This new religion, which still permeates Iroquois life, has been described as a blending of old Seneca beliefs with an ethical code borrowed largely from the Quakers. Hammer then replied formally on January 27, 1965, suggesting that the corps meet with the Indians to try to help them find a suitable site, but implying that they could not have the Weber tract, which provided “a prime location for recreational facilities.” In February, Curtis F. Hunter, a corps representative in Warren, Pennsylvania, near the dam site, met with Bowen and the Webers’ attorney in Salamanca, proposed certain alternative possibilities, including the Indians’ use of the Weber tract by license rather than ownership, and suggested that they all meet with Colonel Hammer the next time that officer was in the area. Through sources other than the Corps of Engineers, however, the Senecas began to learn of the plan for the dam, and by 1955, when the engineers again appeared before the Seneca council to ask permission to continue their surveys on the reservation, the Indians were nervous. Insisting that a small, sixty-five-acre tract for recreation was essential to the success of the Kinzua Dam project would have been farcical had it not been so unhappy for the Indians. “The entire ‘Weber’ tract is essential to the needs of the project and must be acquired,” General Wilson concluded, employing the same words that Hammer had used in his note of May 13 to Bowen.The Army had its back up, and neither General Wilson nor anyone else in the corps could see the silliness of their bureaucratic rigidity. To the corps, it seems, land is land, no matter who lives on it. The great Cornplanter, perhaps, now rests beneath the waters of the reservoir.From the very beginning, when army lawyers first looked into the problem of acquiring land for the dam and the reservoir, the Corps of Engineers had little concern for the uniqueness of the treaty-secured Seneca position.
(The plan was submitted at the end of the three-year period. As an autocratically tinged bureaucracy and one of the most irresistible lobbies in the nation (relying on the “pork barrel” support of political groups everywhere who sooner or later want public works for their own areas), it befriends the American people in the mass and in the abstract, and makes war on the same people when, as individuals or in small numbers, they get in the way. Then, on August 23, 1963, the Senecas were given a sixty-five-acre tract above the level of the reservoir by the family of Latham B. Weber, publisher of the Salamanca There then began a protracted attempt by the Senecas to change the engineers’ mind, an attempt that floundered in a sea of deafness, evasions, and red tape.
Both French and English traders were welcomed in the region, but no white settlement was permitted.Toward the mid-1700’s, trouble came for the western Senecas when English and French military groups began to fight for authority over the upper Ohio Valley. On May 27 General Wilson replied to the Quaker representative, passing on several pieces of misinformation supplied him by Hammer, among them that Hammer “had met with Mr. Bowen on several occasions to negotiate the acquisition of the land for the project” (they had not met face-to-face once, despite Bowen’s request for such a meeting), and that when the Webers had given the land to the Indians, “it was well known that the ‘Weber’ tract was scheduled for acquisition by the Corps” (an untruth that Bowen and the Webers had already set straight). There Cornplantcr took over the civil leadership of his people from an elderly uncle, Kiasulha.Under the protection of the British along the Niagara, where English troops and trailers remained on American soil until after (ay’s Treaty of 1794, the displaced eastern Senecas at Buffalo Creek kept up a bitter hostility to the Americans. In 1954, when the St. Lawrence Seaway was under construction, its builders wanted to place some of their facilities on the Si. several hands of Senecas had moved southwcstward from the Genesee River to the upper Allegheny Valley, and during the next hundred years they established domination over a large area of western New York and Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio, swelling their own numbers and power by absorbing many Indian captives and refugee groups.