Revolution Song

by Russell Shorto

  Chapter 3

  THE TURTLE’S BACK

  Before there was the world, there was the Sky World. It was a place of trees and flowers and animals and people, but the source of light and energy was not the sun but rather a Tree of Light, whose flowers glowed. In one of the houses of the Sky World, together with their families, there lived a boy and girl. One day the girl combed the boy’s hair, and as a result she became pregnant. Shortly after, the boy died. It was decided that the girl, Mature Blossom, would marry Standing Tree, the chief of the Sky World, who was the keeper of the Tree of Light. After the marriage, Standing Tree became suspicious about her pregnancy and had a dark dream. The dream’s message was that the Tree of Light was to be uprooted. With sadness, the people of Sky World followed the dream’s command and pulled up the Tree of Light. Standing Tree and his wife then sat at the edge of the hole where the tree had been. As Mature Blossom peered down to see what was below, her jealous husband suddenly pushed her into the hole.

  Sky Woman—as she was known henceforth—fell through space toward the primal sea. Birds swooped in, grasped her, and guided her down onto a turtle’s back. Ducks and other creatures helped her by getting mud from the bottom and plastering it to the turtle’s shell, creating land. As Sky Woman walked on the land, plants and trees sprang up around her. Eventually, Sky Woman gave birth to a girl. One day when her daughter was grown, the west wind blew into the girl and she became pregnant. She gave birth to twin boys. Sky Holder was a child of order; his brother, Flint, of chaos. The mother died while giving birth to Flint, so Sky Woman, their grandmother, raised the twins. Sky Woman favored Flint and cast Sky Holder out to fend for himself. Sky Holder set off to walk the earth in search of his father. Along the way he learned to hunt, to grow crops, to make fire. Sky Holder and Flint engaged in ongoing conflict. More people appeared; moral complexity—duplicity, revenge—crept into the world.

  Over the course of centuries, the story of Sky Woman and her creation was woven and rewoven. Variations and digressions blossomed. Each nation of the Iroquois league—the Mohawk, Onondaga, Oneida, Cayuga, Seneca and Tuscarora—favored its own version. Children sat by firelight in their smoky longhouses and listened to it unfold over many nights. Elements of the world they knew—the turtle, the wolf, medicine from forest herbs, techniques for growing corn, centuries of accumulated wisdom and tradition—appeared in the story and had their significance ratified.

  The Senecas were the westernmost of the six Iroquois nations. The wooded landscape they lived in rolled on and on, demarcated by rivers, by gorges—stratified rock walls, plunging waterfalls—and by long, deep, cold lakes. The whole terrain baked in the summer heat and in winter filled up high as a man’s head with snow. Home for some was Gen-nis’-hee-yo: Genesee, “this beautiful valley,” with its river running through it, the river mirroring the world, holding on its surface the clouds, the limbs of fallen trees, the visiting moon.

  A boy was born here, sometime in the 1740s, in a longhouse framed by log posts and covered in elm bark. The longhouses had sleeping platforms built against the posts and hearths spaced at regular intervals down the center aisle. A group of such houses constituted the village, named Conawaugus. There was a sulfur spring nearby, and that’s what the name meant: stinking water.

  His mother was called Gah-hon-no-neh. Mothers are always vital to their children, but in the case of the Iroquois a mother was something more. They were a matrilineal society, so Gah-hon-no-neh’s group, the Wolf Clan, would become central to her son’s identity. A clan was divided into “lineages,” extended family groups, and Gah-hon-no-neh was a “lineage matron.” It was a title of authority, for among the Iroquois these women made decisions that affected the whole community. Among other things, they chose the men who would lead. Unless there was a reason not to, a lineage matron often chose her son.

  We don’t know what Gah-hon-no-neh called her son at birth. Senecas typically had two names: the childhood one was exchanged for another in adulthood. As an adult, he was called Kayéthwahkeh. Iroquois names did not necessarily have referents in the physical world, but as the Iroquois came to realize that Europeans expected a translation, they did their best to connect elements in a name to the physical world. “Kayéthwahkeh” had to do with planting; in adulthood, he would become known among the English as Cornplanter.

