The Cornplanter Memorial / An Historical Sketch of Gy-ant-wa-chia—The Cornplanter, and of the Six Nations of Indians.

by James Ross Snowden

Cornplanter refers to his birth and childhood in his interesting address to the Governor of Pennsylvania, in 1822, when the question of taxing his property, hereinafter mentioned, was raised.

"I feel it my duty to send a speech to the Governor of Pennsylvania at this time, and inform him the place where I was from; which was Connewaugus, on the Genessee river.

"When I was a child, I played with the butterfly, the grasshopper and the frogs. As I grew up, I began to pay some attention and play with the Indian boys in the neighborhood, and they took notice of my skin being of a different color from theirs, and spoke about it. I inquired of my mother the cause, and she told me that my father was a resident of Albany. I still ate my victuals out of a bark dish—I grew up to be a young man, and married me a wife—but I had no kettle or gun. I then knew where my father lived and went to see him, and found he was a white man and spoke the English language."[I]

[I] Journal House of Representatives of Pennsylvania, 1822-23.

The period when Cornplanter and his family removed from Connewaugus and the Genessee country is unknown. Probably not until his native town was destroyed by General Sullivan, in his expedition against the Six Nations, in 1779. Of that expedition, Cornplanter speaks in his address to General Washington in 1790. From the strong and eloquent language used by him, and which I shall have occasion hereafter to cite, it is probable he was an eye witness of the desolation produced by Sullivan's army.

Of the early career of Cornplanter, we have but little information. It is generally understood that his first appearance as a warrior, was at the battle of the Monongahela, in 1755, where Braddock was defeated, and that he fought on the side of the French in that bloody field.

A word here explanatory of the position of the Senecas, and their relations with the Indians of the League, and other neighboring nations, may be useful. The Seneca tribe was more exposed to the French and their Indian allies on the lower Ohio and the lakes, than the other members of the League. They had the important and dangerous duties of keeping "the western door of the long house," as they termed their possessions. Their watch and ward extended from the Susquehanna to the Ohio and great lakes. The duplicity, and in fact treachery of the English crown, during the reign of the Stuarts, in not only abandoning the Six Nations in their war with the French which they had undertaken in the interest of the English, but when the League had defeated the French and well-nigh conquered them, the English government compelled them to make peace with France, and submit to the terms which the French dictated. These terms, however could not concede to the French a region of country from which they had been expelled, and which was in fact occupied by the Six Nations; and thus the whole country, south of the chain of the great lakes, was rescued from Canada. Referring to this period, Mr. Bancroft says: "In the course of events, New York owes its present northern boundary to the valor of the Five Nations. But for them, Canada would have embraced the basin of the St. Lawrence."[J] Although the Six Nations were afterwards informed that the treachery and duplicity herein referred to, was not approved by the successors of the Stuarts, nor by the English people, but was the result of the bad conduct of English kings who were under French influence, yet it left an impression on their minds which had an injurious effect in after years.

[J] History United States, volume II, page 424.

By the regulations of the League, in cases where the United Council did not act authoritatively for the whole Confederacy, it appears that the separate tribes were not precluded from engaging in war; nor individual warriors prevented from taking up the hatchet, as inclination might lead them. Acting under these principles, some of the Six Nations fought on the side of the French, during the war of 1755 and 1762, including that part of the Senecas who had their seat north of the Ohio, and below Fort Duquesne; and some on the upper Ohio, now called Allegheny, united with them. From these considerations it is not at all improbable that Cornplanter, then a warrior of twenty-three years of age, was on the war path at Braddock's defeat. It was probably his first battle, as it was also the first in which our Washington was engaged. The Indians of the Ohio and the lakes were, at this period, more apprehensive of the encroachments of the Virginians and the English generally, than of the French. The former were accompanied by the land surveyor and the woodman's axe;[K] the latter had in their train only the engineer to build forts, and a commissariat which supplied the wants of the Indians, as well as their own. Hence, a portion of the Senecas, of the upper Ohio, were induced to take the side of the French. Cornplanter, with a portion of his tribe, probably formed a part of that martial array which we are told set forth from Fort Venango, at the mouth of Venango river, now called French creek, (Franklin, Pennsylvania,) for the forks of the Ohio, embarked in three hundred canoes and batteaux, and having eighteen pieces of cannon.

[K] a few years later than this period the Virginians made great encroachments upon the boundary of the Indians. Lord Dunmore and others, claimed large bodies of land north of the Ohio. The Indians, for a long period of time, claimed that the Ohio was the boundary between them and the whites. In 1773 Lord Dunmore caused surveys to be made at the Falls of the Ohio; and lands in that region are now held under his warrants and surveys.