BIG TREE TREATY

By the time appointed for the Treaty at Big Tree on the Genesee River in the summer of 1797, Robert Morris was a prisoner in his own mansion, unable even to answer the door lest he be arrested and jailed for debt. His son Thomas therefore conducted the actual preparations for the treaty, laying in stores of food, clothing, hardware, powder and whiskey ‘ the latter calculated at twenty-five gallons a day for thirty days. The whiskey, however, was not to be provided at once, but paraded before the thirsty Indians with the promise that it would be given them when the sale was made. Special presents of clothing were prepared for the women, and funds for bribery of the men were set aside at the outset’ [Indeed,] a deliberate plot to subvert the decision for the chiefs had been in the making for months’ Thus the embers of the old [Iroquois] confederacy guttered out in a welter of liquor, bribery, and high-powered salesmanship. The name of the Great League still remained; but its people were now separated, one from another, on tiny reservations boxed in by white men and white men’s fences.

Anthony F.C. Wallace Author of The Decline of the Iroquois 1969