The Europeans changed everything, including the scale and objectives of war. In the 1600s, the Confederacy fought sustained wars on many fronts with large Native American groups, chiefly fellow Iroquoians like the Huron and Algonquin speakers like the Adirondack and Abenaki. Mini world wars, these conflicts sprawled all over the Northeast, the Great Lakes, and the Atlantic states.
Many New York nations disappeared in the pass and fell, as Hamlet would say, of mighty opposites. None did so with greater mystery than an Allegany County group remembered as the Lost Nation. What else do we call them? They vanished from history in a heartbeat. All that remains of them is the name set to their former territory, a 1,500-acre tract in the town of Centerville.
Scraps of rumor lead us to deduce that these folk were admired as craftsmen and settlers. Nothing tells us why they left in such a hustle. The Canandaigua Treaty of 1794 lists the tribes and territories in western New York; none could be the Lost Nation.
The name Tutelo has surfaced in some sources. The Tutelo were a Siouan people from the American Southeast who did some wandering. Some were in western New York in the mid-1700s and may have been absorbed by the Cayuga. But who lived in Lost Nation? And why are there no signs of what happened to them? Did the UFOs beam them up?
Lost Nation today is still undeveloped and used for hunting and other outdoor sports. Its enigmatic ruins—stone foundations and fireplaces—inspire the imagination but have recent origins: the CCC’s (Civilian Conservation Corps) Depression-era work camps.
Still, something about Lost Nation nurtures folklore. Almost every figment of the paranormal surfaces today in the region: mystery lights, ghosts, witchcraft rumors, and mystery critters, including an excellent Bigfoot flap. Every few years it’s something.
THE DALE
(Seneca Country)
The Cassadaga Lakes are three tame water bodies eight miles south of the Chautauqua County college town of Fredonia. They make a rough C-shape nestling today’s Lily Dale, concentrated just south of Upper Lake.
Lily Dale is the capital of Spiritualism, a young American religion based on the idea that the spirits of our dead are still around us and can be reached for communication. While the Dale today is a freethinking community that hosts a summer program of talks and events on many metaphysical topics, what we see is only the flower on the vine. A series of eclectic movements ran behind today’s Lily Dale. The constant is the site.
The whites settling here in 1809 found a number of ancient earthworks. Scholars reported odd skeletons and an ancient road, possibly even a European-style cursus, one of those short, still mysterious, roads to nowhere. These old monuments drove the belief that Lily Dale had been a cross-culturally sacred, conflict-free zone for ancient Native American societies and even a necropolis, a city of the dead.
In the Lily Dale archives is an ancient works map, which Brad Olsen used for his own write-up in Sacred Places of North America. The southern Lower Lake was the focus of the ancient energy, featuring fire pits, causeways, palisades, and earthworks on the north, south, and east sides. We only wish we had the words of the ancient societies. We can only judge by the monuments they left us and the reactions we have to them.
There’s still an earthwork somewhere at Lily Dale, inconspicuous, much settled, and in a tree-shaded yard. There seems little doubt that the spirit of place, the genius loci, is still active. Paranormal folklore abounds from the nineteenth century, including mystery lights and a couple of wonderful reports of a UFO and a Bigfoot. The psychics and mystics at Lily Dale are prone to seeing vortexes and power points there today, as well as spirits.
Surely by design, Lily Dale encourages meditation. It has many nurturing nooks on its grounds. The most powerful may be Inspiration Stump, the atmospheric, reconstructed tree in an amphitheater amidst old-growth forest. Michael Bastine recalls the rumors among the Iroquois that this was a Little People place.
Canadian psychic Gwendolyn Pratt recalled a midnight walk to Inspiration Stump just after a rain. In glistening steam and moon-spattered foliage, the bole in the grove was covered with white butterflies. All they took of the moonlight they gave back. What drew them all here, only here? Not another was in sight, anywhere. It took the breath away. Were they natural? In many cultures of the world, including some Native American ones, it’s thought that souls often return as butterflies.
LAKE ELDRIDGE
(Seneca Country)
Four hundred years ago, the junction of the Chemung and Susquehanna rivers was hunting territory for Native American nations from as far away as the Atlantic coast. This was not unusual. The Northeast Woodlands were being overhunted, and communities had to send far afield for game. Sometime before the Europeans arrived, the warlike Andastes took hold of the region and gave it up only to the mighty grip of the Seneca. Odds are good that this was Seneca territory when the whites arrived, eventually setting up the city of Elmira.
Somewhere in today’s city limits was the Iroquoian village called Shinedowa. Mount Zoar to the southwest dominates the horizon. Just south of it and along the Chemung River was a grove of evergreens that held the burial mounds of these Iroquoians and who knows who before them. The Seneca had legends about what’s called today Eldridge Lake.
A dangerous swamp once surrounded it, and it had many mysterious residents. The Bird of Doom was a giant green creature whose eerie calls drove men back from the trails. Men knew they were fated to be wounded or killed when their paths were crossed by a certain huge black wolf, doubtless a shape-shifter or some wizard’s emissary.
A chief ’s son met a strange, seemingly supernatural woman here and was haunted and fey afterward. The Celts would say that this was his fairy lover. He lost all his taste for life among mortals and was
