The Onondaga shelf, the east–west spine of Iroquois territory, can be porous or obsidian hard. The north–south Genesee cutting through it branches many a channel. All that running water and an ancient sea have left caves, tunnels, and minerals underground.
In 1885, some enterprising fellows sunk a shaft nine hundred feet down to a bed of rock salt. In just a century, the Retsof Salt Mine became the biggest in North America. Its ten square underground miles made it the size of Manhattan.
Then-operator Akzo-Nobel Salt gave up on it in 1994 when part of the mine collapsed and flooded. The state lost mining and trucking jobs, and Livingston County was short its second biggest taxpayer. In January 1997, American Rock Salt arrived to tap in from a different direction. It meant making a new three-mile spur connecting mine and railroad. The nation’s first new salt mine in forty years was a high profile, feel-good affair. Work commenced around the clock at Hampton Corners.
There were some environmental protests at first, largely ceremonial, but things changed when Native American burials were found. By 1997, the NAGPRA had so big a bite that even a bark was plenty to stop a salt mine.
Some burials were clearly those of Senecas during the time of the Europeans’ arrival. This is still Seneca country, and the state works with them all the time. But the ground also held folks from Blackfoot and other Algonquin-speaking nations who haven’t lived in the region since the time of the Crusades. They could have been sent to their graves in the first place by the Seneca. Finding representatives for them wasn’t going to be easy.
The new work area turned out to be a prehistoric power point: the site of at least one sacred earthwork, a village or two, the junction of ancient trails, and a multicultural burial ground dating back at least four thousand years. Trains, tracks, digging, and paving would destroy it all. This was an unwelcome new twist.
We know mound-building societies like the Hopewell and Adena only from burials, artifacts, and the massive earthworks that mystified the Senecas when they came to this valley. The Viper Mound, a Genesee riverside earthwork and possibly a Hopewellian style snake effigy, had already been paved over during the mid-1970s work on I-390. It is hard to identify the living ancestors of the Hopewell. Who rules on their remains? NAGPRA, we have a problem. The suits, of course, just wanted work to go on. Enter, according to the story, a certain prominent Seneca.
This gentleman has devoted his life to teaching the world about his ancestors. The government turns to him in many matters. Some of his decisions have been controversial. He looked the site over, did some of this and that, and gave the OK for work to resume.
The way some tell it, artifacts, remains, and even the GOK (God Only Knows) piles from the salt mines fell largely into his lap. With his OK, the bones, every last nub of them were, in theory, relocated to nearby portions of the property or elsewhere in the valley. The mine opened with only reasonable delays. Talk of backroom deals, political intrigue, and payola ran amok. White activists, alas, may have been shouting the loudest.
What happened to the bones and artifacts? Since a Native American handled them, it wasn’t of white concern. It was other Native Americans who asked the questions. There was grumbling about moving Algonquin remains to Seneca territory, even simply dumping them. Protests came in from many quarters after the reports of bulldozers piling up grave goods and even human bones.
Surely, some justice awaited this desecration. There was talk of curses and mine disasters. Suicide, death, substance abuse, madness, and ruin plagued local politicians who had been involved. Even passersby suffered. One local who took an artifact lost a leg in an accident. Another touched a piece of skull and found her mother dead at home. Mystery lights and altered animal forms were reported on nearby stretches of road. Auto accidents were common. It would be interesting to know what the late motorists saw before spinning out of control. The pattern sounded like an upstate King Tut’s curse.
One of our Native American friends is a woman of Blackfoot ancestry. An activist, she is also mystical, versed in traditional lore. She gets pretty riled when we come to the subject of someone who may have disposed of her ancestors’ remains. “He makes the deal, he takes the money, he does what with the pots and bones?” she said. “Do they go into his museum? Does he sell ’em? They aren’t his ancestors. They’re mine!”
After all we’ve heard about curses befalling whites who picked up bones or greased the skids for the political process, we’d expect far worse to befall a Native American who knew better. “How does he avoid the karma?” I asked.
“Oh, he has protection,” she said. “Every year he has a certain deal he has to make to keep himself out of the way.”
I was aware that I was getting only one side of the story. I called Ted Williams and caught him on one of his western New York forays. He met me at his beloved disc-golf course on another sunny afternoon. When I started in, he didn’t seem to have heard of the case. How could he not have? The matter of the mines had been making shock waves in local Native