  The child didn’t look quite like other people in the village. Boys, he later said, “took notice of my skin being a different color from theirs, and spoke about it.” His father was a white man named John Abeel, who was largely absent from his upbringing but was well known in Seneca villages. He was an itinerant trader who roamed far from his home base near Albany, New York, to service Indians, typically trading rum for furs. He wasn’t much liked. Some Senecas accused him of cheating them. Alcohol abuse was a perennial problem, and the Iroquois associated him with it even as many of them traded with him for it. Among his own people in Albany, meanwhile, John Abeel’s reputation was, if anything, worse. Sir William Johnson, England’s Superintendent of Indian Affairs, referred to him as “that incorrigible villian [sic],” complained that he “constantly carried great quantitys of Rum to the Senecas Country Contrary to Law, & in open defiance of all authority,” and repeatedly tried to rein him in.

  Abeel’s ancestor had come to America two centuries earlier from Amsterdam to be part of the Dutch colony of New Netherland. Its capital, New Amsterdam, was on Manhattan Island, but the Abeels had settled to the north, in the city that, after the English took over, became Albany. They prospered; one became a city magistrate, another became mayor. John Abeel, however, was the black sheep: he would show up repeatedly in city records for violent, drunken behavior, not only toward Indians, but also toward members of his own family.

  Still, Abeel had features that might have made him appealing to a Seneca woman. He knew the woods as well as an Indian, spoke their language, knew how to talk and listen and work angles. Gah-hon-no-neh would not have been ostracized by her people for taking up for a time with the white trader. Among the Iroquois the sexes had an equality that was unfathomable to Europeans. Men and women each had their prescribed duties; beyond these, both were largely able to do what they wanted. And because they were a matrilineal society, who the boy’s father was mattered less than who his mother was. Culturally, Cornplanter was one of them.

  As Cornplanter grew, the world of the Senecas came into focus for him. Generations before, they had grouped themselves in cities whose inhabitants numbered in the thousands, built on high, defensible ground, but in recent times they had changed their settlement patterns. Now there were many small villages like his, with populations numbering only in the dozens, scattered up and down the Genesee River, ending at Lake Ontario to the north, as well as others farther east. Typically, these were a day’s walk apart. Some of the clusters of multifamily longhouses and smaller two-family cabins were on hilltops, others close to the river. In some the houses were grouped around a central green. All had cornfields on the outskirts, as well as plots for beans and squash. There were dogs underfoot. The Senecas kept pigs and chickens, and some kept cattle and horses, and grew hay to feed the animals. The feel of a Seneca village was domestic, settled, agricultural.

  Beyond the village, children learned the tribal territory and customs by seasonally exploring with their families. In March, family groups fanned out and spent weeks in the forest, covering sometimes dozens of miles by foot to reach clusters of maple trees to which they had traditional rights, which they tapped for sap. Back home, while the women boiled the sap into sugar, the boys learned the river, spearfishing with the men. Later in the spring, passenger pigeons descended on the forests. The birds, which would later be hunted into extinction, were at the time of Cornplanter’s childhood so numerous that a European observer witnessed a single flock that “extended 3 or 4 English miles in length, and more than one such mile in breadth, and they flew so closely together that the sky and the sun were obscured by them.” The pigeons roosted in their
favorite trees, which became so laden that the sound of branches snapping under their weight echoed through the forest. Hunting passenger pigeons was an activity that occupied the whole family.

  Summer was a time to be at home: women tended crops, children played. Then came fall, and the main hunting season. A family traveled as a group in a canoe to a favored spot, where they erected a makeshift cabin. From here, the man marched off in search of game. When he killed a deer, he would skin it on the spot, hang the carcass from a tree and mark the place. It was the woman’s job to come after and haul the meat back.

  All of these activities revolved around the father. But Cornplanter’s father might as well have been dead, as Broteer Furro’s and George Washington’s were. It is likely, though, that his mother married after she was done with John Abeel, for she had a daughter who was born after Cornplanter, and then another son.

