The Seneca Indians, “Keepers of the Western Door,” occupied this area since the formation of the Iroquois confederacy about 1550. The most numerous and most warlike of the Six Nations, they for a time dominated tribes northward into Canada and southward into Pennsylvania. Although the Confederacy was allied with the English, the Senecas turned against them in Pontiac’s uprising in 1763. During the Revolution they sided with the British and joined in Tory raids on the New York frontier. For this they were punished and driven back by the Sullivan-Clinton Expedition of 1779. Many settled in Canada after the Revolution, but Chief Cornplanter, born near here, signed the Treaty of Fort Stanwix in 1784, making peace with the United States and accepting a reservation of land. Cornplanter’s half-brother, Handsome Lake, became the prophet of a regenerated Indian religion that still has many followers. In 1793 the Holland Land Company purchased all of western New York from a line eight miles west of here. The region was often stirred by religious and social ferments, such as the Anti-Masonic furor following the disappearance of William Morgan in 1826, and small industries and diversified agriculture are basic to the area’s economy.