The Ghost Orchard

by Helen Humphreys

  Their stolen land was, of course, valuable to the settlers, and the first white settlement started in 1787, on the site of Kanadesaga. The dead trees of the orchards must have remained, as the land was described at the time of purchase as being “covered by an Indian orchard, and the ground has never been plowed, because of a stipulation to that effect made with the Indians in the treaty of purchase. It contains an Indian burial ground . . . [and] was the largest Indian settlement in western New York.”21

  Shoots, or “sprouts” (as they were called then), from the old Seneca apple trees flourished and grew into trees that eventually bore fruit and were used by the incomers. A resident of Geneva wrote in 1799 that “the apple and peach orchards left by the Indians yield every year [an] abundance of fruit for the use of the inhabitants, besides making considerable cyder; so much so that one farmer near Geneva sold cyder this year to the amount of $1,200.”22 (This is equivalent to almost $24,000 in 2017.)

  The Seneca burial mound at Kanadesaga, although protected in the initial bill of sale to the white settlers, was later built on. In the 1950s, there was a diner on the site. The owners, who in the construction discovered artifacts and skeletons of the Seneca dead, called their restaurant the Indian Mound Diner.

  Interestingly, the New York State Agricultural Experiment Station, a division of Cornell University, is built directly across the road from the former site of Kanadesaga. The station has a heritage orchard of approximately seven thousand trees—the largest collection of individual apple trees in the world. It also runs an apple-breeding program in conjunction with local growers, inventing new varieties of apples and releasing them into the North American market. The latest of these varieties are the SnapDragon and the RubyFrost.

  The importance of the apple to the Iroquois was documented at the beginning of the twentieth century by Arthur Caswell Parker, an archaeologist at the New York State Museum who produced an ethnobotany of the Iroquois and used the people themselves as the source for his bulletin. He performed dozens of interviews with members of the Iroquois nation and determined that the apple was their favourite fruit. He even used their language to list the words for it (there are two different words for “apple,” another word for “baked apple,” and a fourth distinct word for “applesauce”), and he was the only early historian I found who wrote about Native Americans by actually consulting them.23 But this was more than likely because Parker was himself of Iroquois descent—his father was a mixed-blood Seneca. When he retired from his job at the museum, he returned to the former home of the Senecas near Geneva, the land of his father, and died there at the age of seventy-three.

  Perhaps because “castle” is an English word, it survived the removal of the Seneca people from Kanadesaga/Geneva. There is an Old Castle Road in the city, and Kanadesaga Creek was renamed Castle Creek. The Seneca apple trees used to grow near this creek, within the Seneca settlement, and since a margin of land on either side has never been built on, I decide to go there to look for evidence of the old indigenous orchards.

  I travel down in the spring so that I can spot the apple trees—it is blossom season and the frothy mass of white and pink will be easily distinguishable from the green leaf of the other trees. I drive down on back roads bordering fields full of old orchards, the blossom so thick on the trees that it looks as if the branches are upholstered with it. The air is sweet with the scent.

  I am using a facsimile of a map from 1845 as a guide at the original Kanadesaga site. This map was made by Lewis Henry Morgan, a nineteenth-century anthropologist and lawyer who was a champion of the Iroquois, representing them on land claims and writing an extensive ethnography of their society. This study influenced the thinking of Marx, Engels, Freud and Darwin. The Iroquois adopted Morgan into their Hawk clan in 1847.24

  Morgan’s map is fantastically detailed. The unit of measurement is paces, and the length of a pace is set at two and a half feet. So it is very easy to walk the perimeter of the old Seneca settlement, which Morgan determined to be roughly sixty-four by forty-one paces. At the time of his map-making, the corner posts of the old Seneca fort were still in place, and he was able to use these when he took his measurements.

