Ganondagan: The Town of Peace They Burned for Corn

On these rolling hills west of the Finger Lakes, the Seneca Nation maintained one of the largest and most important towns in seventeenth-century North America. Ganondagan, which means White Town or Town of Peace in Seneca, was a palisaded community of more than one hundred fifty longhouses housing an estimated four thousand five hundred people at its height. It sat at the western gateway of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, and it carried a sacred significance beyond its size.

This was the home of Jikonsaseh, a Seneca woman known in Haudenosaunee tradition as the Mother of Nations. When the Peacemaker, the Huron prophet Deganawida, traveled among the nations to unite them under the Great Law of Peace, it was Jikonsaseh who helped bring the reluctant Onondaga into the confederacy, proposing the structure that gave them a central role in the new government. Her authority here was not merely symbolic. In Haudenosaunee society, women held the power to appoint and remove male leaders, and the Great Law required their consent.

In the summer of sixteen eighty-seven, the French moved to end Seneca dominance of the western fur trade. The Marquis de Denonville marched south from Canada with over two thousand soldiers and Native allies and attacked Ganondagan. Most of the Seneca warriors had moved to intercept the French farther west, leaving the town defended mainly by women, children, and elders. Denonville's troops burned all four Seneca towns in the area and destroyed an estimated one point two million bushels of corn and beans, enough to feed the Seneca Nation for years. His own Native allies were so disturbed by the tactic that they called the French corncutters, a name given in contempt.

The Seneca never rebuilt here. Today the site is a National Historic Landmark with a full-sized replica longhouse and five hundred acres of walking trails.