New York’s canal building boom and the urban explosion that it triggered dramatically accelerated the dispossession and disruption of traditional life ways of the region’s Native American inhabitants that had been initiated by the introduction of European trade, diseases, colonial wars, the American Revolution, and encroaching settlement by non-natives.
Early years of the canal era coincided with a period of state and federal policies that promoted “Indian removal” from developing portions of New York and other eastern states to reservations in comparatively isolated portions of those states and outlying territories in the American Midwest.
At the time of initial European contact, the upper Hudson Valley, including both the confluence with the Mohawk River and the overland route to the Champlain Valley was occupied by Mahican (Mohican) people. The remainder of upstate New York from Albany to the Great Lakes was homeland to the five nations of the Iroquois Confederacy comprising the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca peoples.
Collectively, they referred to themselves as Haudenosaunee, the People of the Longhouse. By the mid-1600s the Haudenosaunee controlled trade in the Hudson, Champlain, and upper Saint Lawrence River valleys, and to the west through what is now Ohio, most of Pennsylvania, and southern Ontario. The Mohawk River, Wood Creek, Oneida Lake and River, Oswego River, Seneca River, and Finger Lakes were heavily used routes for Haudenosaunee commerce, diplomacy, and warfare.
The river corridors, lakes, and carries between them also served as migration paths for early non-native settlers and invasion routes for colonial armies. Already pressed by European settlement and colonial wars between Britain, France, and Holland during the 17th and 18th centuries, the Haudenosaunee suffered large-scale dispossession during and after the American Revolution.
The Mohawks, who had generally allied themselves with the British during earlier conflicts, were attacked by Americans in 1777 and most in the Mohawk Valley were driven north toward Montreal or west to the Niagara Frontier. In 1779, American forces under Generals Goose Van Schaick, John Sullivan, and James Clinton launched a three-pronged attack against the Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca, who George Washington and others regarded as British sympathizers [now known as the Sullivan-Clinton Expedition].
Almost all of the villages, crops, and stored food in central and western New York were burned. Left without food or shelter at the onset of winter, many of the former residents of those villages sought refuge in the vicinity of British Fort Niagara.
Although many Haudenosaunee returned to their traditional homelands after the Treaty of Paris ended the Revolution in 1783, substantial numbers remained
in British Canada. The centuries-old Iroquois Confederacy suffered a permanent split.
After the American Revolution
A succession of treaties drawn up in the decades following the American Revolution reduced once vast traditional tribal territories to about 16 tightly circumscribed and comparatively small reservations. Subsequent treaties and land deals further reduced the area and number of reservations.
In the years after the Revolution, enormous portions of western and northern New York fell under the control of land speculators and land development companies as the idea of a cross-state canal took form.
Although Iroquois reservations comprised very small portions of their traditional holdings, several stood in the path of these New Yorkers’ expansionist ambitions.
Oneida territory included the “Great Carry” or Oneida Carry between the Mohawk and Oneida/Oswego drainage basins, as essential to Philip Schuyler’s Western Inland Lock Navigation Company and its Erie Canal successor as it had been for thousands of years before.
The Onondagas retained control of many of the salt springs around Onondaga Lake as well as the marshland that would soon become the city of Syracuse.
The Cayuga Reservation included much of the Seneca River and the northern end of Cayuga Lake and thereby controlled all potential waterborne access to the Finger Lakes.
The Seneca’s largest reservation at Buffalo Creek occupied land that would later become a substantial portion of the city of Buffalo.
Not surprisingly, the principals of land companies were some of the most vocal and persistent promoters of both transportation improvements and the extinguishment of American Indian title to lands in central and western parts of the state.
In the decades between the Revolution and the beginning of canal construction, individual land speculators, land companies, and a number of state and federal officials shared common interests and worked hard to remove the Haudenosaunee from New York’s lowland corridors and open the way for non-Indian settlement.
A succession of land transfers, sales, and treaties, some of questionable ethics and legality, further diminished Haudenosaunee holdings along canals and, later, turnpike and rail lines.
Erie Canal Construction
The aftermath of the War of 1812 added the imperative of national defense to the land speculators’ promotion of non-Indian settlement along the border with British Canada.
During his term as Secretary of War, coincident with construction of the Erie Canal from 1817-1825, John C. Calhoun advocated road and canal construction to facilitate rapid settlement of the northern sections of the nation as well as removal of all American Indians to territories west of the Mississippi River.
The Indian Removal Act of 1830, passed during the administration of President Andrew Jackson and Vice President Martin Van Buren [of New York], was supported by the Ogden Land Company and a number of prominent New Yorkers who continued to press for relocation of all Iroquois to western territories.
During the 1830s, nearly half of the members of the Oneida Nation were loaded onto Erie Canal boats and transported to Buffalo, where they boarded lake vessels bound for Green Bay, Wisconsin close to the site of their newly established western reservation.
The Seneca were similarly pressed. After the Erie Canal was completed, the Ogden Land Company and its political allies worked assiduously to secure title to the Buffalo Creek Reservation of the Seneca, which stretched inland from Buffalo Harbor, immediately south of the western terminus of the canal, and was a prime spot for growth of the new boom town.
They also sought title to a number of culturally significant Seneca reservations in the prime agricultural land of the Genesee Valley. Eventually the land speculators prevailed, often through fraudulent means. The Seneca relinquished Buffalo Creek in 1847.
By the peak of New York’s canal boom in the 1840s and ‘50s, the Erie and Champlain Canals ran through portions of the Mohawk ancestral homeland. Oneida territory was crossed by the Erie running east-to-west across the Oneida (Great) Carry and by the Black River Canal running north, the Chenango Canal running south, and a number of shorter waterways such as the Oneida Lake Canal.
The Erie and Oswego Canals ran through Onondaga territory. The Erie and Cayuga-Seneca Canals ran through country once controlled by the Cayugas. The Erie and Genesee Valley Canals ran through the very heart of the Seneca Nation. The state condemned portions of the Seneca’s Oil Spring Reservation between 1858 and 1871 to build Cuba Lake, a storage reservoir for the Genesee Valley Canal.
The first boat to transit the full length of the Erie Canal, carrying Governor DeWitt Clinton and a party of dignitaries from Buffalo to New York Harbor for
the “Wedding of the Waters” ceremony in the fall 1825, was called the Seneca Chief. The name of the vessel was only one of the ironies in the aquatic procession.
Clinton considered himself an authority on the Iroquois; in an 1811 speech before the New York Historical Society, when Clinton was mayor of the city of New York and a newly appointed canal commissioner, he predicted that “before the passing away of the present generation, not a single Iroquois will be seen in this state.”
In this case, Clinton was not prophetic. The land speculators, politicians, and government officials who worked to remove the Iroquois from New York never fully succeeded.
There are more members of the Six Nations in the state today than at the end of the Revolution although those who reside on reservations are often far from their ancestral homelands.
While New York’s canal corridors are lined with sites of ancient and historic Iroquois villages, many of the descendants of those communities now live in distant portions of New York, the Midwest, and Canada.
Read more about indigenous history in New York State.
Read more about the New York State’s canals.
This essay was drawn from the Erie Canal National Heritage Corridor Preservation and Management Plan (2008). You can read the entire plan here.
Illustrations, from above: A map of the Erie Canal and Indigenous Nations (from PBS’s Two World Views); Lewis Morgan’s “Map of Ho-de-no-sau-nee-ga, or the Territories of the People of the Longhouse in 1720”; and Van Rensselaer Richmond, State Engineer & Surveyor, “Map of New-York State State Showing It’s Canals and Rail Roads,” ca. 1858 (with canal routes highlighted).
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