  The sprouts of the girdled Seneca orchard had, in the sixty-six years between the destructive acts of Sullivan’s army and Morgan’s visit to the site, grown back into full trees; “Indian Orchard Apple Trees” is marked clearly on Morgan’s map.25 Also on the map is a single tree near the northern boundary of the fort. Morgan has written beside it the words “Apple Tree still standing,” which presumably means that it was one of the original trees and somehow escaped destruction by Sullivan’s men. In the introduction to S. A. Beach’s The Apples of New York, there is a photograph from 1904 captioned “Indian Apple Tree Still Standing”26 in what looks to be the same spot.27 The overlap of descriptive wording and the location of the tree make me think that the two trees could, in fact, be one and the same.

  The land where the fort once stood is now occupied by a scrappy gas station and mini-mart. I buy gas so I have an excuse to be there.

  By Castle Road, at what seems to have been the spot where Morgan drew the single surviving apple tree, stands a rusty historical marker from 1932 that says: “Site of Kanadesaga, Chief Castle of the Seneca Nation. Destroyed Sept. 7, 1779, in Gen. John Sullivan’s Raid.” Beside the marker are the remains of the frame for a large hanging sign that looks as if it could have once supported a billboard for the Indian Mound Diner or a sign for a former gas station on the site.

  Just south of the broken pavement of the mini-mart parking lot is the burial mound, adrift on a small patch of grass between the gas station and some self-storage units next door. (The Indian Mound Diner once occupied the spot where the gas station is now.) The burial mound has two tombstones placed against each other on top of the rise. One is a large, modern grey stone that looks to have been erected fairly recently. It has the etched figure of a Seneca brave on it; his arms are crossed and he’s standing in front of a fir tree at the edge of a lake. The second marker is from 1908 and is much smaller, but also very tombstone-like. The wording on both is interesting. The modern monument, which I imagine is meant as some sort of redress to the actions of Sullivan’s army, says, “Burial Mound of Seneca Indians, Destroyed Sept. 7, 1779,” which makes it seem as though the burial mound has been destroyed, when in fact it is the only thing left. The smaller gravestone simply says, “Burial Mound of the Seneca Indians.” It was erected by a group called the Fortnightly Reading Club. This was a women’s group, formed in Geneva and other American towns to serve as an educational forum, whose members met every two weeks to discuss books. They read only non-fiction.28 From the group’s archives, for the meeting when they studied “Indians,” I learned that the women of the Fortnightly Reading Club had invited the last of the Seneca medicine men, Shango, to give a lecture, for which they sold tickets and raised enough money to erect the marker.29

  My plan had been to walk beside the creek bed and look for apple trees, but I discover that the foliage along the creek is so dense it’s hard to get more than twenty feet into the underbrush, and then I am so hunched over from avoiding branches and brambles that I can’t look up to notice any apple blossom.

  I back out and reconsider.

  The creek is shallow and brown, choked with the vegetation crowding its banks and full of dead branches. Any plan to walk along it is now shelved also. I stand on the grass, in a clear spot by the road, trying to think of what to do next, and then I notice something strange. Across the creek is a low drystone wall. The stones range from the size of a fist to the size of a watermelon, and the wall runs for about fifty feet and then stops. It does not serve any purpose that I can discern; it’s too short for a boundary marker and it’s well back from the creek, so it wouldn’t be of use as a breakwater. And the creek is barely a trickle, so it’s hard to imagine that it ever floods.

  Lewis Morgan’s map showed two piles of loose stones from the Seneca fireplaces after the for
t had been destroyed. Stones are heavy, and it makes sense that over the course of two centuries, they wouldn’t have gone very far—perhaps being lifted a couple of hundred feet across the creek and used to construct a useless (though decorative) wall. The progress of the fireplace stones suddenly feels like an equation for the passage of time.

