She is known as “The White Woman of the Genesee,”
a frontier-family’s daughter who was captured by Native Americans and lived the
rest of her life as one of them. Although not well known nationally — not
like Martha Washington or Sakagawea — for some Upstate New Yorkers, hers is a
cherished, captivating story. And her monument is familiar to many who frequent
Letchworth State Park.
Mary Jemison was born to Scotch-Irish parents as they
crossed the Atlantic in the winter of 1743. Like many settlers
arriving in the colonies, the Jemisons hoped to start a new life, lured by the
promise of free land. Landing in Philadelphia,
they settled within the year in southern Pennsylvania
at Marsh Creek near Gettysburg.
In their pursuit of unclaimed land, settlers were pushing to
the edges of the frontier, a string of camps, settlements, and small boomtowns.
It was a harsh existence. The land was heavily forested, and every tree, stump,
and stone had to be cleared by hand; it could take years to get it in shape for
farming. The farther the settlers pushed into the wilderness, the greater the
opportunities became, but so did the dangers.
The colonies were at the center of a struggle between two
great European rivals, the French and the British, and in the midst were Native
Americans, struggling to maintain their existence but often drawn into the
conflict. In the spring of 1758, a band of French soldiers aided by Shawnee
warriors stormed through the Marsh Creek settlement. Mary’s two oldest brothers
managed to escape, but the Shawnee
captured the rest of the family, scalped the parents, and took Mary — then 15
years old — and a child from a nearby farm westward toward FortDuquesne, near Pittsburg.
Years later, an aging Mary Jemison described the harrowing
trip to her biographer, James Seaver:
“On the way, we passed a Shawnee
town where I saw a number of heads, arms, legs, and other fragments of bodies
of some white people who had just been burned. The parts that remained were
hanging on a pole, which was supported at each end by a crotch and the whole
appearance afforded a spectacle so shocking that even to this day the blood
almost curdles in my veins when I think of them.”
At FortDuquesne,
she told Seaver, she was offered to two Seneca women who had lost a brother in
a skirmish with George Washington’s army. Accepting her, they began a ceremony
that was both a mourning for the dead and an adoption of the living.
“I stood surrounded by the wailing women,” she told Seaver,
“expecting every moment to feel their vengeance, and suffer death on the spot.
I was, however, happily disappointed. I was considered and treated by them as a
real sister, the same as though I had been born of their mother.”
In a matter of days, one life ended for Jemison, and a new
one began. The Seneca took the clothes she was wearing and tossed them into the
river, dressing her in traditional Seneca garb, a deerskin top that pulled over
the head and pants with flaps tied at the groin. They named her Dehgewanus,
meaning “Two Falling Voices.”
And while she could have left the Senecas later in her life,
she did not. She lived as a Seneca into old age, witnessing the profound
changes and sharing the adversities of her new people. Ten years before her
death, she shared the memories of her life with Seaver, who compiled the story
into the biography he titled “Mary Jemison, White Woman of the Genesee.”
First published in 1824, the book reads like a Seneca oral history.
Jemison has something
of a cult following among New York
history buffs, and over the years, volumes of work have been written about her.
Michael Oberg, professor of history at SUNY Geneseo, says many of his students
are drawn to her story, attracted by her amazing resilience to adversity.
“In the big picture, she’s a minor player,” says Oberg. “She
didn’t sign any treaties. And she didn’t impact any of the tumultuous events
going on around her. But I tell my students that she is a symbol of what
happened to people living in the frontier. It was the ‘outer edge’ of the known
world. It was seen as this line between savagery and civilization. But the
various conflicts blurred that line, and there were these odd relationships
between the different players. You could see the range of interdependencies
that developed in order to survive. And Jemison’s life reflects that point
well.”
Oberg says the Seneca did not question why she continued to
live with them, though whites were puzzled.
“She was white,” says Oberg, “but I’m not convinced that she
was white in any real sense. She went from being Mary Jemison to Dehgewanus.
Later, her identity seemed to evolve again into a combination of her European
and Seneca lives. This ark shows just how complicated the lines were between
red and white people at the time.”
Her arrival in the GeneseeValley was the result of another
dramatic turn of events in her life. After several years living with the
Senecas, she married her first husband, Sheninjee, and within a year gave
birth, first to a baby daughter who died and then to a son, Thomas. Sheninjee
decided to take his young wife and child north to his homeland in the GeneseeValley, where he felt they would be
safer, but along the way he was injured while hunting and died.
Incredibly, Dehgewanus continued
what historians say was a 700-mile journey on her own, the infant Thomas
strapped to her back. In the winter of 1762, she arrived in the GeneseeValley and found Sheninjee’s clan.
Although they were complete strangers, they took her in.
Among the
contemporary experts on Jemison’s life and the history of the Senecas is
Peter Jemison — an artist, curator, manager of the Ganondagan Historic Site
in Victor, and a direct descendant of Mary Jemison and Sheninjee.
