Until the mid-1770s, there was a thriving Native agricultural and trading town here – Oaquaga – on a bend in the upper Susquehanna River, in the southern tier of present-day New York State.
It was likely established in the centuries after the last glacial age, by the ancient ancestors of the five peoples who combined into – between 1100 and 1500 CE – what is now the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. The earliest French missionaries called them the Iroquois, tribes connected by language, custom and religion, and known – from east to west – as the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca.
The first Europeans to document Oaquaga in the 1700s described the town as four settlements strung along both banks of river. The people lived in traditional Haudenosaunee longhouses, and cultivated thousands of acres where they grew corn, beans, squash, peas, and fruit. With its proximity to the Delaware, the other major river running south out of these forested hills – and with easy passes east and west – Oaquaga was the dominant trading place for the entire region.
The town’s people were predominantly Oneida. But Oaquaga was also home to Tuscarora refugees from genocidal wars in the present-day Carolinas, who joined the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, setting up a pattern to follow as European settlers brought war, disease, and Christianity, and upended established societies up and down the eastern third of the continent. Mahicans came to Oaquaga next, driven from the mountains of present-day Massachusetts, then Mohawks, from settler violence to the immediate northeast.
Oaquaga swelled with these refugees, along with their Haudenosaunee cousins from the north and west (Onondaga, Seneca, Cayuga); from as far west as present-day Ohio (Shawnee); and from as far south as present-day Maryland (Nanticoke). They all came to trade and many stayed. As a result, by the time of first contact Oaquaga was a broad, multi-lingual cultural mix, what the historic sign here and the history books call a “melting pot.” It was a Marrakesh of the aboriginal northern woodlands, enabled by the Gayanesshagowa, or Great Law Peace of the Haudenosaunee.
Established in what historians believe was 1190 CE, the Gayanesshagowa was a working blueprint for a multi-tribal society, and would serve as the working model for American representative government 597 years later. Under the Great Law of Peace, none of the five – and eventually six, with the Tuscarora – peoples of the Confederacy had ever gone to war with each other. They settled territorial and other disputes with the war game of lacrosse, which they invented and called “the Creator’s Game.”
Today, next to the Susquehanna River at the site of Oaquaga, sit these two signs.
The first sign claims that the “earliest inhabitants…were here more than 400 years ago,” based on a map drawn by the Dutch in 1614. The sign looks newer than 2014, which would explain the math, if not the reckoning of who counts as an “inhabitant.”
The sign does go on to acknowledge that this was “the land of the Oneida” and refers to “settlements” and “villages.” Apparently, then, the people who lived, farmed, hunted, fished, traded, and raised their families here for all those centuries prior to their “discovery” by the Dutch did not count as “inhabitants.”
The sign also does not mention what happened to Oaquaga, or to those “non-inhabitants” who planted and harvested those thousands of acres of fields and orchards.
The second sign – a New York State historic marker which focuses on the engineering of the bridge spanning the river – does mention what happened: “an Iroquois camp destroyed in 1778 was nearby.”
Oaquaga was certainly not a “camp,” but it was destroyed in 1778.
War Comes to Oaquaga
In the serial wars between the French and the British in the 1700s, and then the war for white independence from Great Britain, the town of Oaquaga was plunged into its own version of the civil war raging between the Colonists loyal to the British and those who rebelled. Across the region, the Haudenosaunee peoples were forced to take sides, based on competing claims on their souls.
Between 1748 and 1777, two dozen Christian missionaries, teachers, and interpreters had passed through Oaquaga. Based on their infiltrations elsewhere in the region, the Presbyterian and Congregationalist missionaries laid claim to the Oneida and Tuscarora; they in turn demanded political and military allegiance to the Colonists. Their rival Anglican/Church of England missionaries laid claim to the Mohawk and Onondaga, and in turn demanded allegiance to the British.