  It is a disparate collection of things at the corner of Castle Road and Pre-Emption Road in present-day Geneva. The past pokes up through the present and is still surprisingly visible. But the burial mound itself is underwhelming. Its gentle slope suggests a septic bed, rather than a mass grave. This is because the mound has been greatly altered from its original size of two hundred feet in diameter by ten feet in height. A hundred years after Sullivan’s army drove out the Senecas, members of the tribe still returned in the early fall, every year, to visit their dead. The people who then owned the corner of Castle Road and Pre-Emption Road would give them dinner when they arrived for their rites, and again when they were departing.30 In 1955, when the tribe became extinct and there were no more members left to travel to the spot, archaeologists excavated the site. When they had taken their “artifacts,” the burial mound was considerably smaller.

  I don’t find any apple trees buried in the undergrowth along the creek bed, but I do discover one standing on a patch of grass out back of the mini-mart. It is a large tree with a bifurcated trunk, and by measuring its girth, I estimate that it’s somewhere around sixty years old. So if it is a descendant of the original Seneca trees (and even though it’s in the right spot, this is still a big if), it would be the fourth or fifth generation of the original orchard. But it has a resemblance to the tree in the photograph from 1904, right down to the bifurcated trunk, so there is a possibility that it has descended from one of the Seneca orchard trees.

  Someone cared for the tree at one point, as it has a cable wrapped around its split trunk, put there with the purpose of keeping the tree together and preventing the trunks from separating. But it’s clearly been a while since the cable was placed—parts of it are buried under the bark, and the apple tree has grown over it.

  I’m not sure what is or isn’t currently private property and how much I’m trespassing, so I dart about, furtively conducting my measurements and taking photographs. I feel alternately like a detective and a crazy person. Several cars on Pre-Emption Road slow down while I am measuring the girth of the bifurcated tree with the sewing tape measure I keep in the glovebox of my car. I found it years ago lying in the middle of a road, and it has proven to be unexpectedly useful in a variety of situations.

  As evidence of the Seneca presence, the apple tree is not as definitive as the pile of rocks/stone wall. I want the tree to be descended from the original Seneca orchard, but I don’t know for sure that it is. The thing to do is to come back here in the fall and taste the apples it produces. That will give me an important piece of the puzzle.

  Driving back to Canada, I look at all the stray apple trees along the sides of the road, the blossom flashing white, and I think of how the trees operate as a kind of code or language into the past. A few trees clumped together signal an old orchard, while a single tree by the side of the road could be from an apple core flung from a moving vehicle; a lone tree in a cow field is perhaps the result of an apple being eaten and then excreted by a cow. The past is all around us if we look carefully and can figure out a way to read it.

  Because tribes moved around, and because there were not the border distinctions that there are today, it can be assumed that within the Iroquois nation, agricultural practices would have been similar among those on the northern and southern shores of the Great Lakes.

  In the east of what is now Canada, French Acadians introduced the apple to the Mi’kmaqs, who, having no name for it in their language, called it a French cranberry.31 They planted “field-orchards” in Annapolis and King Counties, and became known for a variety of apple called the Mic-Mac Codlin.32 This was an internationally recognized variety and was included in a report to the Royal Caledonian Horticultural Society in Edinburgh in 1885.33

  The Indian orchards resulted in new and distinct varieties of apples. Over a dozen varieties that originated in indigenous orchards showed up as recognized apples in nursery catalogues and government horticultural reports. And it is here that I have to question the notion that the indigenous peoples only planted apple trees from seed and did not graft, as has been believed. To produce such distinct and flavourful fruit that was in wide circulation seems to suggest there was indeed some grafting going on. And why, if there was sufficient contact between the indigenous peoples and the settlers to introduce the various tribes to apples, wouldn’t there have been some settlers who showed the indigenous peoples how to graft?