  Seneca children also learned about their world through stories. Winter evenings especially were times for storytelling. Besides the tale of creation, the other elemental story that unfolded on special occasions was that of the forming of the Iroquois league. In the distant past, it held, the Mohawk, Onondaga, Oneida, Cayuga and Seneca nations, all of which spoke interrelated languages, warred with each other until three leaders brought them together. Two chiefs, Deganawidah, the Peacemaker, and Hiawatha, his disciple, devised a plan for unity, called the Great Law of Peace. Hiawatha preached this gospel of unity to members of the five tribes, convinced them of its wisdom, offered a name for the confederacy—Haudenosaunee, “People of the Longhouse” (though Europeans would refer to them by the French-coined name “Iroquois”)—then sailed off in a mystical “white stone” canoe. The third leader, Jikonsaseh, the Peace Mother, provided the hearth where the peace was made, and insured that the new league recognized the rights of women. Not long before the time of Cornplanter’s birth, a sixth nation, the Tuscarora, became part of the league.

  By the time of Cornplanter’s childhood, the league had developed an ornate system for settling disputes and making important decisions, which involved a great deal of travel by extended family groups and highly ritualized meetings headed by the fifty chiefs who formed its hereditary council, with lengthy speeches and replies and the giving of wampum belts to symbolize what had been agreed.

  The territories of the six nations were ranged between the Hudson River and the Great Lakes. The Mohawks were the easternmost nation, and thus the one closest to European settlement. Because of this, they had long since altered their way of life. Their traditional hunting-and-gathering routines were constrained by English and Dutch settlers having claimed much of the territory. They had taken to living in log cabins and were pushed to make other changes by England’s agents for Indian affairs and by American missionaries. But the Senecas, at the far western edge of Iroquois territory, still lived according to their own rhythms. The Senecas also had the largest territory of the six nations and were the most populous. The populations of all the Iroquois had fallen dramatically in the previous century as a result of war and of diseases brought by Europeans for which they had no immunity, but by Cornplanter’s time the numbers were back up to where they had once been. The overall population was small, though: about 4,000 Senecas lived spread out over several thousand square miles. They were a people in flux—and yet this was a relatively stable time.

  In many ways, the individual villages were more important than the tribe or the league. A village was self-sustaining; each did its own trading with Europeans, making deals with the English or French depending on circumstances and on who had a better offer. In the balance of power with the Europeans, the Senecas had the upper hand. They got what they wanted out of the relationship: clothing and textiles, nails, copper, pots, guns, bullets, rum. Sometimes, as a bonus or incentive to trade, the English or French would send a small party of blacksmiths to set up a forge and live near a Seneca village to make and repair metal tools. The villages communicated with each other over an intricate series of paths that they kept cleared, and sometimes via canoe. Iroquois communication was a source of amazement to white settlers, who noted that a trained messenger could cover 100 miles a day on foot. And the pathways seemingly went on forever. The Iroquois interacted with far-flung tribes—Ojibwas, Miamis, Wyandots, Illinois, Catawbas, Cherokees, Chickasaws—and traveled, traded and made war deep into Canada, as far south as the Carolinas and as far west as the Mississippi River. The Senecas knew where they were in the world.

  As the boy Cornplanter grew up in the Seneca world, a particular trait emerged in him. He was not only smart but unusually sensitive to nuance, appreciative of complexity, such as was found in the labyrinth of the Seneca creation story. He was deliberative and measured, able to hold conflicting ideas in his head. And he had a frankness of expression that went with these qualities: a square, solid face, and deep eyes that seemed both penetrating and pondering.

