Witch or not, John was a seer. He dreamed that he killed his brother Thomas and forfeited his own life. He told this to an old sage called the Black Chief, who advised him to watch his temper. The dream turned out to be prophetic.
On the first of July 1811, Thomas came to his mother’s house and encountered brother John. A quarrel commenced. John grabbed Thomas by the hair, dragged him out, killed him with a tomahawk, and fled to Caneadea, New York. His mother found Thomas on her doorstep. It was a bitter loss to the community. Though he enjoyed a drink, the fifty-two-year-old Thomas was a model Seneca. The council weighed the matter but decided that this was just a fight, a simple brawl that got out of hand.
Mary’s youngest boy, Jesse, was thought the finest of her sons by a long shot. At twenty-eight, he was the main support of his widowed mother and a very “white” Indian in manners, dress, and work. Mary ordered him to steer clear of brother John, in whom, according to Doctor Seaver, something had incited “so great a degree of envy that nothing short of death would satisfy it.”
In the spring of 1812, Robert Whaley of Castile sold a raft before it was built. The planks to be used for it were at the top of a hill on the banks of the Genesee, and he needed extra hands to get them to river level. Unaware of the family tension, Whaley recruited a crew that included Mary’s son-in-law George Chongo and both of her feuding sons.
Whiskey joined the work and stayed when it was over. A fight broke out between Jesse and George Chongo. Hiokatoo’s youngest son pounded his brother-in-law and started heading home. At that point, brother John pulled a knife and stood before the white raft builder, face lit with a demonic intensity. “Jogo!” he snarled. “Get lost!” Whaley made tracks.
“So, you want more whiskey and more fighting,” said Jesse, trying to take away the knife. The pair clinched and tussled, and Jesse was struck repeatedly. “Brother, you have killed me!” he cried out. Any one of his eighteen wounds could have been mortal.
The bravest thing John did in his whole life was to tell his mother what he had done. There was no legal consequence to this deed, either, probably looking to the council like no more than a drunken knife fight. But John was a pariah—till people needed medicine.
In the spring of 1817, John Jemison went to Buffalo to work as a healer. He came back to Mount Morris in midsummer just after the Great Slide of the Genesee. He took a look at the hillside that had collapsed in that event and considered it a sign of his own death. In a couple of days, he fell to drinking on nearby Squakie Hill with three Seneca, two remembered only as Doctor and Jack, and a third from Allegany.
In the afternoon, a quarrel started, and the two local Seneca decided to kill John Jemison. He may have threatened to witch them, and the pair dared not let him get a head start. As the party broke up, the two conspirators hauled John Jemison off his horse, hit him with a rock, and finished him with an axe. He was fifty-four when he died at the end of June 1817 and was given a white funeral.
Blood feuds and revenge figured in preindustrial life everywhere, but among the Iroquois, a death didn’t always merit a death. If someone killed a member of a rival clan and sent an offering, usually white wampum (a symbolic beaded sash), to the victim’s family, the quarrel was over—if it was accepted. This the two murderers tried. Mary Jemison refused. She told the council that she didn’t want the pair harmed; she just never wanted to see them again. This meant banishment from their families, their villages, and their ancestral lands.
Doctor and Jack ended up wandering Squakie Hill, despised, despising even themselves. Troubled by dreams and visions, they soon took their own lives.
The Seneca always considered the hill haunted because of Jemison’s death there, and his revenge could be said to have come from the spirit world. Does his influence linger? White campers today report all kinds of apparitions about Squakie Hill. Is he behind the psychic play, still stalking the shades of his murderers?
TWO SENECA WITCH TRIALS
Son of a white trader and a Seneca maid, Garyanwaga, or Cornplanter, became a chief among the Seneca. His name turned blood cold in colonial hearts during the frontier wars, like those of Mohawk Joseph Brant and the white Loyalist ranger John Butler (1728–1796). Cornplanter was surely with those two at the infamous Cherry Valley, New York, massacre. He fought against the 1779 counterstroke at Sullivan’s Hill until the day was lost.
Cornplanter was more than just a fighter. In 1790, he spoke nobly to George Washington on behalf of all Native Americans. One of the tracts given to the Seneca after the Revolution is still largely in their possession: the Allegany Reservation, to which Cornplanter and many Seneca retired after the Revolution.
But things didn’t stay peaceful. The young U.S. government relocated a party of Munsees/Delawares to the Allegany, not seeming to understand that they and the Seneca were traditional enemies. Tension bloomed into trouble.
Cornplanter’s daughter Ji-wi fell ill in 1800 after giving birth. Led by Cornplanter’s half brother, the soon-to-be-prophet Handsome Lake, the Senecas accused the child’s Delaware father of trying to kill Ji-wi through witchcraft to spare himself “the responsibility of matrimony.” Things got out of hand quickly. War nearly broke out between the rival nations. Negotiators were called in from Ohio and Canada. State militias in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York went on alert, and reports were made to the U.S Secretary of War.
Ji-wi recovered and the matter cooled, but not before serving as a testament to the power of witchcraft in the Iroquois world.
Rhetoric was one of the transcendent arts of the
