May 17, 2012Indian Camp
Located at the intersection of Baker & Steele Streets
Indians have occupied and passed through the Jamestown area for most of 14,000 years, but for Chautauqua County as a whole, much of the evidence in the ground has been inadequately studied or permanently destroyed. Surrounding regions have a complex and confusing prehistory making deductions for this area difficult.
The great ice sheet pushed debris ahead of it. These plugged the Chadakoin Valley causing Lake Chautauqua to form as the glaciers melted. Within the next few hundred years, hardy tundra plants and the caribou and mastodon which fed on them lured Jamestown’s earliest visitors to the outlet and shores of Chautauqua Lake. The distinctive fluted points from this time have been found at the mouth of the Kiantone Creek, on the lower Stillwater, and on the lake shore. Current evidence suggests that the earliest people in the area came from the west and hunted a territory stretching from eastern Ohio, where they obtained the chert for their tools, to the Canadian side of Lake Ontario. For hundreds of years on small band of only 35 –50 people endlessly crisscrossed this vast area and called it its own. Eventually, these people seem to have concentrated their activities in Ontario.
By 8,000 B.C. the artic environment with its giant animals and huge herds was replaced by evergreen forests which gave sparse support to game and its human predators . The population seems to have been sparse. It lived by diversified hunting and gathering.
Over the next several thousand years deciduous and mixed forest encouraged greater populations of game and man. Jamestown, near a source of the Ohio river, and close to Lake Erie, and the Genesee and Susquehanna water sheds was a way station for visitors, immigrants and ideas from regional cultures on all sides. Points showing these varied influences have been found in Jamestown. Two burial mounds, long since destroyed, where the Lutheran complex now is and another on Steele Street and the outlet, south of Harding Avenue, probably dated from the first millennium A.D. and represented influence of the southern Ohio Hopewell culture.
After 1,000 A.D. such horticultural Iroquoian societies as the Five Nations (Senecas, Cayugas, Onondagas, Oneidas, Mohawks), the Neutrals, the Hurons, and the Eries developed in central and northwestern New York and in Ontario. Apparently similar Iroquoian peoples were living in Chautauqua County then or soon after. For 200 years historians have thought that the Eries were the tribe living here when Europeans fist knew of this region, although some scholars now think the Wenro held this area. We cannot be sure the Onniasontke, Akrakouaronons, or some tribe unknown by name was not resident here in the 17th century. An ossuary (bone pit) once found near East Jamestown suggests a possible 16th or 17th century village nearby. Earthworks, prevalent north and east of town, date from about 1300-1575.
Whoever these people were, some of their ancestors had been present in the immediate area for thousands of years, some had come in from Ohio before 1,000 A.D. and others may have moved in numbers form Ontario or the Allegheny Valley. In the 16th century, influence form non-Iroquoian cultures below Warren was surprisingly strong. In any event, warfare by the Five Nations and Neutrals and other unexplained factors depopulated the entire region from the Seneca Villages on the Genesee River to the upper half of both Lake Erie shores before 1650.
In 1724 some of the Delaware and Shawnee tribes subject to the Six Nations (now including the Tuscaroras) began to settle along the Ohio and Allegheny. Six Nations officials and citizens, particularly those form the western branch of the Senecas, known as Chunussios, followed into the new towns. The mixed peoples of these towns, when predominantly Seneca, acquired the name "Mingo". The presence of these new villages attracted renewed interest in the area on the part of both France, which had encouraged the Indians to move, and Britain.
In 1779, during the Revolutionary War, George Washington planned a major campaign against the Six Nations. On August 11, Col. Daniel Brodhead set out from Fort Pitt up the Allegheny in conjunction with larger armies in central New York driving into the traditional Six Nations homelands. The entire Indian Confederation was sent fleeing to British protection at Fort Niagara.
In the 1780’s many former Mingo and Chenussio families reorganized under Cornplanter and resettled widely over southwestern New York and northwestern Pennsylvania. In 1789 it was thought Chautauqua Lake would fall within the Erie triangle. That year the Six Nations sold their land west of Chautauqua Lake and its outlet to Pennsylvania, but reserved the eastern shore where they had dwellings. In 1797 the Six Nations sold their New York State lands but retained the rights to hunt and fish. They continued to camp and exercise these rights until crowded out by early settlers.
It was in this context that James Prendergast found Indians camped at the site of Jamestown when he accidentally discovered the spot in 1806. Gilbert W. Hazeltine, who tells the story, also gives three anecdotes of Indians living in Jamestown in the eighteens and twenties. All three mention Joh Bale. The surname indicates Bale must have been a son of Cornplanter, although only one other reference suggests Cornplanter ever had a son, John. Phillip Tome, who knew Cornplanter and his family well, say Cornplanter and sons Henry and John killed 15 bears on the shores of Chautauqua Lake one season, apparently in late 1780’s. Hazeltine also mentions an Indian camp around the south and west edges of Brooklyn Square. Four other sources mention Indians in early Jamestown, up to the 1830’s, and indicate they were usually on their way from the Cattaraugus Reservation to the Brokenstraw Creek area in Warren County, Pennsylvania.
INDIAN CAMP
PART OF THE CORNPLANTER BAND OF SENECA INDIANS CAMPED ON THIS HILLSIDE AND ADJOINING RIVER TERRACE IN THE PERIOD BETWEEN THE INDIANS' SALE OF THEIR LAND IN 1797 AND THEIR FINAL RETREAT TO RESERVATIONS IN THE 1830'S.