(from Child’s Gazetteer of Jefferson County, N. Y., pub. 1890, pp 9-13)

For the following account of the occupancy of this territory, before the advent of the white settlers, the publisher is indebted to D. S. Marvin, of Watertown, who has devoted much time to the study of aboriginal traces, etc., and is probably more competent to deal with the subject than any other resident of the county: --

During the opening scenes of the historic era the territory of Jefferson County was unoccupied by Indians, but held by the Oneidas and Onondagas as hunting-grounds; stealthily visited now and then by the St. Regis, Massasauga, and other Canadian tribes for like objects.

Dr. Hough, in his History published in 1854, mentions and describes some 20 mostly fortified Indian village sites, situated in all parts of the county. Dr. Hough’s accounts were mostly taken from Aboriginal Monuments of New York, by E. G. Squier, Smithsonian contributions. Record is also made in the 3d vol. of Documentary History of New York of others visited and described in 1802 by an early itinerant missionary. But out most exact knowledge comes from explorations since made of the remains that lie buried in the soils of the county. These show that the territory had been occupied by Indians for considerable but unknown periods of time, anterior to the discovery of America. The territory of the county was ceded in 1788 to the state, by the Oneidas, excepting some small individual grants. The document was called a treaty, but it was really a deed. One fact in this connection, bearing much significance as to Indian polity, has heretofore escaped comment. It is this: there are the signatures of four women attached to the instrument with those of the chiefs of the nation. This makes it evident that the Oneidas had already emerged from the stage of savageism and advanced to the middle stages of barbarism, for in the former or savage stage inheritance is entirely in the female line. Here we see the chiefs and females are associated to convey the title. Rights of hunting and fishing in the ceded territory were reserved by the Oneidas, and this right was maintained until the county was settled with whites by the Macomb purchase and its grantees, Le Ray de Chaumont, and others.

The descriptions of Indian remains given by the authors referred to, and others, like all accounts of early times, are no doubt in the main founded upon facts; but the immense size of some of the skeletons, the rows of double teeth of the warriors, the remains of giants that lie buried in the soils of the county, seem more or less mythical; no such remains are now found. Some years ago Drs. E. W. and F. G. Trowbridge, of Watertown, exhumed some 15 or more skeletons near Apling postoffice, on the old Talcott farm in Adams, one of the places described by Dr. Hough, and a typical fortified village site, where the lines of entrenchments made by the Indians in defending themselves against their enemies may still be clearly traced. These skeletons were the remains of men, women, and children, and instead of showing the giants of prehistoric times, they were of less robust habit and averaged smaller size than those of the Five Nations, and the generally faintly traced muscle attachments show inferior muscular development, and the whole osteology people of small stature. Their similar manner of entrenching for defensive purposes evinces that the other sites were constructed and occupied by the same tribe, at the same dates, and under like conditions. The considerable amounts of burned corn, both upon the sites occupied and in some of the graves, show them to have been to some extent an agricultural tribe. For the purposes of easy tillage all these villages were located upon sand-covered moraines, and other easily wrought soils. Considering the rude stone tools, with which they were constructed, many years of labor must have been expended upon these lines of defense; much strategical skill is displayed in locating the entrenchments, the lay of the ground was well studied, and advantage taken of the situation wherever natural defensive objects would be utilized, such as steep slopes, hills, rocks, and shores of streams. The shapes are not regular, but the result of local conditions; some have but one side entrenched, others have double lines, and the one on Black River Bay, located upon an open plateau, was round, and had double lines of entrenchments, with a lunette towards the water. Access to water was never left unstudied.

Their stone hoes and other agricultural implements evince skill and adaptation to the wants demanded; stone gouges for tapping maple trees and making sugar were common. This seems to have been quite a feature of their domestic economies. Their war-like implements seem to have been much less considered and elaborate than among the Iroquois, but the two have sometimes been so intermingled that we cannot now always be certain of which is local and which Iroquian. Many of their domestic utensils were made of pottery, and broken pottery is a distinguishing feature of all these village sites. A careful examination shows that this pottery was much used for cooking utensils, boiling sap, etc., by throwing in heated stones. The blackened inner surfaces still show charred food clinging to the broken fragments. Some of these vessels seem to have been of considerable size.