Oaquaga was torn down the middle. Eternal life or eternal damnation of their souls, it was drummed into them by both, hung in the balance. Neighbors turned on neighbors, as had the whites all around them. What we have been taught about the “American Revolution” was first and foremost a civil war, based on social class and economic status, and the people of Oaquaga – which for centuries had lived under the Great Law of Peace – were forced to choose.
Because of their greater numbers and successful alliance with the British against the French in the earlier wars, the broader Haudenosaunee Confederacy sided with the British, led by war leader Joseph Brant and the Mohawk. When the political consensus among the Colonists chose rebellion in 1776, the Haudenosaunee chose again to side with the British, who promised they could keep their land. The Colonists, as they were witnessing every day, would continue to steal more of it, and with the British gone would surely steal it all. For the same reasons it served as a trading hub, Oaquaga became a staging area for Joseph Brant and his warriors for raids on both encroaching Colonists and the Continental Army.
The resident Oneida, however, had succumbed to the Congregationalists and Presbyterians, several of whom had mastered their language and trained many of their own people as preachers. They were the quintessential “praying Indians” – as the British, French, and Colonists had been calling them since the war of extermination in New England in the 1670s – and were politically pliable. The inevitable civil war in Oaquaga followed, and many of the “praying” Oneida and Tuscarora fled north. Many others hunkered down, hoping to be spared by one side for their political loyalty and Christianity, and by the other for their kinship under the Great Law of Peace.
By 1778, none of that mattered to General George Washington.
Because Oaquaga was known to be harboring Brant and his warriors, he ordered the Continental Army to destroy the town, its inhabitants, and all of its food supplies.
The Army burned every structure to the ground, save the one house occupied by the Oneida who served as the emissary to the Colonists, and slaughtered everyone who had not fled. Soldiers burned the orchards, razed every field they could, and mowed down those they could not. Even though an estimated half the inhabitants of Oaquaga had sided with the Colonists against the British, none were spared.
One eyewitness recounts that many had run out into the cornfields to hide. As the soldiers mowed the fields, they found several children hiding among the rows. They killed them not with musket fire, but by “running them through with bayonets and holding them up to see how they would twist and turn.”
The message had been sent: no one would be spared. Enemy combatants, non-combatant “praying Indians,” women, children, all of them were targets. The Army that had prevailed in the Colonists’ own civil war would bring down the wrath of this new Continental Army upon whole towns. The slaughter in Oaquaga set the stage for a wholesale, equally brutal, and every bit as sadistic sweep through Haudenosaunee country one year later, also ordered by Washington.
Among the countless casualties was the Gayanesshagowa, the Great Law of Peace, which had stood for 600 years; in Oaquaga, the Haudenosaunee had gone to war with each other.
After the destruction of Oaquaga, the few survivors among the Mohawk fled north to present-day Canada, where their descendants live today on reserves. The survivors among the Oneida fled north to a reservation where their descendants still live. The survivors among the Onondaga live on a sliver of a reservation outside present-day Syracuse, an hour north of Oaquaga, once the Marrakesh of the northern woodlands, a trading and agricultural town that had been inhabited by their ancestors for thousands of years.
Haudenosaunee Rising
On those reserves and reservations, the descendants of the Haudensaunee have reinstated Gayanesshagowa, the Great Law of Peace, centering it in their cultural restorations. The Law is commemorated in the design of their national flag: a field of purple with five white figures for the five original tribes – the colors and design of wampum trading belts; the figure in the middle represents the Onondaga, on whose land the Gayanesshagowa was negotiated under the original Tree of Peace 834 years ago. Under this tree is where all the tribes came together to “bury their war hatchets.”
Today, the Haudensaunee can also now be seen on the world stage in the Creator’s Game – lacrosse, the war game their ancestors invented – as a sovereign nation. They will compete in the first ever Olympic lacrosse competition at the 2028 Summer Olympics in present-day Los Angeles.
When they enter the stadium during the opening and closing ceremonies, they will be marching under their nation’s purple and white flag.
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