Jeff Z. Klein (Niagara Frontier Heritage Project)

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the sport of running was dominated by Indigenous men. Such famous runners as Tom Longboat (Onondaga), Jim Thorpe (Sac and Fox), Louis Tewanima (Hopi), Deerfoot-Bad Meat (Siksika), and Ellison Brown (Naragansett) were all winners of Olympic gold, the Boston Marathon, and other prestigious races of the era. But the first among them was a Seneca from the Cattaraugus Territory… the original Deerfoot.

William Wells Brown took part in a 1835 brawl in which black Buffalonians, he said, “assembled to protect a brother slave and his wife and child from being dragged back into slavery, which is far worse than death itself.”

Robert Creeley (1926-2005), one of the most important American postmodern poets of his era, belongs to the world. But he also was — and continues to be — a Buffalo treasure.

Mary Elizabeth Johnson Lord was a prominent Buffalo matron. “Kind to all animals herself, it pained her to see them abused,” as one local newspaper put it. Now, more than a century and a half later, if they could, they’d still be thanking her.

It’s right there on Fredonia’s village seal: a lamp with five small flames and the words “First gas well”---a shorthand way of laying claim to the proud distinction of being the first place anywhere in the world to be lighted by natural gas.

What Ely Samuel Parker was able to accomplish would have been remarkable for any man. But that Parker, a Tonawanda Seneca, accomplished all he did during a period of outright hatred against Native Americans is nothing short of incredible.

We’re not entirely sure how the Buffalo chicken wing was invented, but there are some good tales, and they tend to revolve around what happened one night in 1964 at the Anchor Bar.

The Blizzard of 1977 took 31 lives in Western New York and the Niagara Peninsula, long the most vicious, relentless and paralyzing storm in the living memory of a place often battered by brutal winter weather.

The 19th century is filled with tales of heroic rescues on the Great Lakes by the fearless lifesaving service, ships’ crews and brave civilians who risked their lives against impossible odds to save others. But among all of them, the extraordinary courage of one woman stands out---Abigail Becker, “the Angel of Long Point”.

When Manny Fried passed away at 97 in 2011, the Buffalo theater community lost a giant. But not just the theater community. Buffalo labor lost a giant too.