The Cayuga People and the Town Destroyer

Long before any college, this lake belonged to the Cayuga, in their own language the Gayogohono, the People of the Great Swamp. They were one of the five original nations of the Haudenosaunee, the great confederacy that European settlers called the Iroquois. Their longhouse towns lined this lake, surrounded by hundreds of acres of gardens and orchards.

One village, called Peachtown, was famous for some fifteen hundred peach trees. And then, in the autumn of seventeen seventy-nine, it was all deliberately burned. During the Revolutionary War, George Washington ordered a scorched earth campaign against the Haudenosaunee for their raids on the frontier.

Led by General John Sullivan, an army of several thousand Continental soldiers swept through this country, destroying roughly forty villages and an enormous quantity of food, including well over one hundred thousand bushels of corn. In September of that year, detachments moving up both shores of Cayuga Lake leveled the Cayuga towns, cutting down the orchards and torching the harvest with winter coming on. Thousands of refugees fled to the British at Fort Niagara, where famine and cold killed an uncertain number over the following winter.

The Haudenosaunee gave Washington a name for this. They called him Hanadagayas, the Town Destroyer. The Cayuga Nation still exists, and still holds ties to this water, but the fire of that autumn is why so few of their towns survived to be remembered here.