Mary’s youngest boy, Jesse, was thought the finest of her sons by a long shot. At twenty-eight, he was the main support of his widowed mother and a very “white” Indian in manners, dress, and work. Mary ordered him to steer clear of brother John, in whom, according to Doctor Seaver, something had incited “so great a degree of envy that nothing short of death would satisfy it.”
In the spring of 1812, Robert Whaley of Castile sold a raft before it was built. The planks to be used for it were at the top of a hill on the banks of the Genesee, and he needed extra hands to get them to river level. Unaware of the family tension, Whaley recruited a crew that included Mary’s son-in-law George Chongo and both of her feuding sons.
Whiskey joined the work and stayed when it was over. A fight broke out between Jesse and George Chongo. Hiokatoo’s youngest son pounded his brother-in-law and started heading home. At that point, brother John pulled a knife and stood before the white raft builder, face lit with a demonic intensity. “Jogo!” he snarled. “Get lost!” Whaley made tracks.
“So, you want more whiskey and more fighting,” said Jesse, trying to take away the knife. The pair clinched and tussled, and Jesse was struck repeatedly. “Brother, you have killed me!” he cried out. Any one of his eighteen wounds could have been mortal.
The bravest thing John did in his whole life was to tell his mother what he had done. There was no legal consequence to this deed, either, probably looking to the council like no more than a drunken knife fight. But John was a pariah—till people needed medicine.
In the spring of 1817, John Jemison went to Buffalo to work as a healer. He came back to Mount Morris in midsummer just after the Great Slide of the Genesee. He took a look at the hillside that had collapsed in that event and considered it a sign of his own death. In a couple of days, he fell to drinking on nearby Squakie Hill with three Seneca, two remembered only as Doctor and Jack, and a third from Allegany.
In the afternoon, a quarrel started, and the two local Seneca decided to kill John Jemison. He may have threatened to witch them, and the pair dared not let him get a head start. As the party broke up, the two conspirators hauled John Jemison off his horse, hit him with a rock, and finished him with an axe. He was fifty-four when he died at the end of June 1817 and was given a white funeral.
Blood feuds and revenge figured in preindustrial life everywhere, but among the Iroquois, a death didn’t always merit a death. If someone killed a member of a rival clan and sent an offering, usually white wampum (a symbolic beaded sash), to the victim’s family, the quarrel was over—if it was accepted. This the two murderers tried. Mary Jemison refused. She told the council that she didn’t want the pair harmed; she just never wanted to see them again. This meant banishment from their families, their villages, and their ancestral lands.
Doctor and Jack ended up wandering Squakie Hill, despised, despising even themselves. Troubled by dreams and visions, they soon took their own lives.
The Seneca always considered the hill haunted because of Jemison’s death there, and his revenge could be said to have come from the spirit world. Does his influence linger? White campers today report all kinds of apparitions about Squakie Hill. Is he behind the psychic play, still stalking the shades of his murderers?
TWO SENECA WITCH TRIALS
Son of a white trader and a Seneca maid, Garyanwaga, or Cornplanter, became a chief among the Seneca. His name turned blood cold in colonial hearts during the frontier wars, like those of Mohawk Joseph Brant and the white Loyalist ranger John Butler (1728–1796). Cornplanter was surely with those two at the infamous Cherry Valley, New York, massacre. He fought against the 1779 counterstroke at Sullivan’s Hill until the day was lost.
Cornplanter was more than just a fighter. In 1790, he spoke nobly to George Washington on behalf of all Native Americans. One of the tracts given to the Seneca after the Revolution is still largely in their possession: the Allegany Reservation, to which Cornplanter and many Seneca retired after the Revolution.
But things didn’t stay peaceful. The young U.S. government relocated a party of Munsees/Delawares to the Allegany, not seeming to understand that they and the Seneca were traditional enemies. Tension bloomed into trouble.
Cornplanter’s daughter Ji-wi fell ill in 1800 after giving birth. Led by Cornplanter’s half brother, the soon-to-be-prophet Handsome Lake, the Senecas accused the child’s Delaware father of trying to kill Ji-wi through witchcraft to spare himself “the responsibility of matrimony.” Things got out of hand quickly. War nearly broke out between the rival nations. Negotiators were called in from Ohio and Canada. State militias in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York went on alert, and reports were made to the U.S Secretary of War.
Ji-wi recovered and the matter cooled, but not before serving as a testament to the power of witchcraft in the Iroquois world.
Rhetoric was one of the transcendent arts of the Six Nations. Their speechmakers were world renowned in their day, and the man we call Red Jacket (Sagoyewata) was the greatest known to history. Red Jacket’s familiar English name was likely due to his fondness for a British soldier’s coat. By the end of the eighteenth century, he had made a most powerful enemy.
Partly under Cornplanter’s guidance, the Seneca had backed the losing side in a couple of conflicts, most importantly the Revolution. Cornplanter also had a hand in land sales to the whites, and Red Jacket’s dagger-wit was letting no one forget. Cornplanter had the great Sagoyewata charged with witchcraft, possibly accused of making a curse or spouting witch fire at night.
