HISTOKY OF STEUBEN COUNTY, NEW YORK. 



39 



year to nearly par value in the market. Being thus situ- 

 ated, and having failed to extinguish the Indian title to the 

 whole of the tract at first contemplated, they memorialized 

 the Legislature and got released from their obligations in 

 reference to what remained, paying only for what was in- 

 cluded in the Indian treaty. 



But the Indians who had made the treaty, apparently in 

 good faith, soon became dissatisfied and disaffected. In 

 August, 1790, Mr. Phelps informed the elder Mr. Gorham, 

 in Boston, that the Indians had been to Canandaigua and 

 had refused to receive any further payment, alleging that 

 the amount of purchase money was to have been ten instead 

 of five thousand dollars. He wrote that the Indians were 

 very much exasperated on account of some recent murders 

 of their people committed by the whites at Tioga, that he 

 was about to undertake a conciliatory mission to their prin- 

 cipal villages, and that if he did not succeed they would 

 retaliate by a general attack upon the whites. At a council 

 held by Mr. Pickering, at Tioga, in November, 1790, Red 

 Jacket and Farmer's Brother both claimed that the sum to 

 be paid by Mr. Phelps was ten instead of five thousand 

 dollars; they alleged that their" heads had been confused," 

 and that they had been '^ cheated." Speaking of the pay- 

 ment. Red Jacket said, " When we went to Canandaigua to 

 meet Mr. Phelps, expecting to receive ten thousand dollars, 

 we were to have but five thousand. When we discovered 

 the fraud we had a mind to apply to Congress, to see if 

 the matter could not be rectified. For when we took the 

 money and shared it, every one here knows that we had 

 hut about one dollar apiece. All our lands came to was 

 but the worth of a few hogsheads of tobacco. Gentlemen 

 who stand by, do not think hard of us for what has been 

 said. At the time of the treaty twenty broaches would not 

 buy half a loaf of bread ; so that when we returned home 

 there was not a bright spot of silver about us." 



Cornplanter, the leader of the disaffected Indians, visited 

 Philadelphia and laid their complaint before President 

 Washington. The President promised investigation of the 

 matter. Mr. Phelps wrote a vindication of his conduct in 

 the making of the treaty, and sent it to the President, 

 accompanied by the affidavits of Rev. Samuel Kirkland, 

 James Deane, Judge Hollenbeck, and others. In Decem- 

 ber, 1791, Joseph Brant fully acquitted Mr. Phelps of dis- 

 honesty or unfair dealing in the purchase of the lands, in a 

 long letter addressed to the President of Indian Affairs for 

 the Northern District of the United States. In this letter 

 he is particularly severe on Cornplanter, alleging that he 

 was " influenced by bribes and selfish views." He says 

 that the lessees were only released from the payment of 

 five thousand dollars out of the twenty thousand they had 

 agreed to pay for the whole country, and a pro rata 

 amount of their stipulated annual rent. The poor Indians 

 never realized the sum promised them by the lessees, and 

 yet there is no doubt but the lessees themselves, in one 

 form or another, realized a large amount from their illegal 

 long lease. 



We close our chapter on the Indian treaties with the 

 following extract from Mr. Turner's excellent History of 

 Phelps and Gorham's Purchase : 



'' The whole history of the early Indian treaties in this 



State is a complex one. There was a disjointed state of 

 things existing among our own people. The treaties began 

 without any clear and definite understanding of what were 

 the respective rights of the State and the general govern- 

 ment. The Indians, after they had heard of * one big fire 

 being lighted for all the thirteen States,' could not under- 

 stand why they should be invited to attend ' so many little 

 fires,' or councils. The almost interminable mischief, the 

 lessees' movement, was thrust in to add to the embarrass- 

 ment. The close of the Revolution had left them with 

 distracted councils. Cut up into factions themselves, no 

 wonder that when they were pulled and hauled about from 

 one treaty to another, beset by State commissioners, lessee 

 companies, speculators, and their ' old friends at Niagara,' 

 they should on several occasions have complained that their 

 ' heads were confused.' 



" But the crowning curse, and the source of nearly all 

 other evils that beset them, and nearly all that embarrassed 

 our relations and intercourse with their race, was the use 

 of spirituous liquors. In the absence of them, the advent 

 of our race. to this continent would have been a blessing to 

 theirs, instead of what it has proved to be, — the cause of 

 their ruin and gradual extermination. Nowhere in a long 

 career of discovery have Europeans found natives of the 

 soil with as many of the noblest attributes of humanity, — 

 moral and physical elements which, if they could not have 

 been blended with ours, could have maintained a separate 

 existence, and been fostered by a proximity of civilization 

 and the arts. Everywhere, when first approached by our 

 race, they welcomed it, and made demonstrations of friend- 

 ship and peace. . . . Whatever of savage character they 

 may have possessed, so far as our race was concerned, it 

 was dormant till aroused to action by assaults or treachery 

 of intruders upon their soil, whom they had met as friends. 



" This was the beginning of trouble. The cupidity of 

 our race perpetuated it by the introduction of ' fire-water,' 

 which, vitiating their appetites, cost them their native inde- 

 pendence of character, made them dependents upon the 

 trader and the agents of rival governments, mixed them 

 up with factions and contending aspirants for dominion, and 

 from time to time impelled them to the fields of blood and 

 slaughter or to the stealthy assault with the tomahawk and 

 scalping-knife. . . . From the hour that Hudson lured the 

 Indians on board his vessel on the river that bears his 

 name, and gave them the first taste of spirituous liquors, 

 the whole history of British intercourse with them is 

 marked by the use of this accursed agent as a principal 

 means of success. . . . The early French traders upon the 

 St. Lawrence and in all that region commenced the traffic 

 not until they had ascertained that they could in no other 

 way compete with the English traders than by using the 

 same means. The early Jesuit missionaries checked them 

 in their work of evil, but the English trader was left unre- 

 strained, even encouraged by English colonial authority. . . . 

 It was with his keg of rum that the Englishman could 

 alone succeed, and with a morbid, sordid perseverance he 

 plied it in trade as well as in diplomacy. 



" At a later period, when the storm of the Revolution 

 was gathering, . . . the aspect of the quarrel between 

 England and the colonies was not suited to their tastes or 



