Miscellaneous Papers Relating to Anthropology/Chautauqua County, New York
CHAUTAUQUA COUNTY, NEW YORK.
By James Sheward, of Dunkirk, N. Y.
Chautauqua County has furnished many indications of a former occupancy; but, as yet, we have found nothing to establish its probable antiquity.
I have some fragments of a piece of pottery, a jar or vase, found beneath the roots of a very old apple-tree in the town of Stockton. This tree grew in a valley, and was evidently quite old when it was blown down. The vase or jar was broken, but it was estimated, from the pieces found, to be about two gallons capacity. The pieces indicate that it was made principally from pounded quartz. The surface was smooth and impervious to water. The depth at which it was found I have been unable to ascertain with any certainty. Thus far I can find no evidence of a secular increase in the valley; consequently there are no data for a calculation of the period when the jar was abandoned. The fragments and description were given to me by Mr. F. McCullough, of Delanti, this county. Within the village of Frewsbury, town of Carroll, some years ago, a pine stump, which had been left standing for a long time, was pulled up, and under its roots were found two human skeletons. I saw some of the bones were parts of the skull, but was unable to determine whether the crania indicated round, flat, or oval-shaped heads. I could obtain no certain information as to the depth below the surface at which these bones were found, and none as to secular increase. The pine stump was very large and showed 580 cuticle layers or growths. The tree at the time it was felled was five hundred and eighty years old, and was probably cut down twenty years or more before the stump was pulled up. A period of six hundred years must have elapsed since that tree began to grow. How long those skeletons have been inhumed prior to the germination of the tree we cannot tell. At the first settlement of that section of our county the valley was a vast pine forest. Through this valley runs a creek or brook, tributary to the Conawauga, one of the tributaries of the Ohio. I have reason to think that a thorough exploration of this neighborhood would give valuable information.
In the town of Sheridan, on the farm of Mr. N. Gould, have been found, at various times, numbers of human bones. These bones indicated, by their number, size, and position, that the place where they were found was either a cemetery or had been the scene of a battle where large numbers of all ages and sexes had been killed. The craniological developments I know nothing about. In the vicinity of Mr. Gould's farm are yet to be found earthen fortifications, breastworks, and ditches. These fortifications are somewhat numerous and extensive, reaching over into the town of Perufret, where a hill, known now as Fort Hill, gives unequivocal testimony of the work of man. Between Fort Hill and Mr. Gould's farm is found a hill about 30 feet high, with a circumference at its base of about 90 paces. The top of this hill is flat, oval in outline, and composed, as far as examined, of the material constituting the surface formation of the plain. The hill may possibly have been formed by currents of water, but there is no bluff or bank near it. It stands about 3 miles inland from the lake, and was originally covered with large forest trees in nowise differing from the trees of the surrounding plain. Mr. Gould, over seventy years of age, says he well remembers the hill as it was in his childhood, and that it was so conspicuously above the surrounding trees as to be regarded as a landmark by early navigators of Lake Erie. He describes one tree, which grew near the top of the hill, as being 4 feet in diameter. Careful examination of the plain gave no depression in the surface to indicate that the earth which composes the hill was excavated there. I am inclined to the opinion that the hill is in reality a mound, and that it was in some way connected with the other fortifications already mentioned. In this connection I may mention that some years ago, in plowing a field on his farm, Mr. Williams, of the town of Sheridan, turned up as much as two bushels of flint spalls or chips, and a number of arrow and spear heads. These were pretty much all together, and led Mr. Williams to suppose that Indians made their tools there. Some of these implements, in outline and material, very nearly, if not entirely, correspond to those found in Ohio, near what is called Flint Ridge. I believe that flint or chert is not to be found in this county. Whether the crude stone was brought to the place where the flints were found, and was there worked into shape, cannot be settled as yet. Some fifty-odd years ago I saw a large field in what is now the city of Zanesville, Ohio, plowed up for the first time. The whole field was dotted over with flakes, spalls, arrow and spear heads, stone hammers, and axes, indicative of a manufactory. Old and partly decayed stumps were overturned or pulled up and the spalls were found under them. From this field to Flint Ridge there was nearly a continuous water communication. There are grounds for believing that the material was originally quarried at Flint Ridge, where numerous excavations, partially filled up, are to be found, and having trees growing in them. Whether the persons or people who wrought in Sheridan were located there we do not know, neither can we safely say that the implements found were made by those who erected the fortifications.
I have an amulet which was plowed up on the farm of Mr. Prendergast, in the town of Westfield, this county, and by him presented to me. It somewhat resembles Fig. 27 in Colonel Foster's work, "Prehistoric Races," page 222, which he calls a totem. His totem was found in Wisconsin; the amulet was found in Chautauqua County. I will give my reasons for regarding these effigies as amulets in an article now preparing, entitled "An Inquiry into the Origin and Antiquity of the Indian Race." I have never yet found an Indian drawing or signature of his totem that could be at all compared to the outline of the amulet; and as there are two holes neatly drilled and rimmed for the reception of a thong or cord, I am inclined to think that no Indian made it, and that it belonged to a people of superior taste and skill. He who made and polished it was an expert workman, and could not have been a hunter or a warrior of the Indian kind. I have a stone gouge of admirable construction, which was plowed up in the town of Sheridan and given to me by Mr. Griswold. Like the amulet, it must have been made by an expert. The stone is hard enough to carry quite a fine edge, and the tool gives evidence of having been much used on wood. It is supposed that it was used for tapping the maple tree. I have some other implements found in this county, one in the shape of a celt, which, a Seneca Indian told me, was used by his people for skinning animals.