“This was a highly developed society, with its own legal
system, its own teaching methods and spiritual beliefs,” he says. “We had our
own values, and we cared for our elderly and our sick.”
Mary Jemison, he says, was fully embraced by the Seneca
people as one of their own. She was not a slave, and she was not made to do any
work or act any differently from other Seneca women.
And she lived very much as a Seneca. “Her day-to-day life
really focused around the chores and responsibilities of Seneca women,” says
Peter Jemison. “Non-Indians referred to her as The White Woman of the Genesee,
but she didn’t see herself that way. And the Seneca didn’t see her that way,
either.”
“Her life was really determined by the various stages of the
crops — corn, beans, and squash — which is what
Seneca women did. There was a specific time for every stage of this work, and
they carried all of this knowledge about planting, nurturing, separating the
seeds, and harvesting and storing. This was key to their survival, because they
had six months of winter to get through.”
Mary remarried, this time to a Seneca chief, Hiokatoo, and
bore six more children, some living long lives, others surviving only a few
days.
Peter Jemison emphasizes the transitions his ancestor’s life
underwent: separated from her parents in a violent raid, she lived among the
people who fought the settlers, only to find that it became the Seneca who were
persecuted.
By the mid-1700’s, it
was clear to the Seneca and the five other tribes of the Iroquois that
whites would continue their push west toward the interior territories. Their
attempts to unify as a force of resistance failed, and they often ended up
fighting each other instead. They also feared the superior might of the
British, and their leaders debated how to avoid getting caught in the middle of
the coming war between the white Europeans and the white colonists.
In a disastrous decision, the Senecas sided with the British
— and on the eve of the Revolutionary War, to prevent the British from using
the Senecas to fight against him, George Washington ordered General John
Sullivan to remove the threat.
They burned the Senecas’ fields and destroyed peach and
apple orchards, says Peter Jemison, “all in an effort to eliminate us.”
Seneca women and children fled their villages to seek safety
in the forests; warriors met Sullivan’s army in a fierce battle near HoneoyeFalls at the head of ConesusLake.
Sullivan, Mary Jemison told James Seaver, left every village
from Canandaigua to the Conesus shores “a black and burned patch of earth.”
“Thousands become refugees and seek shelter from the British
at FortNiagara
in the winter of 1779,” says Peter Jemison. “But when they get there, they are
shut out. The snow was said to be 6 feet deep. So most of them perished; either
they froze or starved to death.”
Sullivan’s attack and the Senecas’ flight to FortNiagara is sometimes compared to
the Cherokees’ “Trail of Tears.” With nothing to eat and no shelter, the
Senecas became homeless nomads on their own land.
But the tragedy is also another example of Mary Jemison’s
instinct for survival.
“Instead of going to FortNiagara, she stays in the GeneseeValley, where she meets two escaped
Negro slaves,” says Peter Jemison. “These two men take Mary and her children
in, and all of them live in this log cabin. She works out an arrangement with
them, and for every ear of corn that she husks and braids, she received some of
those kernels for her own use.”
Peter Jemison adds a commentary: the Revolutionary War was
about many things, he says, but from his perspective as a Native American, it
was ultimately a war over resources.
“You can say it was about freedom and unfair taxation,” he
says, “but the real objective of it was to get our land. Washington’s
objective was to take our land by force, because he wanted to ensure the
protection of the colonies — of New York.
When the war ends in 1783 with the Treaty of Paris, it doesn’t even mention the
Iroquois. The British are defeated, but living on this land are Iroquois who
never signed any treaty. We never surrendered, and we never agreed to give up
our land.”
By the early 1800’s,
the remaining Seneca were living on reservations. The 1779 agreement known
as The Big Tree Treaty, between Robert Morris and the Holland Land Company and
David Ogden and the Ogden Land Company, essentially stripped the Seneca of
their homeland, which was then sold to settlers coming to the GeneseeValley. Mary Jemison was given her
own reservation, about 20,000 acres of land. Called the Gardeau Flats, the area
encompassed most of what today is LetchworthPark and parts of the towns of Mt.Morris and Nunda.
Jemison lived at the bottom of the GeneseeRiver gorge near the north end of
the park. “It was very fertile soil,” says Nick Loverdi, a member of the Mt.
Morris Historical Society. “Remember, the dam wasn’t there, so it probably
flooded a little, but every spring the river would lay this dark rich silt down
from Pennsylvania and the Ohio
valley. They could turn it with their hands. Today that same land on the flats
— the area as you just come into town off the I-390 — is rock hard. Those
farmers can hardly split it open with all that heavy machinery.”
The chaos of the war may have ended, but the tension over
land continued. Mary, writes James Seaver, never became melancholy describing
her capture or her parents. It was her description of this later portion of her
life that made her “teary.” Confined to reservations that were surrounded by
white people and their laws; the once flourishing Seneca culture declined into a
state of disease and drunkenness. And Mary spent much of her time fending off
opportunists trying to scam her out of her last possessions.
“A lot of speculators tried to exploit her in her later
years,” says SUNY Geneseo’s Oberg. “Under New York
law at the time, Indians could not sell their land to a private party.”
