The Seneca and the Western Door
Near Buffalo, New York
Long before the Erie Canal reached this lakeshore, long before the first grain elevator rose over the water, the land around Buffalo Creek belonged to the Seneca Nation. The Seneca called themselves the Onondowaga, the People of the Great Hill, and they served as the westernmost of the six nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. Within the Confederacy's symbolic architecture, they held the title Keeper of the Western Door.
The territory around Buffalo Creek came to the Seneca in the sixteen hundreds, when they displaced the Wenrohronon people and moved into the western reaches of present-day New York. By the end of the seventeen hundreds, the Seneca had a village here, on the east bank of the creek where it widened before meeting Lake Erie. The spot was known to them long before any European placed a name on it.
After the American Revolution, the United States recognized Seneca land claims in a series of treaties. The Buffalo Creek Reservation, established in the seventeen nineties, encompassed roughly forty-nine thousand acres. It was the homeland of the Seneca who had survived the Revolutionary War's Sullivan-Clinton Campaign, which had destroyed most of their villages in seventeen seventy-nine.
Then came the eighteen thirties and the pressure of the Ogden Land Company, a private land speculation firm that had purchased the right of first purchase to Seneca lands under a scheme that predated Seneca consent. The Second Treaty of Buffalo Creek, signed in January of eighteen thirty-eight, called for the Seneca to sell all four of their remaining New York reservations and relocate to Kansas Territory. The treaty process was widely condemned, including by Quakers in New York, Baltimore, and Philadelphia who documented fraudulent signatures and coercion. A renegotiated compact in eighteen forty-two allowed the Seneca to retain several reservations, including Allegany and Cattaraugus. But the Buffalo Creek land was gone.
The village where this city stands was once a Seneca place. That fact is older than the canal, older than the city's name.
