The Seneca and the Genesee, Before Rochester Was Rochester

Before there was a Rochester, before the flour mills and the Erie Canal aqueduct and the boomtown, the Genesee River valley belonged to the Seneca, the westernmost nation of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, known to Europeans as the Iroquois. The Seneca are traditionally known as the Keepers of the Western Door. Their territory stretched from the Genesee valley westward, and they had lived in and moved through this landscape for centuries.

The river itself, the name likely derives from a Seneca word, ran north through their territory, rising in the hills of Pennsylvania and emptying into Lake Ontario at what is now the community of Charlotte. The Seneca used the Genesee valley as hunting ground and corridor. The three waterfalls, the same cataracts that Nathaniel Rochester would assess for water power in eighteen oh three, were landmarks in the Seneca world long before they were machinery sites in an American one.

The Seneca allied with the British during the American Revolution. After the Continental Army's Sullivan-Clinton Campaign of seventeen seventy-nine burned Seneca villages throughout the region, the Iroquois Confederacy's power in New York collapsed. In seventeen eighty-eight, the Seneca ceded or sold the land that now includes Rochester through the Phelps and Gorham Purchase. The dispossession was fast and, by the standards of the era, largely transactional in form, though the Seneca had little leverage in the negotiations.

What followed the cession was Rochester. The river that had been their corridor became the power source for the Young Lion of the West.