Cornplanter

Cornplanter, whose Seneca name is rendered Gaiantwaka in the historical record, was born around 1750 at Canawaugus, a Seneca village on the Genesee River, the son of a Seneca mother and a Dutch trader named John Abeel. He came to military prominence among the Seneca during the American Revolution, leading war parties in the Battle of Oriskany, the Battle of Wyoming, the Cherry Valley raid of November 1778 and the fighting against General Sullivan's 1779 campaign into Haudenosaunee territory, continuing raids into 1780.

After the Revolution, Cornplanter turned from war leadership to treaty diplomacy with the young United States, becoming one of the most prominent Seneca voices at the negotiating table. He was a principal Seneca signatory of the Treaty of Fort Stanwix in 1784, the Treaty of Canandaigua in 1794 and the Treaty of Big Tree in 1797, agreements that ceded large tracts of Haudenosaunee land and drew sharp criticism from other Seneca leaders, most notably Red Jacket, who argued Cornplanter had conceded too much. In 1796 the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania granted him about fifteen hundred acres of former Seneca territory along the Allegheny River for himself and his heirs; the tract took his name and, by 1798, was home to some four hundred Seneca.

Cornplanter used his standing to court Quaker educators, inviting them to establish schools on his land to teach practical skills, a choice that put him at the center of debate over how far the Seneca should accommodate the encroaching United States. His brother Handsome Lake's religious reform later turned that debate toward the tradition his own diplomacy had helped his people survive within.

Cornplanter and Handsome Lake were half brothers, born to the same Seneca mother at Canawaugus and raised in the same Seneca community, and their two lives diverged and rejoined at some of the most consequential moments in Haudenosaunee history. While Cornplanter rose as a war chief and treaty diplomat, Handsome Lake lived for years within the pressures of land loss and the alcoholism that had taken hold of Seneca communities after the Revolution, pressures Cornplanter's own diplomacy had done little to relieve. In June 1799, ill at Cornplanter's own settlement on the Allegheny, Handsome Lake collapsed into a state that appeared to onlookers as death. Cornplanter was called to his brother's side, and it was in that comatose state, with Cornplanter and others gathered around him, that Handsome Lake received the first of the visions that became the Gaiwiio, the good message that founded the Longhouse religion.

Cornplanter's own response to his brother's teaching was not immediate. He had already invited Quaker missionaries onto his land to run schools, a choice the Gaiwiio's call to preserve traditional Seneca ways sat uneasily beside. Only later, after the War of 1812 left him disillusioned with the accommodation he had spent his career pursuing, did Cornplanter close the schools he had welcomed and turn toward his brother's reform, by tradition burning his old military uniform and breaking his sword as a sign of the change. He did not fully sever his ties to the Quakers, but the reversal marked him, by the end of his long life, as a supporter of the very religious revitalization his brother had begun at his own doorstep. Cornplanter died on February 18, 1836, on the Pennsylvania land grant that carried his name.