  At the same time, he was not only an excellent fighter but a ferocious one. As in European civilization, war was a means to personal glory and power, but Iroquois warfare had an additional element: it was an antidote to suffering, a way of maintaining psychological balance. When someone in the village died and the loved ones were plunged into grief, a woman from the aggrieved family would order the men to attack an enemy tribe. It was not necessarily a matter of retribution. The idea was to redress the imbalance the death had caused, to deal with the loss either by killing an outsider or by taking one prisoner and forcing the outsider to take the place of the loved one. If the victim was to be killed, his ordeal began with torture—and everyone took part, with the oldest women leading the way by pulling out the victim’s fingernails. If the victim was to be adopted into the tribe, the ritualistic adoption likewise involved initiation by torture. The torture was considered to be for the captive’s benefit: one who survived it with bravery won esteem. After the ordeal, the former enemy was “dead,” and the new person was welcomed into the tribe with soothing words and the dressing of wounds.

  Violence, therefore, was a sacred act. Particularly for a boy such as Cornplanter, who as the son of a powerful mother was destined for leadership, becoming adept at it was a part of growing up.

  Two hundred and forty miles east of Cornplanter’s village, on the banks of the Hudson River in the town of Albany, New York, another family was making its way in the world, following its own traditions and rhythms. Theirs was a humble home, for Christoffel Yates, the father and provider, was a blacksmith, a man of modest means. But the household was boisterous, for Christoffel and his wife Catalina had no fewer than eight children. The routine uproar was interrupted one summer day in 1724 by a period of hushed expectancy followed by the cries of a newborn as Catalina gave birth to her ninth child. They called him Abraham.

  Abraham Yates grew up without frills or advantages, but he was ferociously inquisitive and quickly learned his world. The river, broad and ever-changing in its moods, dominated the town. Near his home was a wide common pasture where everyone’s cows ranged in one large herd. Most of Albany’s three hundred houses had a garden, a well and a tree in front; they spread along the western shore of the river and up the hillside that sloped away from it. Technically it was an English town, of course, part of the British province of New York. It was also in a sense an Iroquois town; the boy got used to seeing Mohawk Indians coming and going, for Albany was the center for trade with the Iroquois and, as a service to keep the Indians happy, blacksmiths like his father repaired their tools and guns free of charge.

  Most of all, though, Albany was Dutch: its roots in the Dutch colony of New Netherland were apparent everywhere. Houses had gables; fireplaces were surrounded by blue-and-white Delft tiles. Many households were bilingual. Yates’s was one of these, for, like Cornplanter, he had Dutch ancestry. Dutch women of the region like his mother kept up traditions passed down from their mothers and grandmothers. They served butter chicken, pickled herring and cole slaw, and made “koekjes” (the origin of the American “cookies”) for their
children. The Dutch festival of St. Nicholas, when children received presents on December 6, was a more substantial holiday than Christmas.

  Being the ninth child of a blacksmith did not exactly position one for greatness. Abraham couldn’t even take up his father’s trade; his four older brothers filled the available spots at the Yates forge at the southern edge of town. So he was shunted into an even humbler trade: shoemaker. The apprenticeship was long—typically four to seven years—but Abraham was industrious by nature, so he did his time and eventually went into business for himself.

  Yates kept his account books in English and Dutch, depending on the customer’s preferred language. It was his practice to go over an entry with the client. So to the family of Jacob Gerritse van Schaick, who lived in the farming community of Half Moon farther along the Hudson River, he wrote that he sold “Een paar schoenen voor je kind” (“one pair of shoes for your child”) and a pair of men’s shoes. He did good work, and his clients came back to him repeatedly.

  But it was a plodding, low-profit business, and as time went by, Abraham Yates chafed. He was in his twenties now. He was smart and he knew it. He wanted more out of life.

  He was a keen follower of local affairs, and early in life he developed a chip on his shoulder, a sharp sensitivity to injustice. He itched to get into politics. But that was almost impossible. Throughout the American colonies politics was a gentleman’s business: you were supposed to be of a certain class to run for office. The roots of the local political structure went all the way back to the city’s beginnings as the Dutch town of Beverwijck. In the New Netherland period, New Amsterdam, on Manhattan Island, was the polyglot, relatively urbane capital, while in Beverwijck—150 miles north in the brooding wilderness—life was more basic and society was more uniformly Dutch. Everything revolved around the fur trade, which came to be dominated by a few families.