The Seneca Nation and the Burning of the Villages

Before there was a village named for the Watkins family, before there was a state park or a racetrack or a salt company, the land around Seneca Lake was home to the Seneca Nation. The Seneca were the westernmost and most numerous of the nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, sometimes called the Iroquois, whose territory stretched across western New York. Their name in their own language is sometimes translated as the Great Hill People, and their homeland reached from the Genesee River westward and encompassed the country around Seneca Lake.

In the summer of seventeen seventy nine, during the American Revolutionary War, a Continental Army force of more than four thousand soldiers under Generals John Sullivan and James Clinton marched through Haudenosaunee territory on direct orders from George Washington. The campaign that followed systematically destroyed forty Haudenosaunee settlements, burning an estimated one hundred sixty thousand bushels of stored corn and countless orchards and longhouses that provided the community's food and shelter. The destruction of those stores, combined with the brutal winter of seventeen seventy nine, contributed to a Haudenosaunee population decline that historians estimate in the thousands over the following years, though scholars disagree sharply on the actual toll.

The campaign is remembered in Haudenosaunee oral tradition to this day. The word used in the Haudenosaunee language for the office of President of the United States translates as Town Destroyer, a name given in memory of the orders George Washington issued in seventeen seventy nine. It was this destruction that opened western New York to American settlement, and twelve years later, to the investors who purchased three hundred twenty five thousand acres for forty two cents each.