Cornplanter’s Cemetery

When I lived up there in that glorious place, I’d heard for years that the old Seneca chief Cornplanter was buried in the northernmost reaches of the Allegheny National Forest.  Cornplanter lived a long and storied life—to approximately 100 years of age.  He first appeared on the scene in the French and Indian War of the 1750s, remained prominent during the Revolution, and settled into happy obscurity till his death in the early 1800s.

Family legend once had it that we were part Seneca Indian.  I liked that belief.  It was somehow comforting.  It made me believe that my love of the great North Woods of Pennsylvania was somehow an element of racial memory.  But my wife got me a DNA test for Christmas, 2019, and it showed no Native American ancestry at all.  The Seneca People, whose remaining reservation land is just a few feet across the border in New York State, have decorated the old chief’s grave in traditional relics.

Here’s how the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania describes Cornplanter on the official grave marker.  I’d always thought that the USA had broken its treaty with the Seneca by confiscating their lands in Pennsylvania and flooding their settlement to create Kinzua Dam and reservoir—in the 1960s.  But documents I’ve read on this excursion state that the treaty granted this land not to the Seneca People, but only to the descendants of Cornplanter, all of whom had died off by the mid-1950s.  (Most were killed by the Spanish Flu Epidemic of 1918.).  And so, the US was justified in its decision to move the old Cornplanter Cemetery to higher ground and to flood his settlement.  Is this a lot of white supremacist hooey, or is it right?

“The Rev. Asher Bliss.”  What a great name.  He was a white missionary to the Cornplanter settlement.  Many of the Seneca People on the Pennsylvania side of the line converted to Presbyterianism, despite the best efforts of Cornplanter’s older brother, Handsome Lake—a revivalist and reformer of Seneca religion.  If I’d had a son, Asher might have been a good name for him.  But I’ve been blessed with daughters only, and their names are good, too.

Oh, Chief Cornplanter, the snow is melting on your grave.  It’s 45 degrees in northernmost Pennsylvania in late January!  What we white folk have done to this world is yet to be discovered.  It’ll be unwrapped not like a present, but like a grisly mummy’s bandages, like the rotting wooden caskets that were moved up from your now-flooded valley.  I wish it could be otherwise.  But you, too, lived in trying times, times when the world you knew was drawing to its close.  Visit us with wisdom and with poise to face the days ahead!