Native American Roots

Around 1790, Native Americans traveling from the headwaters of the Susquehanna River at Otsego Lake toward Tioga Point, Chenango Point, or Cayuga Lake passed in several hundred bark canoes, with four to six people in a canoe, including many women and children. Jesse McQuigg, who came here in 1788 at age five and later recalled the scene in 1851, remembered them approaching the village in a solid body with great regularity and uniform movement. Some were ornamented with feathers, jewels, silver broaches, white woolen blankets with heavy stripes, and broadcloth blankets, and the men carried rifles, tomahawks, scalping knives, pipes, and tobacco. They landed here, cooked and ate breakfast from near his father’s house to James McMaster’s house along an open plain, and he recalled them as good natured and there for peace, with devices cut into ornaments, worked into garments with porcupine quills, and painted on, while apparent leaders or chiefs stood among them and the women carried the bundles and did the work.

Owego, New York · United States