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Apples on the Border: Orchards and the Contest for the Great Lakes
by
William Kerrigan
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In the fall of 1791 Elkanah Watson toured western New York, searching for real-estate opportunities. Ten years earlier there had been few white settlements in this region; it was the heart of Iroquois country. But the American Revolution had shattered the power of the Six Nations. The war had forced many Iroquois to flee to Canada; others remained in New York, but they found themselves eking out a living on bounded treaty lands—reservations that would continue to shrink in size during the next several decades as white settlers' demand for these lands increased. Attempting to take full advantage of this situation, Watson had come to the region intent on making a fortune speculating in land, which he expected would soon fill up with white settlers. |
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While searching for desirable land on an early September morning, Watson discovered evidence of the recent war. Climbing into a small boat in Geneva, New York, he had crossed Seneca Lake to the site of a former Seneca Indian village. "We pitched our tent at Apple-town, a fine tract of land, formerly the headquarters of the Seneca nation. It contains extensive orchards of scattering old trees, the only fruit trees in the country." Watson could find no sign of the Seneca in or around Apple-town, but all about him lay evidence of the disaster which had befallen them. "Many of the trees are girdled, and marks of the destructive axe of the soldiery are yet to be seen in every direction. The Senecas were, formerly, a powerful nation," Watson asserted, but "not a vestige [of the Seneca nation] is now to be seen in this vicinity." Instead, the site of the former Seneca capital was rapidly filling up with white settlers, and "we were astonished to see one hundred and fifty people collected at a meeting here. This is a prelude to the assembling of thousands, who are destined shortly to possess these fertile regions."1 |
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The following year Maj. William McMahon crossed into the Ohio Country and traveled down the Tuscarawas River Valley. Gen. Anthony Wayne had sent him on a scouting mission to assess Indian strength in the region. Although white settlers were already pouring into the Ohio Country in 1792, the fertile bottomlands of the Tuscarawas were still Indian country, and violence between the Native Americans who resided there and the encroaching whites was escalating. In the previous three years, two attempts to crush Indian resistance to white settlement in the region had been foiled by Indian forces. Traveling down the Tuscarawas River in the late summer of 1792, McMahon encountered the remains of three abandoned Moravian Delaware settlements at Schoenbrunn, Gnadenhutten, and Salem. He noted that "peach trees at the three places bore an abundance of peaches, but nearly all the branches had been broken down by bears." At Gnadenhutten, where Scots-Irish frontiersmen had methodically murdered ninety Delaware converts in cold blood just ten years earlier, McMahon discovered "the best apples he had ever tasted."2 |
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Two years later, Anthony Wayne would launch the third invasion of the Ohio Country. One week before the decisive Battle of Fallen Timbers, Wayne stopped at the confluence of the Maumee and the Au Glaize rivers to regroup and establish Fort Defiance. The place where these rivers came together was also the site of a large Wyandot Indian village, and Wayne noted that the cornfields planted there seemed to stretch on forever, but also that there were extensive peach and apple orchards at the location.3 |
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