  Among horticulturalists there was discussion about whether the indigenous practice of not pruning orchards was preferable to the methods used by the white settlers to keep their own orchards healthy and vibrant. “The old apple orchards planted by the Indians were found in good, sound condition,” observed one report, “and continued so much longer than trees planted in later years by the white settlers.”34

  In an 1871 list of apples, rated in order of desirability, the New York State Agricultural Society ranked the summer apple Indian Rareripe second after the Early Harvest. It was described as being “a fair apple and good bearer,” and one of the best apples in terms of its suitability to the soil and climate of North America. It was further described in the report as being a “tart, pleasant apple [that] cooks well.”35

  In Georgia, there was an apple grown in the Cherokee orchards called the Equinetelle. It was in nursery catalogues until 1890, when it was renamed the Buckingham.36 The Buff was also a Cherokee apple, as was the Nickajack, which was named after the creek where it was grown. Indian orchards were often beside rivers or creeks, and were frequently named after them. Both the Buff and the Nickajack are still being produced as heirloom apples in select orchards across North America, as is the Lawver, which originally was “found in an old Indian orchard in Kansas.”37

  The majority of the old indigenous apples are, however, extinct.

  The Cullawhee came from Jackson County, North Carolina, and was once the largest apple ever grown. A single apple measured twenty-one inches in circumference.

  The Indiahoma was described in a Texas nursery catalogue from 1920 as having been discovered in old Indian Territory. It was a large, red oblong apple of excellent flavour.

  The Indian Winter was listed in nursery catalogues in Georgia, Kentucky and Massachusetts from 1861 to 1878.

  The Kittageskee, an extinct Cherokee winter apple that once grew in North Carolina and Georgia, was described as being of excellent quality, although it was judged too small to make a profit at market.

  Other extinct Cherokee apples were the Red Warrior, the Spann and the Stevenson Pippin.

  The Tillaque was a large, yellow-skinned winter apple from North Carolina. Its name meant “big fruit” in Cherokee.

  The Coopers Russeting, first documented in Gloucester County, New Jersey, was thought to be of First Nations origin.

  The Townsend was found in 1760 in a clearing in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. It was described as excellent for eating fresh, and also for cooking and drying.

  The Tell was a red winter apple from Arkansas, and the Wall, another Cherokee variety, was also a winter apple. It was listed in an 1853 issue of Western Horticulture Magazine, where it was described as a prolific bearer.

  In a letter to the editor of the journal Southern Cultivator, a man named Silas McDowell wrote the following: “Equineley, Junaluskee, Camack’s Winter Sweet, Maverick’s Winter Sweet, Cullasaga, Elarkee, Ducket, Nickajack, Cullawhee. The foregoing . . . apples were nearly all originally found growing in old Cherokee Indian fields, and I have thought it best to give each one the Cherokee name of either the Indian or the stream where it originally grew.”38

  Not many of the early settlers seemed to share Silas McDowell’s sensitivity, and it appears that most
apple varieties in the indigenous orchards were either renamed when the whites took over the land or left to go extinct.

  One story with a somewhat happier ending involves the Junaluska—a yellow-skinned, medium-sized apple with russet patches and juicy yellow flesh. It was named for the chief of the Eastern Cherokees, who fought with Andrew Jackson against the Creeks and saved the future president’s life, only to be driven out of his home in 1838 as a result of Jackson’s Indian Removal Act. Chief Junaluska was initially imprisoned at Fort Montgomery, and then was forced to march with his people to eastern Oklahoma, a trek of some eight hundred miles. After several years there, he walked back by himself to North Carolina at the age of sixty-seven and petitioned the government to remain there. His service to Jackson was finally acknowledged, and he was given a piece of land near Robbinsville.

  A tree bearing his eponymous apple was part of a Cherokee orchard there that the US government was intent on purchasing.39 The chief didn’t want to part with his favourite apple tree, and so the state commissioners gave him an extra fifty dollars for it. The land where the tree grew eventually became part of Silas McDowell’s orchard, where he continued to grow the historic Cherokee varieties and sell them. He sold the Junaluska apple until 1859, but after his death the orchard was not preserved and the varieties there were left to grow wild.

  In 2001, a North Carolina apple hunter, Tom Brown, found what he determined to be the Junaluska apple on land that was several miles from the historic Silas McDowell orchard. Through research and interviews, Brown was able to accurately identify the apple and he grafted three trees, which were subsequently planted at Chief Junaluska’s grave near Robbinsville.