On the west side of River Street near the estate called Greencrest and at the edge of Cooper Park is a stone wall that’s gone through a lot of changes. For most of the twentieth century, it was smooth. By the 1960s, the stones bulged toward the street, as if the wall were buckling—or something inside was trying to get out. Some Cooperstonians got curious, broke through the wall, and found a skeleton, with pipes, weapons, and artifacts. Most presumed it the burial of a Mohawk chief, though he was just as likely to have been an Oneida. Otsego Lake is the boundary between their former territories, and Cooperstown roots it like the dot of an exclamation point. This burial is on the Oneida side of the town.
The townsfolk could have saved themselves the trouble if they had read Ralph Birdsall’s (1871–1918) 1917 history. The skeleton was found in the late 1700s by Judge William Cooper (1754–1809), father of the Leatherstocking Tales author. The novelist’s grandson, also named James Fenimore Cooper, told this tale to folklorist Harold W. Thompson (1891–1964). How the body got into a wall in the first place is left to conjecture.
It seems likely that the wall’s first builders may have found the old chief exactly where he was and decided to keep him near his original spot by putting him in the wall. Many thinner walls fell around the bones, and a stronger one was made. It lasted into the Woodstock era and merely buckled.
In local tradition, the buried chief ’s posthumous kicking expressed his fury at the white takeover of his lands. Other supernatural theories involve a weeping skeleton whose saline tears undermined the wall and a thrashing one trying to get a bit of leg room. This guy was folded close: in a virtual squat, knees to chin, arms round his shins.
Not the least of the controversy is the whereabouts of the chief ’s remains today. Did they put him back, with a little repositioning, and reform the wall? Did they sell the artifacts? Did they give the bones to a local museum? Heaven help whoever holds them, if his or her heart isn’t pure. At least the wall is still behaving.
THE FIVE GHOSTS OF RED JACKET
(Seneca Country)
The Six Nations were not metallurgists, painters, city builders, or engineers. Their distinctive arts were those natural to their place and lifestyle, those of mind and word: storytelling, song making, and speech giving. They were particularly famous for their orators, and the man we call Red Jacket was one of the greatest. When he was born near Keuka Lake in 1750, Iroquois lifestyle and landscape were much as they had been for a thousand years. When he died at Buffalo in 1830, he was afraid for Native American survival.
The name Red Jacket likely comes from the British officer’s coat he often wore. His birth name Otetiani is often said to mean “always on guard.” By the time he stood with the Six Nations counselors he was Sagoyewata. That could mean “he keeps them awake,” but it’s also been taken as “he can’t shut up.” No translation implies that he withheld his opinion.
Red Jacket’s monument at Forest Lawn, Buffalo
Many whites considered Red Jacket a genius, an orator ranking with Cicero and Demosthenes. He campaigned against selling land to whites and taking alcohol from them. He caught the liquid plague himself, and most of the comical episodes in his file come from it. George Washington’s silver medal on his chest did sobriety no favors, making Red Jacket one of the few Native Americans allowed in a white pub. He was at the least a great wit, who, even through the language barrier, came up with some of the best lines of the day.
All kinds of invective get thrown around in political squabbles, and Red Jacket had his share of them. One image of him that’s stuck in history is coward. No one who called out Joseph Brant and Cornplanter could have been a chicken. Eyewitnesses described Red Jacket leading a devastating guerilla operation at the 1813 Battle of Chippewa. Some Iroquois maintain that Red Jacket founded a deadly Seneca assassins’ cult, the Red Tips, named for the red-tailed hawk, little brother of the eagle. (The Mohawk correspondents are the Black Hand. They choke you in the night and leave only sooty marks on your throat.) Red Jacket a coward? That’s silly on the face of it. He was Seneca.
In his last years, Red Jacket was filled with gratitude to the Great Spirit for his days on earth. Hoping to honor him with the ceremony of one last hunt, he plunged into the Genesee Valley, probably in Livingston County. He was expecting the old-growth forest he remembered, streaked with footpaths and dotted with villages. Before long, he came to a fence and saw cleared land and whites plowing. He went off in a different direction and came to another fence and another farmer’s field. He sat down on the trail and sobbed.
After a round of farewells to friends and relatives, Red Jacket died at Buffalo Creek in 1830, “exulting that the Great Spirit had made him an Indian” and dreading a white burial. His Christian wife, however, ruled his rites. He was originally buried near many Seneca luminaries in the Old Indian Graveyard at Buffum Street in Buffalo, but his remains did a spell in a cherry wood chest on the Cattaraugus Reservation until they were reinterred—allegedly—in 1884 at Buffalo’s Forest Lawn Cemetery, resting now by a fine martial monument, tomahawk in hand.
Some Seneca believe that Red Jacket got his wish and that the bones under the monument are not his.
