Partly under Cornplanter’s guidance, the Seneca had backed the losing side in a couple of conflicts, most importantly the Revolution. Cornplanter also had a hand in land sales to the whites, and Red Jacket’s dagger-wit was letting no one forget. Cornplanter had the great Sagoyewata charged with witchcraft, possibly accused of making a curse or spouting witch fire at night.
It was far from the first time a powerful Iroquois was suspected of cutting corners to gain “extra” abilities. And word wizards—riddle masters, poets, and songmakers—in many world cultures were sensed to be magicians. It may also have been a political hatchet job orchestrated by Cornplanter’s half brother, the witch finder and soon-to-be-prophet Handsome Lake. It was a dangerous moment, and it came to trial in 1801 in a council meeting at Buffalo Creek, remembered in John Mix Stanley’s famous painting.
Red Jacket got up and gave it back—for three hours—along the Buffalo Creek. He was acquitted and never challenged again. It was presumed thereafter that his sorcery involved nothing but words.
KAUQUATAU
It was momentous when an Iroquois chief fell ill. His orenda was that of the nation, and when his illness seemed magical, it was presumed that only a powerful figure could have launched the curse. This would either be the chief of another community—which could lead to a war—or a mighty witch, possibly within the chief ’s own community.
In the spring of 1821, an important Seneca man fell ill at his home on the Buffalo Creek Reservation. He seemed to need no more than simple nursing. Kauquatau, a Seneca woman who was considered a healer of great power, was appointed to tend him. Everyone was shocked when her patient died. The community sensed witchcraft and blamed his magical nurse.
A delegation of chiefs approached Kauquatau and got ready to knock her off, but at the critical moment, the appointed executioner choked. According to rumor, the witch froze him and his fellows with an instant spell, possibly the evil eye. Chief Soonongise, commonly called Tom Jemmy, broke free of the spell, drew his knife, and slit the witch’s throat. They left her body where it lay, on the banks of Buffalo Creek, possibly near the foot of Michigan Street in Buffalo.
The whites of the region threw Tom Jemmy into jail. Red Jacket came to his trial, took a bit of scolding from the white prosecutor, then thundered back. The Seneca were a sovereign nation, he argued, and the execution was legal in their society. He reminded the white court of the American witch trials in Salem, even their culture’s treatment of their own Savior, one no Christian is allowed to forget. Convinced or maybe just cowed, the State Supreme Court let the prisoner go.
Witches’ bodies were considered so toxic that they were always specially handled. Kauquatau seems to have been buried under her house, one no Seneca would touch thereafter. The land was sold in the winter of 1842 to the Ebenezer religious society, and shelter was so scarce that a family of German fundamentalists took over the witch’s collapsing cabin. Soon, they reported terrifying psychic eruptions. Only the intervention of group leader Christian Metz and the burning of the cabin put the matter to rest. Today, the witch’s presumed grave is still a conspicuous bare space in a white burial ground. The Old Main Cemetery in West Seneca is a regional legend, with many reports of the apparition of a “woman in white.”
The Stealer of Children’s Hearts
(Seneca, Late Nineteenth Century)
An old reservation woman was especially solicitous at the deaths of children. She consoled families and helped with funerals, and for a while it was appreciated. But late one night, a neighbor walking by her house saw a head-sized ball of light shoot out the chimney toward the graveyard. This was a witch light, in which some witches were thought to travel. “So,” she said to herself, “The old girl must be up to it.”
The next time a child died, the old woman came to help, taking a turn sitting with the corpse. But the woman who’d seen the witch light told her husband to keep an eye open around the body that night.
Sure enough, at midnight when the old woman thought she was alone, she took a knife, cut the heart out of the child, and left the house while everybody slept. The neighbor’s husband followed her. In a while, a ball of fire flew out the chimney of her cabin and streaked to the cemetery.
Frightened but game, the husband followed it to the old section in which many of the graves were sunken. He watched the woman dig and scrape for a while, put something into a hole, and cry out, “There! I’ve got you another. Now we’re friends again, and you’ll lead me to money.”
The neighbor’s husband took off as quickly and quietly as he could. He dove for cover and lay still when the light soared over him again, doubtless heading back to the witch’s chimney.
The next day he went to the dead child’s father and said what he’d seen. They found no marks on the body; the witch had magically healed the cut. But at the cemetery, they found the grave the witch had visited, with signs of fresh digging. They dug up the grave and found a corpse with a tender heart in its teeth and its shockingly fresh and contented face covered with blood. They ran for the witch doctor.
At twilight they watched him pour kerosene down the hole of the open grave, stuff it with rags, and set the mess afire. Soon red and black smoke poured out, and the leaves of the trees above it fluttered in the glow. Toward
