Onondowahgah

The Seneca, known in their own language as Onondowahgah, or People of the Great Hill, trace their origin in tradition to a time when two men returning from a hunting trip found a small brightly colored serpent floating on a leaf, carried it home in their canoe, and inspired the town to feed it. The snake grew from eating insects and mice to craving rabbits, deer, and bear, and when the people could no longer sustain it, it burst from its pen and began eating them. After consuming the entire town, it hunted from town to town, spreading terror and death, until only the people living on a great hill overlooking Canandaigua Lake remained. There, a boy and a girl were told in a dream to make a bow of white pine, a string from the girl's hair, and a dogwood arrow tipped with a pure white arrowhead, and with these they killed the serpent. As it died, its body rolled down the hill into Canandaigua Lake, disgorging human skulls; tradition holds that no trees have grown where it rolled and that the round stones at the bottom of the lake are those skulls. The boy and girl, the last survivors, became the first People of the Great Hill and the founders of the Seneca Nation.

Victor, New York · United States