rude camp and defenses, there was no settlement nearer than Logstown, Ohio. The Senecas formed what was called the western door of the Iroquois Long-house, and claimed our county as a part of their hunting-ground. I can find no satisfactory proof of the occupancy of this territory by any tribe of Indians, unless it may have been the residence of the Kah Kwahs, a tribe said to have been driven out by the Iroquois, and which has wholly disappeared. It is claimed by some that there was once a tribe called Alleghans occupying lands in or near this county.
It appears to me that the Iroquois, admitted to be the most intelligent and powerful of all the tribes or confederacies, were never far enough advanced to construct the fortifications or to make the polished stone implements found in our county; and if they were not, was there any other people who were ever settled in this territory?
Champlain, in 1609, gives us some idea of the barbarism of the Senecas, against whom he made war. Wasseuäer, the Dutch historian, in 1621-'2 represents the Indians as savages who could not have been of the "polished stone age." Cartier found them "insufferable"; so Cadillac describes them. All we can gather from historical documents leads to the belief that the stone implements, the pottery, the fortifications, the skeletons found, and the large mound (if it be one) were the work of a people existing anterior to the historic period and more advanced than the Knoshioni, or Powhatanic stocks. One argument grows out of the fact that all the relics have been dug or plowed up. Stone axes, flint or chert arrow and spear heads have often been found on the surface or just below the surface of the land, while the pottery, gouge, amulet, &c., have been found at various depths. The two skeletons found at Frewsbury under the pine stump lived and died long before the "League of the Long-house" was formed. Two feet, at least, of a secular increase has grown up since these two human beings were laid away. Can we, in the absence of "monuments of known age," ever ascertain the rate of that increase? The lofty old pine tree began its life more than six hundred years ago. How long before that tree sprouted had these bodies been deposited there? And then, again, were these two dead ones members of the tribe or nation that raised the breastworks and made the implements we find at various depths below the surface of today?
In my search after data upon or from which to estimate a secular increase of land I have consulted many Indians and whites, but none are able to give any facts. Sa-gun-da-wie, or Big Nose, a member of the Seneca tribe, gave me an iron ax or hatchet, evidently one of the kind used by the Dutch or French to trade for furs. He told me it was plowed up on the Cattaraugus reservation from a depth of about 8 inches, but he could not say whether the plow had ever before passed over the spot. The ax must have been lost or thrown away at least two hundred years ago; it may have been two hundred and fifty years. If we were sure that the implement was left on the surface two hundred years ago, the secular increase would have been at the rate of about 4 inches per