It was far from the first time a powerful Iroquois was suspected of cutting corners to gain “extra” abilities. And word wizards—riddle masters, poets, and songmakers—in many world cultures were sensed to be magicians. It may also have been a political hatchet job orchestrated by Cornplanter’s half brother, the witch finder and soon-to-be-prophet Handsome Lake. It was a dangerous moment, and it came to trial in 1801 in a council meeting at Buffalo Creek, remembered in John Mix Stanley’s famous painting.
Red Jacket got up and gave it back—for three hours—along the Buffalo Creek. He was acquitted and never challenged again. It was presumed thereafter that his sorcery involved nothing but words.
KAUQUATAU
It was momentous when an Iroquois chief fell ill. His orenda was that of the nation, and when his illness seemed magical, it was presumed that only a powerful figure could have launched the curse. This would either be the chief of another community—which could lead to a war—or a mighty witch, possibly within the chief ’s own community.
In the spring of 1821, an important Seneca man fell ill at his home on the Buffalo Creek Reservation. He seemed to need no more than simple nursing. Kauquatau, a Seneca woman who was considered a healer of great power, was appointed to tend him. Everyone was shocked when her patient died. The community sensed witchcraft and blamed his magical nurse.
A delegation of chiefs approached Kauquatau and got ready to knock her off, but at the critical moment, the appointed executioner choked. According to rumor, the witch froze him and his fellows with an instant spell, possibly the evil eye. Chief Soonongise, commonly called Tom Jemmy, broke free of the spell, drew his knife, and slit the witch’s throat. They left her body where it lay, on the banks of Buffalo Creek, possibly near the foot of Michigan Street in Buffalo.
The whites of the region threw Tom Jemmy into jail. Red Jacket came to his trial, took a bit of scolding from the white prosecutor, then thundered back. The Seneca were a sovereign nation, he argued, and the execution was legal in their society. He reminded the white court of the American witch trials in Salem, even their culture’s treatment of their own Savior, one no Christian is allowed to forget. Convinced or maybe just cowed, the State Supreme Court let the prisoner go.
Witches’ bodies were considered so toxic that they were always specially handled. Kauquatau seems to have been buried under her house, one no Seneca would touch thereafter. The land was sold in the winter of 1842 to the Ebenezer religious society, a
nd shelter was so scarce that a family of German fundamentalists took over the witch’s collapsing cabin. Soon, they reported terrifying psychic eruptions. Only the intervention of group leader Christian Metz and the burning of the cabin put the matter to rest. Today, the witch’s presumed grave is still a conspicuous bare space in a white burial ground. The Old Main Cemetery in West Seneca is a regional legend, with many reports of the apparition of a “woman in white.”
The Stealer of Children’s Hearts
(Seneca, Late Nineteenth Century)
An old reservation woman was especially solicitous at the deaths of children. She consoled families and helped with funerals, and for a while it was appreciated. But late one night, a neighbor walking by her house saw a head-sized ball of light shoot out the chimney toward the graveyard. This was a witch light, in which some witches were thought to travel. “So,” she said to herself, “The old girl must be up to it.”
The next time a child died, the old woman came to help, taking a turn sitting with the corpse. But the woman who’d seen the witch light told her husband to keep an eye open around the body that night.
Sure enough, at midnight when the old woman thought she was alone, she took a knife, cut the heart out of the child, and left the house while everybody slept. The neighbor’s husband followed her. In a while, a ball of fire flew out the chimney of her cabin and streaked to the cemetery.
Frightened but game, the husband followed it to the old section in which many of the graves were sunken. He watched the woman dig and scrape for a while, put something into a hole, and cry out, “There! I’ve got you another. Now we’re friends again, and you’ll lead me to money.”
The neighbor’s husband took off as quickly and quietly as he could. He dove for cover and lay still when the light soared over him again, doubtless heading back to the witch’s chimney.
The next day he went to the dead child’s father and said what he’d seen. They found no marks on the body; the witch had magically healed the cut. But at the cemetery, they found the grave the witch had visited, with signs of fresh digging. They dug up the grave and found a corpse with a tender heart in its teeth and its shockingly fresh and contented face covered with blood. They ran for the witch doctor.
At twilight they watched him pour kerosene down the hole of the open grave, stuff it with rags, and set the mess afire. Soon red and black smoke poured out, and the leaves of the trees above it fluttered in the glow. Toward the end they thought they heard a horrid gibbering through the crackle of the flames, as if a vent to hell had opened in that grave.
They broke into the old woman’s house and found bloody rags on a table. They approached her at the funeral. “You’re nothing but a witch!” the bereaved father shouted. “Now I know why you go to funerals. Admit it!”
She burst out crying. “I never hurt the children. I gave their hearts to my friend after they were dead. My friend in the ground was my friend in life, and she makes luck for me now. I’d starve without her.”
“You should have told people you needed help,” said the father. “You can do without luck like that. Go home, and give up this business.”
A witch doctor made a charm above the heartless child so that she might rest in her grave. The witch woman died not long after, so maybe her time was due. And maybe only the power of the spirit witch had kept her alive that long.