Chautauqua Lake lies within this county, and many relics have been found along its shores. At one place Long Point juts out into the lake, forming a long, narrow neck of land, which used to be fringed with bushes and covered with stately trees. On this point, near its outer extremity, there had been a canal and basin excavated. A party or a person could easily double the point in a canoe, part the bushes and paddle through the canal and into the basin, where they were perfectly hidden from view. I saw the remains of this canal and basin about seventeen years ago; the outlines were then quite distinct. These works, however, are not proofs of a settled population.
The Iroquois knew all about our territory; indeed, they gave the name to the lake, Cha-tau-quah, or "bag tied in the middle." In a written speech, prepared by Corn-planter, Half-town, and Big tree, Seneca chiefs or sachems, and presented to President Washington, they ask their "father" if he is determined to crush them, and say, in case he is: "In this case one chief has said he would ask you to put him out of his pain. Another, who will not think of dying by the hand of his father or his brother, has said he will retire to the Chataughqua, eat of the fatal root, and sleep with his fathers in peace." This speech was answered by the President, and these chiefs replied as follows: "Father, we see that you ought to have the camping place from Lake Erie to Niagara, as it was marked down at Fort Stanwix, and we are willing it shall remain to be yours. And if you desire to reserve a passage through the Canawauga, and through the Chataughquah (Lake), and land for a path from that to Lake Erie, take it where you like best. Our nation will rejoice to see it an open path for you and your children while the land and water remain, but let us pass along the same and continue to take fish in those waters in common with you."
There was, at an early day, a path or road from Lake Erie through the towns of Portland and Chautauqua to Chautauqua Lake, and thence to Pittsburgh, which the French and Indians traveled; but, except a rude camp and defenses, there was no settlement nearer than Logstown, Ohio. The Senecas formed what was called the western door of the Iroquois Long-house, and claimed our county as a part of their hunting-ground. I can find no satisfactory proof of the occupancy of this territory by any tribe of Indians, unless it may have been the residence of the Kah Kwahs, a tribe said to have been driven out by the Iroquois, and which has wholly disappeared. It is claimed by some that there was once a tribe called Alleghans occupying lands in or near this county.
It appears to me that the Iroquois, admitted to be the most intelligent and powerful of all the tribes or confederacies, were never far enough advanced to construct the fortifications or to make the polished stone implements found in our county; and if they were not, was there any other people who were ever settled in this territory?
Champlain, in 1609, gives us some idea of the barbarism of the Senecas, against whom he made war. Wasseuäer, the Dutch historian, in 1621-'2 represents the Indians as savages who could not have been of the "polished stone age." Cartier found them "insufferable"; so Cadillac describes them. All we can gather from historical documents leads to the belief that the stone implements, the pottery, the fortifications, the skeletons found, and the large mound (if it be one) were the work of a people existing anterior to the historic period and more advanced than the Knoshioni, or Powhatanic stocks. One argument grows out of the fact that all the relics have been dug or plowed up. Stone axes, flint or chert arrow and spear heads have often been found on the surface or just below the surface of the land, while the pottery, gouge, amulet, &c., have been found at various depths. The two skeletons found at Frewsbury under the pine stump lived and died long before the "League of the Long-house" was formed. Two feet, at least, of a secular increase has grown up since these two human beings were laid away. Can we, in the absence of "monuments of known age," ever ascertain the rate of that increase? The lofty old pine tree began its life more than six hundred years ago. How long before that tree sprouted had these bodies been deposited there? And then, again, were these two dead ones members of the tribe or nation that raised the breastworks and made the implements we find at various depths below the surface of today?
In my search after data upon or from which to estimate a secular increase of land I have consulted many Indians and whites, but none are able to give any facts. Sa-gun-da-wie, or Big Nose, a member of the Seneca tribe, gave me an iron ax or hatchet, evidently one of the kind used by the Dutch or French to trade for furs. He told me it was plowed up on the Cattaraugus reservation from a depth of about 8 inches, but he could not say whether the plow had ever before passed over the spot. The ax must have been lost or thrown away at least two hundred years ago; it may have been two hundred and fifty years. If we were sure that the implement was left on the surface two hundred years ago, the secular increase would have been at the rate of about 4 inches per century; if two hundred and fifty years had passed, it would have been at the rate of 3½ inches per century, or nearly the same as that found by Dr. Horner at Heliopolis, in Egypt. If we assume an average secular increase in our valleys of 3 inches per century, the skeletons at Frewsbury are at least eight hundred years old; they must be at least six hundred years old. I am not without hope that closer and more patient observations will, in course of time give us some reliable data upon or from which we can estimate antiquities now seemingly beyond our reach.
That Chautauqua County was once inhabited by a people more advanced than were the Indians found in the neighborhood by the French and Dutch may, I think, be assumed. That there were human beings here eight hundred or even one thousand years ago seems probable.
I think there are many reasons for the belief that the Indian race, or races, if you will, were the descendants of the Mound-Builders, notwithstanding eminent ethnologists think to the contrary.
I think our county would richly repay a thorough scientific exploration.