The law was designed to prevent whites from taking advantage
of the Seneca. “But land was big money in New York
during those days,” says Oberg, “and Mary had plenty of it.”
Two Geneseo businessmen used their
influence to get the law changed, and Jemison later sold most of it to them for
a fraction of its value.
There is a tendency to romanticize Mary Jemison’s life, says
Oberg. But, he says, it was a life marked by tragedy. “Make no mistake,” he
says, “these reservations were truly horrid places. They’ve been described as
‘slums in the wilderness’ by some historians. And alcohol was a terrible
problem that touched Mary’s life deeply.”
Within a five-year period, Mary lost her three sons. In alcohol-related
fights, John killed his half-brother Thomas and his brother Jesse. John himself
was killed later in a fight in which alcohol was involved. The loss of
Thomas — the son she had carried on
her back from Pennsylvania —
was particularly difficult. It was he to whom she had turned for advice on
important decisions, particularly when it came to dealing with whites.
When James Seaver
interviewed Jemison, he found her still agile, despite her age. She
gathered her own firewood, tended to her livestock, and could still “cross a
log” with ease, he said. He described her as a short, small-framed woman, with
blue eyes. And though her hair was almost white, she told him it was light
brown when she was young. She usually spoke in the Seneca language, but Seaver
said she spoke to him “in almost perfect English except for a faint Irish
curl.”
Jemison had had opportunities to leave the Senecas several
times during her life, but she had stayed with them, fearing how her children
would be treated off the reservation. She continued to live on the flats until
three years before she died. Then she was taken to the Buffalo Creek
Reservation, where she died in 1833.
Many of her descendants lived in the Mt.Morris, Perry, and Nunda
communities into the early 1900’s. But, says historian Nick Loverdi: “Nowadays,
I’m sad to say that nobody takes much interest in the past. One of her
grandsons lived just outside Mt.Morris,
but people don’t talk much about her any more. It’s a shame, too: all this
history, and it happened right here.”
A highway crew rebuilding Main
Street in Mt.Morris uncovered Seneca artifacts
last summer during excavation. Otherwise, there is scarce evidence that a
community of Indians once thrived here. And Jemison wouldn’t recognize much of
the area today. Mini-marts, McDonald’s restaurants, and a Rite Aid Pharmacy dot
the highway into Mt.Morris.
But she might be relieved to discover that the Gardeau Flats where she lived
look about the same.
Nor has everyone forgotten about her. In mid-October, a
popular time for the park, visitors to the Gardeau site gaze down the gorge to
the river bed where Jemison’s cabins once stood, and exchange looks of
disbelief. “And she was a woman,” one of them says.
A makeover
Mary Jemison is buried in Letchworth State Park, and her grave site,
along with one of the Jemison cabins and a recreation of a Seneca Council
House, are part of a historical landmark site and museum complex conceived by Buffalo
businessman William Pryor Letchworth.
Letchworth had bought much of the
land surrounding the GeneseeRiver
gorge in that area in 1859, to preserve both its natural beauty and its Seneca
heritage. He built his retirement home on the property and began planning a
museum complex that would include the Council House, the Jemison cabin, and
Mary Jemison’s grave. In 1906, he gave the vast property and the buildings to
the state to be preserved as a park.
The cabin and Council House were made of pine, however, and
over the years, they had deteriorated badly. If they were to be preserved as
Letchworth had wanted, major improvements would be needed. Park officials also
wanted to move the buildings closer together, as Letchworth had envisioned.
In 1997, park officials secured a grant from “Save America’s
Treasures,” a public-private partnership that helps preserve important historic
structures and collections.
The Letchworth preservation has
been a thorough, painstaking process. Most of the damage to the buildings was
in the lower sections, where the logs were closest to the ground. And the
restoration had to be done under strict guidelines. The buildings could not be
disassembled. No nails could be used, and no drill holes could be made in the
wood. The structures had to be jacked, braced, and then moved, one as much as
120 feet — without letting them collapse into a pile of rubble.
New logs replacing the most heavily damaged wood were chosen
to match the originals as closely as possible, and they were hewn by one of the
few people in the country who still knows how to do that work, AlfredUniversity professor Leon
Buckwalter.
“It’s a very specialized trade, and there’s not much demand
for it now,” says Buckwalter. “Obviously, no power tools were used, to match
the authenticity of the original logs.
Work on the site should be completed by spring 2006. And
then the Jemison cabin will be open for visitors. Brian Scriven, historic site
manager for LetchworthState
Park, estimates that about 25,000 people visit
the nearby William Pryor Letchworth museum, a structure housing Seneca
artifacts and items of regional natural history. “About half of those people go
up to the Jemison site behind the museum,” he says. “So we figure that there
must be about 10,000 to 15,000 visitors to the site.” While there’s no official
count, because it’s an outdoor site, Mary Jemison, says Scriven, “definitely
has her following.”
This article appears in Nov 30 – Dec 6, 2005.
