82 CLINTON ON THE ANTIQUITIES 
pieces of coarse pottery resembling stone-ware, and roughly ornamented. 
The Indians have a tradition that the family of the Antones, which is sup- 
posed to belong to the Tuscarora nation, are the seventh generation from 
the inhabitants of this fort, but of its origin they know nothing. There is 
also a place at Norwich, in the same county, on a high bank of the river, 
called the castle, where the Indians lived at the period of our settling the 
country, and some vestiges of a fortification appear there, but it is in all pro- 
bability of a much more modern date than the one at Oxford. 
In the town of Ridgway, in Genesee county, there have been discovered 
several ancient fortifications and burying places. About six miles from the 
ridge road, and south of the Great Slope or Mountain Ridge, an old bury- 
ing ground has been discovered within two or three months, in which are 
deposited bones of an unusual length and size. Over this ground lay the 
trunk of a chestnut tree, apparently four feet through at the stump. The 
top and limbs of this tree had entirely mouldered away by age. The bones 
lay across each other in a promiscuous manner; from which circumstance, 
and the appearance of a pit in the neighbourhood, it is supposed that they 
were deposited there by their conquerors. And from the fort being situated 
in a swamp, it is believed it was the last resort of the vanquished, and pro- 
bably the swamp was under water at the time. 
There are extensive clearings in the Indian reservation at Buffalo, of 
which the Senecas can give no account. Their principal settlements were 
at a great distance to the east until the sale of the greater part of their 
country since the conclusion of the revolutionary war. 
On the south side of Lake Erie, as | am informed, there is a series of 
old fortifications running from the Cataraugus creek to the Pennsylvania 
line, a distance of fifty miles. Some are two, three, and four miles apart, 
and some within half a mile. Some contain five acres—the walls or breast- 
works of earth; and they are generally on ground where there are appear- 
ances of creeks having once emptied into the lakes, or where there was once 
a bay—so that it is inferred that these works were once on the margin of 
Lake Erie, which has now retreated from two to five miles northerly— 
