An otherwise excellent documentary on farming in the Finger Lakes said that Native people had been farming this land for a thousand generations. Charitably calculating a generation as 20 years, a thousand generations takes us back 20,000 years, at which time we were under a mile of ice. So crop yields were pretty thin.

But, once the ice receded and people moved in, farming did develop. The white people in the westward expansion are often called settlers… a very gentle noun… rather than invaders. They also make much of clearing the wilderness, or taming the wilderness. But this was NOT wilderness. One of the reasons the land was so attractive was that so much of it was cleared, there were towns, there were orchards, there were farm fields. Native people had been terraforming for hundreds of generations, as human beings always do.

Steuben County, though under Iroquois RULE, was home to groups of several ethnicities. It was sort of a military frontier, with small towns and large patrols. There’s a habit of dismissively calling any Indian settlement a village… the “village” Custer attacked at the Little Big Horn had as many people as Hornell… and the main Iroquois settlements at the north end of the lakes were honest-to-goodness cities, larger than most communities in the new United States.

But around here smaller towns were the rule. There was one at the Painted Post, and one at the Chimney Narrows (east end of Corning). There were two in today’s Canisteo… one at the mouth of Bennett’s Creek, one at the mouth of Colonel Bill’s Creek.

Much of Indian settlement was somewhat decentralized, which makes sense if you recognize that with no livestock animals in America, meat came from hunting, fishing, and clamming. A community needed a large geographic spread as its larder, to avoid overhunting or overfishing.

In Europe, farming was a he-man’s work, while hunting was a recreational activity, indulged in once or twice a year. To their ethno-centric eyes, Indian men were lazy sons-of-guns who made their wives do all the work on the farm while they went off hunting. They didn’t recognize that this required constant reconaissance, journeys sometimes of several days in all kinds of weather to reach a given hunting ground, processing the kills on the spot and then packing it all back.

In Europe after the Black Death chopped population almost in half, the legal doctrine of waste land arose. If land was NOT plowed, and if no one ran cattle on it, you could move in and take possession as long as you started doing one of those things. When Europeans arrived here, they said, “Look at all the waste land!” And started grabbing all they could. The Indians didn’t really USE it after all… they might just come through hunting one week a year. Roger Williams pointed out that the reason the Indians don’t run cattle is because THERE ARE NO CATTLE IN AMERICA – which is also why they don’t plow! In addition to the immorality of taking Indian land, Williams argued that the waste land doctrine had no meaning over here, but he, of course, was completely ignored. One of several reasons Rhode Island is so small!