When we hear about the founding of Buffalo, we usually hear about Joseph "Black Joe" Hodge, Cornelius Winney, Captain William Johnston, Martin Middaugh or Ezekiel Lane---all fascinating men who settled here in the late 1780s or early 1790s. But they were all settlers or “Indian traders”---i.e., non-Indigenous merchants living among the Senecas already inhabiting the banks of Buffalo Creek.
Fact is, those Senecas and other Indigenous people already living here were the first Buffalonians. Yet they themselves had arrived only a few years before… during the harsh winter of 1779-80. For nearly a century and a quarter before then, nobody lived where Buffalo stands today… it was too cold, too windswept, too poor a location for a village of any kind. The Senecas had taken the land from its earlier inhabitants, the Erie, Neutral and Wenro peoples, each of whom the Senecas wiped out by 1656 during the Beaver Wars. But ever since they used it only as hunting and fishing grounds, preferring to live in their traditional homeland along the Genesee River.
Then came the American Revolution. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy split, with four of the Six Nations backing the British (the Mohawk, Seneca, Onondaga and Cayuga) and two backing the rebels (the Oneida and Tuscarora). The British allies, mainly Mohawks and Senecas operating out of Fort Niagara, conducted raids on American positions and settlements. On two occasions in 1778 they perpetrated horrific atrocities: at Wyoming Valley in northeastern Pennsylvania, they slaughtered American wounded and prisoners, and at Cherry Valley, near Oneonta, N.Y., they massacred dozens of civilian noncombatants. The American response came a year later, in the form of the Sullivan Expedition---a scorched-earth military campaign undertaken to destroy the Seneca homeland… nothing less, as George Washington wrote to Gen. Sullivan, than “the total destruction and devastation of their settlements and the capture of as many prisoners of every age and sex as possible. It will be essential to ruin their crops now in the ground and prevent their planting more.”
By November 1779, the Sullivan Expedition had achieved its awful goals: more than 40 Seneca towns were destroyed, along with hundreds of thousands of bushels of stored food (from that point on, the Senecas called Washington Hanödaga:yas, “Town Destroyer”). Several thousand Haudenosaunee refugees were forced to flee. With winter closing in, they gathered at Fort Niagara, where they knew they’d be safe from the Americans. The inside of the fort filled quickly, forcing many refugees to camp outside the ramparts.
The winter of 1779-80 turned out to be one of the harshest and coldest of the 18th century. The Seneca matriarch Mary Jemison remembered it as an incredibly brutal period of freezing and mass starvation for her people:
The snow fell about five feet deep, and remained so for a long time, and the weather was extremely cold; so much so indeed, that almost all the game upon which the Indians depended for subsistence, perished, and reduced them almost to a state of starvation through that and three or four succeeding years. When the snow melted in the spring, deer were found dead upon the ground in vast numbers; and other animals, of every description, perished from the cold also, and were found dead, in multitudes. Many of our people barely escaped with their lives, and some actually died of hunger and freezing.
At the end of that horrible winter of disease and starvation, the British—struggling to feed the 5,000 Native refugees—ordered them to disperse and plant crops. That May, the Senecas set up a village of about 1,000 souls at Buffalo Creek.
The Senecas knew the locale as Došowëh, the Place of the Basswoods … a swampy, windswept, mosquito-plagued place that had not played host to a permanent settlement since the vanished heyday of the Erie nation some 150 years earlier. But as inhospitable as it seemed, Buffalo Creek provided a safe haven for the Natives who settled there---Seneca and other Haudenosaunee, Delaware, Mississauga and others. Under the protective umbrella of several nearby British military installations, its Indigenous inhabitants thrived.
Within four or five years, Indian traders like Hodge, Winney, etc. had moved in… and Buffalo, from its humble origins as a refugee camp, was well on its way to becoming the city we know today.
Cast (in order of appearance):
British officer: Karl-Eric Reif
British commander: Mike Dugan
Native man: Billy Logan
Native woman: Sarah R. Greene
Narrator: Susan Banks
Script: Jeff Z. Klein
Sound recording: Charles Gilbert
Sound editing: Micheal Peters
Piano theme: Excerpt from “Buffalo City Guards Parade March,” by Francis Johnson (1839)
Performed by Aaron Dai
Produced by the Niagara Frontier Heritage Project
Associate producer: Karl-Eric Reif
Webpage written by Jeff Z. Klein (Niagara Frontier Heritage Project)
Special thanks to:
Kathryn Larsen, vice president, content distribution, Buffalo Toronto Public Media
S.J. Velasquez, director of audio strategy, Buffalo Toronto Public Media
Jerry Urban, senior radio broadcast engineer, Buffalo Toronto Public Media
Councilmember Mitch Nowakowski and the Buffalo Common Council for their generous support