Awhile later, the scene was repeated. “What did you see this time?” said Quick.
“An eagle soaring above us,” said the brave.
Quick kept his own gun at the waist, casually trained on his companion. “Why don’t you walk ahead of me this time.”
They came to a grove even more sheltered than the rest, and Quick cocked the hammer. “So, my deceitful friend,” he said. “Tell me what you see now.”
“The spirit world,” said the brave, stepping in front of the barrel and standing tall.
One afternoon in the 1980s, white teacher John Newton was walking on the Onondaga Reservation with some of his young students. A pickup truck went caterwauling by them on a bumpy dirt road. As it passed, he was startled to see a couple of young men bouncing precariously in the back, legs hanging over the tailgate. “Boy, they ought to be careful,” said Newton. By their lack of reaction, his students let on that it wasn’t such a big deal.
Newton couldn’t understand this. He may even have raised his voice. “Well—somebody could get killed! Doesn’t that matter to you?”
One of the boys shrugged and summed up the attitude of the others. “He’ll just go into the spirit world a little early.”
I FEEL MY FRIENDS HERE
The notion of acculturating the Native Americans goes back to George Washington’s administration. It was presumed that progress was the natural goal of societies, and that the proper gift to Native Americans was what the whites would have wanted for themselves: religion, education, jobs, and life skills—in short, more white medicine. Indian schools were established across the United States.
Most of them in the East were orphanages for the care and education of children orphaned because of the collapse in their societies brought about by white incursions. Some in the West were shock military schools intended to modify ancient attitudes by reworking a single generation.
Supported by Baltimore banker Philip E. Thomas (1776–1861), Quaker missionaries Asher Wright and his wife, Laura Maria (1809–1886), built a combined school and orphanage on the Cattaraugus Reservation in 1856. Tycoon William Pryor Letchworth (1823–1910) gave a financial hand in 1875, and by 1898, the Thomas Asylum for Orphan and Destitute Indians came under the supervision of the state’s Department of Social Welfare. That’s when most of the buildings we see today were constructed.
Like many a college campus of the day, they were Georgian Revival redbrick structures, with appealing cornices, dentils, and cartouches, most featuring Native American images with classical styling. Today, a handful of the buildings stand, and probably, in some form, the tunnels and passages that connected them all. By 1905, it was known as the Thomas Indian School.
By 1956, the centralization of New York schools was under way, and the Thomas, as it was called, closed. The site and some structures did a five-year spell as part of the Gowanda State Hospital, an insane asylum. Decline, dilapidation, and many demolitions followed.
The experience of these Indian schools was traumatic enough—away from nature, language, villages, families, play. The discipline of the era would qualify today as abuse. These “forgotten” children returned to their villages as adults, often neither fully white nor Native—“neither wolf nor dog” as the Seneca say—and unable to deal with the world.
Over the years, we’ve interviewed old-timers who remembered family members traumatized by their years with the schools. Our Tuscarora friend Jay Claus had an uncle who had never been right, due, Claus was sure, to his experiences at the Thomas.
No wonder the Thomas is haunted. We know a graveyard was here, probably under the whole campus. Skeletons were discovered in 1900 during excavations for new construction. That should have told them something.
Only a couple of the original Thomas buildings still stand, and the most prominent is the former infirmary, right out there on Route 438 across from the library. Today the site is used for office space by the Seneca Nation, but no one likes to be in it at night. We know many a Seneca who lists it as a top haunt in the region.
Seneca librarian Pam Bowen tells the story of a Cattaraugus woman doing some late-night painting on the top floor. Just after her male colleague ducked out for an errand, she heard the old-time elevator kick in ominously and start clattering up. She didn’t wait to see what would come out the door. She bolted down the stairwell and waited outside for her partner.
One old lad we interviewed used to drop in on the place whenever he was in the area and walk around mournfully near the resting places of his chums. Many had died during their time at the Thomas, and some were buried, according to him, in “lost” graves. The place was, to him, horrible, but the way old warriors revisit battlefields, he went back now and then to honor the fallen. “I feel my friends here,” he said.
The Ghost Talker
In the 1970s, Mad Bear and friends were out viewing rock carvings when their young guide found a magnificent, ancient flint point. He offered it to Mad Bear. “You found it,” said Mad Bear. “There must be a reason.” The boy put it in his pocket.
“Whoa!” said Mad Bear. “You can’t take it like that. Either put it back where you found it or make some kind of offering. If you can’t offer something, make a pledge.”
The lad held the arrowhead up to the sun for a minute and put it in his pocket. “I made a pledge,” he said, grinning. “I promised the Great Spirit I’d quit drinking.”
Mad Bear cut him off. “A pledge is sacred,” he said. “You’ve got to mean it.”
A few days later, Mad Bear called his friends together to tell them that the young man who had taken them to the rocks was dead, killed by the stroke of a knife. Few thought it would take Mad Bear long to find the killer. He went to the boy’s family.
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