We’ve heard it suggested that the Valley of Madness, like much other Alfred folklore, is the invention of college pranksters, possibly no older than the 1970s. The cycle indeed has a murky feel, and we often see that the mere hint of such is enough for skeptics to declare victory and stop questioning. A rumor cycle so strong and prevalent about one of the stops on the Forbidden Trail—to come—at least deserved a mention.
THE HILL AND THE STONE
(Oneida Country)
Primes Hill is about six miles south of today’s town of Oneida, at the heart of the Oneida Nation territory. It had held an Oneida village, including a two-acre, twelve-foot-high, double-walled fort that could have sheltered twelve hundred people.
The Oneida needed their forts. They had sided with the colonials in the Revolution, helped turn the war, and been relatively abandoned by the young United States. They had also earned the outrage of the British-allied Mohawk, who burned and sacked a pair of Oneida forts. Oneida lash-backs took out three Mohawk forts and drove the survivors into British-controlled Canada. Many Oneidas relocated to a reservation near Green Bay, Wisconsin, still a center of Oneida culture. By the early 1800s, the New York Oneida gave the appearance of a shiftless, beaten people with little purpose or cultural core.
In 1813, Thomas Rockwell bought one of the first farms on Primes Hill. His new tract held the former Oneida Council ground and Council Rock, which, so far as any whites of the day could discern, was the Oneida stone. This object is interesting.
The Oneida are the People of the Standing Stone. Though a mighty tradition has developed about their national symbol, it may not have been just figurative. There appears to have been one central “true” stone and a host of lesser ones, one to each Oneida village. It’s as if this original stone, should one exist in reality, was a big emanator of orenda from which all the others drew their power.
Early New York ethnologist Henry Rowe Schoolcraft (1793–1864) visited Primes Hill in 1845 and was most impressed by the view, at the top of the highest point in the Oneida Creek valley. A beacon lit here would be seen a long way. Schoolcraft found it the focal point of some elaborate white folklore, chiefly of the “ancient mysteries” school. The evidence of battlefields and reports of very large human skeletons—common rumors about upstate New York—got them speculating about metal-using giants and a prehistoric culture clash. Human giants are associated in legend with ancient power sites all over Europe. Primes Hill, site of the fabled stone, was surely one of them.
So far as he knew, Schoolcraft was looking at the stone that clear day in 1845. He was impressed mightily by the view and his romanticized notions of the site, but he was let down by the stone itself. In Schoolcraft’s sketch, this object, set heavily in the earth, is far more of a quadruped than a bipedal standing stone.
It’s no wonder Schoolcraft might have been let down; these mythic relics on all the continents can seem humble to whites, raised on grander and more recent monuments. But there is mystery about the Oneida stone. Other sources describe the original as a slender, crystalline sevenfooter sounding suspiciously like a European-style menhir.
The Primes Hill site was surely still holy. William M. Beauchamp’s confidants remembered scenes from their childhoods, of small groups of Oneida, foreigners in their own lands, drifting about looking for seasonal work like today’s migrant laborers. Twice a year they returned to Primes Hill and camped within easy walking distance of the Council Grove. They never bedded down too near the stone, people recalled, and they only approached it at night. A woman remembered spying on them as a child and observing some “strange rite” by the stone.
In a gesture intended to convey inclusiveness and respect, something taken publicly to represent the Oneida stone was moved to Utica’s Forest Hill Cemetery in 1849. In the century-old photograph, it doesn’t look anything like either Schoolcraft’s sketch or the natural obelisk others described. The whole situation leads many to wonder if the Oneidas said everything they knew to the whites. In 1974, this object, too, came back to Oneida land and rests today quite close to their casino—Turning Stone—which may even be named for it. But obviously its former Primes Hill site was still sacred to the Oneida of the middle nineteenth century, and we wonder if the stone itself was the whole point of the thing—or if another one is out there.
KINZUA
(Seneca Country)
Because of repeated flooding of towns and cities downstream—like Pittsburgh—the Kinzua Dam was authorized in 1963. It backed up the Allegheny River, turned a valley into a lake, and flooded loads of Seneca history.
Somewhere under the Allegheny Reservoir is Cornplanter’s grave, a simple tree under which the old warrior was buried in 1836 at the age of one hundred. Probably only the Seneca knew which one it was, if it was still standing, but what a tragedy it was for them to lose access to it. Cornplanter’s village and Handsome Lake’s vision site were here as well, now under water.
It’s hard for non-Iroquois to appreciate the anguish this caused the Seneca. All through the cycle of protests, lawsuits, and construction, the whole region was a zone of psychic folklore. Phantom horses, fabled bogies, and even the archetypal
