The Cornplanter Tract — A Treaty Promise Drowned in Nineteen Sixty-Five

In November of seventeen ninety-four, Timothy Pickering, representing the United States government, signed a treaty with the Seneca Nation at Canandaigua, New York. The treaty, known as the Pickering Treaty or the Canandaigua Treaty, granted the Seneca their reserved lands in perpetuity. The language was precise on that point. The word perpetuity means forever.

The Seneca leader Cornplanter had received a personal land grant from Pennsylvania in seventeen ninety-two, a tract of approximately six hundred acres along the Allegheny River in Warren County. It was not reservation land in the federal sense. It was a direct grant, in recognition of Cornplanter's role in maintaining peace between the Seneca and the new American republic. Three generations of Cornplanter's descendants lived on the tract. There was a cemetery. There were family histories embedded in the ground.

In nineteen sixty-five, the Kinzua Dam was completed on the Allegheny River. The reservoir it created flooded more than ten thousand acres of the Seneca Nation's Allegany Territory, including the Cornplanter Tract. The Army Corps of Engineers had examined the project and concluded that an alternative dam site existed that would have avoided flooding Seneca land, but that site was rejected because it would have flooded farmland in New York owned by non-Indians. The Seneca had the treaty. The farmers had the political influence. The question was not which mattered more. It was which mattered more in nineteen sixty-five.

President John Kennedy declined the Seneca Nation's request to halt construction of the dam, which had already been authorized decades earlier. The Seneca fought it in court. They lost. About three hundred graves were relocated. The Cornplanter Tract, which a federal treaty had promised in perpetuity, is under water. It has been for sixty years.