164 THE GEORGE CATLIN INDIAN GALLERY. 



for the soundness of his judgment, his love of truth, his probity, and his bravery as a 

 warrior. Destroy-Town bore the same name that the Iroquois bestowed on General 

 Washington, who, in consequence of his generosity toward this conquered and de- 

 spairing people, at the close of the Revolutionary war, was enshrined in their affec- 

 tions and reverenced not less than William Penn, the just pale-face. 



TALL PETER. 



Tall Peter, Ha-no-ja-cya, according to the orthography of published treaties and 

 other documents, was also a compeer of the great Seneca orator. His Indian name 

 should be written Wa-o-no-jah-gah, and signified he has swallowed a tooth. In middle 

 age he became a Christian, and thereafter led a useful and exemplary life. The few 

 aged Indians who remember him speak of him with respect and affectiou. He was 

 one of their leading chiefs. I have been able to glean only these few particulars con- 

 cerning him. 



He was a man of gigantic stature, fully 7 feet high, and died and was buried at the 

 mission cemetery some fifty years ago (in Erie, 1834), aged probably about seventy 

 years. 



THE NINE UNKNOWN BRAVES BEFORE DESCRIBED. 



Near the center of the old mission cemetery, and opposite the main entrance, was 

 a cluster of graves in which were buried Red Jacket and his brother chiefs. The 

 pride and valor and wisdom of the nation, before it became spiritless and moribund, 

 slumbered there. There were no monuments, not even a head-stone, to mark the re- 

 spective resting places of these aboriginal lords — only a venerable walnut tree, which 

 stretched out its sheltering arms and spread its canopy of foliage over the hallowed 

 spot. Humphrey Tolliver,* an aged runaway slave from Virginia, with his white 

 wife and mulatto children, occupied a cottage and cultivated a few acres of garden land 

 bodering the cemetery grounds. He had lived there many years — when Red Jacket 

 was in his glory and the leader of his people. He continued to reside there long after 

 the last loitering Seneca turned his back upon the ancient seat of his tribe, never 

 more to return. Thereafter Tolliver became the self-appointed sexton of the old grave- 

 yard when the crowd of white emigrants surged in to fill the places of the departed 

 Senecas, and he buried the pale-faced dead in the holy ground which had been con- 

 secrated as the place of sepulture of the red men. Never could he be induced, how- 

 ever, to consent that the sacred area about the walnut tree should be profaned by the 

 spade of the grave-digger. He would shake his gray head and say, " The big men of 

 the Senecas were buried there." He knew them well, those silent, composed, and 

 mysterious men, in strange, picturesque garb, and speaking an incomprehensible lan- 

 guage. He died a few years since at a very advanced age, and a new custodian of 

 the Indian cemetery — a white man who lacked sensibility and was superior to the 

 weakness of superstition — succeeded to the humble office. 



Besides the remains we have been successful in identifying, there reposed in this 

 little area the ashes of Two Guns, Twenty Canoes, John Snow, White Chief, and sev- 

 eral other chieftains, all of whom are numbered among the nine undistinguished dead 

 reinterred with Red Jacket in Forest Lawn Cemetery, Buffalo, N. Y., October 9, 

 1884. — Transactions of the Buffalo Historical Society, vol. 3, 1884. 



RED JACKET'S COMPANIONS. 



EXHUMING THE REMAINS OF RED JACKET'S FRIENDS IN 1884. 



The committee on selection of Indian chiefs for interment made several visits to the 

 old mission cemetery, of which mention bas been made, accompanied by the venera- 

 ble missionary, Mrs. Wright, and by aged Indians who had been long familiar with 



*A Virginian; spelled Taliafero. 