Pipes made of clay, of which figures 1, 2, and 3 are typical styles, were a distinguishing feature; those of conventionalized animal forms were common. A few steatite and slate pipes, of fanciful and massive structure, have been found, but their scarcity suggests that they were of other tribes. Tobacco was much cultivated to fill these numerous pipes.

The debris accumulating around these ancient encampments has been found, several feet thick, and there can be distinguished several different layers, showing interruptions in their occupation. In the lower layers the bones are very rotten; soon crumbling to pieces upon exposure to the air. In the upper layers some of the bone implements, consisting of spear points, bodkins, awls, and others of deer’s horns, seem as fresh as if made and used at the present day. Much more use was made of bone and horn utensils and implements than among tribes where chert and flint is more common in the rocks. The stone hatchets seem more battered and broken than among the Iroquois.

At Perch Lake, which seems to have been a favorite fishing station, there are two kinds of so-called mounds, one generally upon the islands, of small size and flat top, the other upon the ridges, or lateral moraines of the shores, the latter consisting of raised circles with dish-shaped centers, from one to two rods across and three or four feet high, some of the circles overlapping, perhaps hinting of the practice of polygamy; for, beyond a doubt, these are the remains of an earlier form of Indian dwellings in use before the square house of the Iroquois had been devised. The same form is still in use among the Digger Indians of California, and others of our less advanced tribes.

The same form and style of houses is hinted by the circles of toad-stools, growing from buried organic matter, upon the once strongly fortified mound, also spoken of by Squier and Hough, on the Gragg farm near the hamlet of Burrville. But it seems probable that this earlier form of dwelling was superseded by the later square house of the Iroquois, built mostly of wood and partly above ground, without chimneys, except a hole in the roof for exit of smoke, and as many, but partly separated, copartments as there were families to be accommodated, for there now remains none of the circles around the sites of other villages. Chimneys were entirely unknown to the Indians; indeed, they did not come into general use in civilized European states until the fourteenth century.

That the square house was a stage of evolutionary progress is made evident by a survey of the condition of the Iroquois. Whether the Indians were autochthonous or not would carry the discussion beyond the scope of the present inquiry. Judging from a careful survey of the facts it is evident that Indians had inhabited the territory under consideration from one to two thousand years. There were certainly no so-called mound builders here. But the remains show clearly that the tribe inhabiting the county was forced to defend themselves against some enemy. The local conditions seem to suggest that the tribe here was the Massasugas, or some contiguous Adirondack or Canadian Indians, and were driven from the county by the more progressive and powerful Iroquois, who had already advanced so far as to understand the value of combination and concert of action in war, and this is what is termed advancement from savage to barbarian life. Whether the square house was used by the tribe probably driven away is a question that cannot now be answered; the older round or dirt house, being much more deeply set, left a more lasting impression upon the soil. It is a notable fact that Lewis and Clark found the same style of square house in use in 1805 among the Oregon Indians, and on the Pacific, showing that the confederated and powerful Iroquois were not the only tribes that had advanced by natural laws from a lower to a stage of development before the historic period came in.

There may have been occasional giants among the Indians, for they appear among both ancient and modern nations occasionally, but are more common in modern than ancient times, --a natural result of civilization in ameliorating the conditions for development.

The Oneidas, who sometimes spent their summers here in hunting, were perhaps the most friendly to the whites, also the most progressive tribe of the Iroquian confederacy. Indeed the whole Six Nations had developed so far as to comprehend and adopt the advantages of strong combinations, thereby placing themselves upon a higher plane than other tribes outside of their confederacy, who showed less capacity for such development an combination. This is made evident when we consider the territory and tribes they had conquered and made tributary to themselves before the settlement of the country by white men. Their sway already extended beyond the lakes and St. Lawrence, westward to the Mississippi, southward to Georgia, eastward to the Hudson and ocean. But unfortunately for the confederation the clash of arms caused by the conquests of the whites resulted in arrest of progress, if not in actual revertion, and their tenacious retention of the old tribal laws and relations now retards and prevents civilization.