24 



HISTORY OF STEUBEN COUNTY, NEW YORK. 



" la 1764, Sir William Johnson determined to be trifled 

 with no longer in the matter of the two murderers and 

 other causes of complaint against the Grenesee Senecas, and, 

 accordingly, with the full approval of the other nations, 

 fitted out a military expedition against the Canisteo Castle. 

 A party of one hundred and forty Indians, with a few white 

 men, under the command of Captain Montour, a half-breed 

 war-chief, was dispatched to break up the nest. This ex- 

 pedition started in April, 1764, from Oquago, a village on 

 the Susquehanna, above Binghamton, and in a fortnight 

 made thorouii;h work. The inhabitants fled at Montour's 

 approach, but he destroyed their villages and property. 

 Kanhangton,* or Tioga Point, now Athens, Pennsylvania, 

 was the first place destroyed. It consisted of thirty-six 

 good houses, built of square logs and having stone chim- 

 neys. The next point was a village on the Cayuga Branchf 

 (the Chemung). Here thirty houses of the same kind 

 were found and destroyed. Thence the party marched to 

 Canisteo, which the report in the colonial records describes 

 as ' the largest of the Delaware towns, consisting of sixty 

 good houses with three or four fireplaces in each.' It ap- 

 pears from this that the outlaws deserve at least the praise 

 of introducing great improvements in architecture among 

 the savages. Probably the white and black members of 

 the colony were less inured to the intense severity of the 

 weather than the red men, and had been accustomed to 

 better lodgings. Hence these luxurious barracks of hewed 

 logs and stone fireplaces. But the emissaries of justice 

 spared nothing. The village was burned and the miscella- 

 neous inhabitants plundered. They even found in the se- 

 cluded retreat horses, horned cattle, and swine, which, 

 however, were in such a pjoor condition after the winter, 

 that few were fit to be driven away. It appears that no 

 efibrt was made by the Canisteos to defend their town, 

 although the defile, several leagues in length, through 

 which the invading party passed before reaching the fine 

 valley where, in an open meadow of several hundred acres, 

 the village stood, off'ered ample opportunity for a ruinous 

 attack upon them." 



The early settlers discovered here two forts, which, upon 

 careful examination, exhibited considerable engineering 

 skill. One was situated near the bank of the river, just 

 in the neck of the defile as it opens into the valley on the 

 east. It occupied about an acre of ground, with four square 

 corners, and was inclosed by palisades or pickets. The 

 embankment remaining when the early settlers came to the 

 place was about two feet high. At the mouth of a similar 

 opening into the valley from the south, on Col. Bill's 



* Kan is the Iroquois name for town ; the other part of the name 

 is from a word signifying the junction of two rivers. A score or more 

 of Indian viUages in Western New York, at the time of the Sullivan 

 campaign, began with this word Kan, — such as Kanadasaga, Kana- 

 gasas, Kanadanga, etc. 



f This is the name given to the Chemung Eiver in the colonial 

 records and early writings. Before it had any other name, the people 

 down in Pennsylvania and travelers generally called it the Cayuga 

 Branch of the Susquehanna, because it extended off in the direction 

 of the Cayuga country. The village referred to was on the Chemung, 

 in the vicinity of Waverly. It was visited by Bartram, the English 

 botanist, and Conrad Weiser, on their return from Onondaga in 1743, 

 twenty-one years before this expedition, and was then a village of 

 considerable importance. 



Creek, was another fort of about the same size and con- 

 struction, which seems to have been designed as a place of 

 retreat in case the first fort was taken by an enemy. The 

 works were evidently constructed with reference to an 

 attack from the east, and if we suppose them to have been 

 built by the Canisteos at the time of their occupancy of 

 the valley, there would be a manifest fitness in this, as the 

 only invasion from white settlements at that time must 

 necessarily come up the river from an eastern direction. 

 The engineering skill, too, would be easily accounted for 

 by the presence of the deserters from the British army and 

 other Europeans who formed part of the mixed settlement. 

 The word " castle" as applied to the ancient Canisteo town 

 would seem to imply some sort of stronghold or fortifica- 

 tion. Although no mention is made of a fort in the brief 

 record of the expedition, and it is stated, or at least implied, 

 that the Canisteos made no resistance, yet the forts or the 

 main fort below the town may not have been garrisoned at 

 the time of the invasion, and may have been passed by un- 

 noticed, as it stood about fifteen rods from the bank of the 

 river. At all events, these forts were here when the early 

 settlers came to the country, and the most reasonable sup- 

 position is that the3^ were built by the band of outlaws de- 

 stroyed by Sir William Johnson's expedition in the spring 

 of 1764. 



The foundation of a house of hewed timber was also dis- 

 covered in 1818, east of the river fort and just below the 

 mouth of Cold Stream, on the farm of Joshua C. Stephens. 

 It was exposed in changing the bed of the river, and had 

 every appearance of having been covered for a long time 

 by the natural alluvial deposit of the valley. 



Judge McMaster has singled out two of the actors in 

 this expedition as noticeable men : " The leader, Montour, 

 as there is strong grounds for believing, was the son of the 

 famous Indian woman known as Queen Catharine, and the 

 same warrior who, after a fiital encounter with the American 

 troops in the war of the Revolution, was brought to the 

 mouth of the Conhocton, there to die and be buried in a 

 grave marked by the Painted Post, which has given an en- 

 during name to that locality. The other was Joseph Brant, 

 as I shall venture to say on the authority of the records, 

 which show that in this very month of April, 1764, he was 

 engaged in an expedition against some hostile villages, and 

 on the authority of Stone's ' Life of Sir William John- 

 son,' where Canisteo is mentioned as the name of a village 

 attacked at that time by the great Thayendanegea." 



The story is not yet finished. " The inhabitants of the 

 destroyed village fled for protection to the Senecas of 

 Genesee, who were in not much better odor than the suf- 

 ferers themselves. Three months later we find that the 

 refractory ' Chenussio Indians and other Senecas' made a 

 treaty of peace, in which it was provided ' that regarding 

 the delivering up of the Kanestio murderers, one of them 

 being dead, the other is pardoned, on their acceding to the 

 additional article,' and also, ' that as the Delawares of the 

 Susquehanna, who came for protection to Chenussio last 

 spring, after their castles were destroyed by Sir William 

 Johnson's Indian parties, are now suing for peace through 

 the Chenussio mediation, the Chenussios agree to deliver 

 up at Oswego within three weeks Atweetsera, the Delaware 