The Swig of Flying
(Seneca, Early Twentieth Century)
One young Seneca man was visiting another at his cabin. The two were enjoying a summer evening and discussing a couple of ladies they hoped to know better. One of them mentioned the fine opportunity the evening’s dance at the Tonawanda Reservation Long House could provide, ten miles away. Neither of them had a car, and it would all be over by the time they could walk there. The host went to his cabin and brought back a reused wine bottle. “Take a sip of this,” he said.
Both took swigs of something that tasted like sweet wine. After putting the bottle away, the host trotted down the dirt road in the direction of the Long House. His guest followed. Soon both were running in great, effortless bounds. Thirty, forty, fifty feet. Tracts of road and trail flew under them with every stride. They tossed their heads and laughed. The sky above them hurtled by.
In only minutes, their airy courses glided to a walk. Lights and music came to them from the Long House and reminded them where they were heading. Just as they entered, the guest cleared his throat and coughed. He got a shock. Red light glowed in his cupped fingers as if a fire inside him shot light through his mouth and nostrils—one of the traditional giveaways of the Iroquois witch. Folks sure to know what it meant would be inside the Long House.
“I wouldn’t do that in there,” said the owner of the magic wine, and his guest nodded. They had a good time, but as the night came to an end, the guest was starting to wonder if he had been made into a witch for good. He was happy to find when he left the dance that the effects of the flying liquor were barely noticeable. His strongest cough made no more than a spark, and in another hour, he was all the way back to himself. Still, he stayed a long way away from that witch-Seneca ever after.
WITCH CHILDREN
Belgian ethnologist Frans Olbrechts (1899–1958) spent time among the Cherokee of North Carolina and reported on a strange custom in 1932. Some Cherokee families chose certain children, often twins, to be witches. They were brought up specially, undergoing a sort of life initiation supposed to endow them with supernatural abilities. The most critical period of this training was the first fortnight of life.
Infants so chosen were given no mother’s milk for their first twenty-four days. They were fed only the white liquid of corn hominy and only at night. No strangers were allowed to visit them.
Once this three-week cycle was over, the parents of these witch children never worried about them, even when they didn’t know where they were. It was presumed that the children could take care of themselves. Even in infancy, Olbrechts reported, “whatever they think happens.” Throughout their childhood, their constant playmates were the Little People, usually invisible to everyone else. By adulthood, they could fly through the air, project themselves underground, walk on sunbeams, and take the forms of certain animals.
Olbrechts wondered openly why anyone would want to add to the number of witches in the world. He sounded, though, as if he had become a believer. When these witch children grew up, he reported, “They are most annoying individuals. They always know what you think, and you could not possibly mislead them. What is worse, they can make you ill, dejected, love-sick, or dying merely by thinking of you in that condition.”
The Cherokee are linguistic cousins of the Iroquois and once lived near the Tuscarora in the Carolinas. When the Tuscarora came to New York, some Carolina customs surely came with them. Our confidants have been ominously quiet about practices among the Iroquois that might be related to this.
The Hair-Bone Token
(Seneca, Early Twentieth Century)
A strong young man got sick, and no one knew what was wrong. He saw doctors, took medicine, got rest, and got worse. By the time he quit work and went to stay with a friend, he was in bed most of the day.
A witch doctor from the Tonawanda Reservation made a potion of unspecified stuff and put a poultice of it on the sick man’s belly. Calling for quiet, he covered it carefully with rags and moss and sat back to wait. Those who touched the mass said it felt hot.
In a while, the sick man groaned, as if something was being drawn out. At a moment he seemed to be waiting for, the witch doctor grabbed the poultice, ran to the kitchen, and dumped it into the ash pan of the stove. He rummaged around in it and pulled out a small sharp bone wrapped in a white hair—a traditional witch token. Jaws dropped. The healer communed with the quirky object for a while and ventured that a certain neighborhood widow was behind the witching. Friends and family had a hard time with this. “She calls every day to see how he is,” said the woman of the house.
“Just see what happens ne
xt time she visits,” said the witch doctor, tucking the hair-bone token into the patient’s hand. His recovery wasn’t instant. He tossed and mumbled, covering himself with the sheet.
By the end of the next day, he was coherent and, as he held the bone-and-hair trinket, sounded as if he was narrating a film. “Here she comes. She’s leaving her house. Now she’s down by the well. Now she’s on the road . . . crossing the bridge, the gate, the path. She’s by the apple tree. Now she’s at the door.” There was a knock.
“I couldn’t sleep last night,” said the widow when the introductions were done. “I worried so much about poor Bill.”
“You’re the one!” the sick man yelled from under the blankets. “You leave me alone after this or I’ll kill you!” With apparent pity, the old woman took her leave.
That night the sufferer talked to the bony item as if spectators didn’t exist, chanting phrases and verses from a language none knew he’d ever learned. At the end, he wrapped one of his own hairs around the object and shouted, “Go back to her, and stick in her heart!” He threw it in the direction of the witch’s house. Everyone heard it tap against the wall. It vanished as if it had flown right through.
Iroquois Supernatural: Talking Animals and Medicine People Page 7