Cross-Published with more illustrations and details at Upstate Earth
Last week I stood on a densely wooded hilltop and looked down a steep cliff to a creek swollen with Spring rains. I was only four miles from Interstate 90 in central New York state, but there wasn’t a sign that human beings had ever set foot here. Not an arrowhead. Not a beer can. I doubted if even a deer would climb up to this small plateau. Yet everything I had read told me that this ground was home to hundreds of human beings more than a century before the first Europeans appeared.
What kind of fear had driven a band of Mohawks to make their home in this isolated and nearly inaccessible spot? Had some prehistoric 9-11, some devastating massacre, driven them here? More questions came to me in this tranquil forest, questions about our own culture and our own future.
I first learned of the village site from the writings of the late Paul Keesler, a great chronicler of rambles and fishing expeditions in the Mohawk Valley. In Discovering the Valley of the Crystals, Keesler writes of coming around the sharp bend of a small creek, and finding a high shale cliff that matched old descriptions of a long ago Indian village. Respectful of the ancient people, he had no desire to disturb the ground and was content merely to find the site. And we decided to repeat their pilgrimage.
But first we consulted an often reliable old source, the 1925 History of the Mohawk Valley: Gateway to the West, edited by Nelson Greene, which contains a telling report from Douglas Ayers, one of the last amateurs to carry off artifacts that might have unlocked more of the history of this ancient settlement:
Otstungo was one of the first Indian village sites to be investigated and, while it has been dug over for a century, it still yields an occasional relic of interest. Some very fine stone axes, pestles, arrowheads, spears and bone implements have been excavated from this Mohawk fort. The castle site is remarkably well adapted for defense and is one of the most picturesque and interesting of the Mohawk locations. It is situated on a beautiful winding stream and the gorge of the Otstungo is well worth a visit.
The Otstungo prehistoric site embraces about six acres situated on the top of a high perpendicular cliff of Utica shale, overlooking the Otstungo Creek. The primeval forest on Otstungo was pine, as is the second growth today. We work around the virgin pine stumps and strike shallow trenches six feet wide and six inches deep between them. We cut a root. Out from under it tumbles a decoration of a pipe. It is an imitation of a great horned owl. There are the large round eyes, the facial disks, the ear tufts, the beak — crude, but easily recognizable as the silent-winged forest hunter whose hunting-cry must have often boomed through the Otstungo woodland.
By the time a SUNY Albany team led by Dr. Dean Snow excavated the site in 1985-87, the collectable artifacts were gone. Even so, modern techniques were able to map the longhouses and date the village to around 1450-1525, an era when the Mohawks were continuously harried by the Algonquin-speaking tribes who surrounded their small homeland.
The Amish newcomers who have recently revitalized family farming in the area knew nothing of an old Indian site, but then we met an old-timer in the tiny hamlet of Hallsville who told us, “Just go up to Freys Bush Road and follow the creek straight down to Indian Hill.”
Tramping through underbrush full of poison ivy and ticks, we soon switched to wading along the Otstungo Creek. Navigating with care along the slippery shale that formed the creek bottom, we came to an eighty foot high cliff that exactly matched the photograph from Keesler’s book, and the even older one from Nelson Greene’s history.
This cliff would certainly have presented a formidable barrier to the enemies of the village, as it did to us. After a challenging climb up a steep slope, we reached a level space on top of this impressive mount, about six acres in extent, just as Greene had described it. The village site was densely overgrown and it required imagination to see it peopled with the 400 to 600 people estimated to have lived here five centuries ago. We pictured the village life as Joseph Bruhacs had described it in an October 1991 National Geographic article, a place where men and women lived in an equality unknown to Europeans, experiencing a rich spiritual life founded on their experience of the natural world around them.
Like Paul Keesler eleven years ago, we could not help but experience a sense of awe in this silent forest. Descending from the village, we briefly searched in the stream directly below, as he did, and found a couple small fragments that may be a piece of pottery and a sinker for an ancient fishing net. Or perhaps they were simply pebbles.
So much is lost in the mists of time, but the village’s location speaks very clearly about the sacrifices this community was willing to make in return for a sense of security. The soil is rocky and far poorer than the rich soil along the river. And the creek was far too shallow for the canoes that provided swift transportation and access to indigenous trade routes. Every drop of water had to be carried up from the creek. But for the generations who lived here, all this must have been balanced by the defensive advantages of the hilltop. The villagers of Otstungo faced real threats to their very existence, and they had real enemies. And when they had the chance, their descendants sought alliances with the Dutch and then the English to assure their strength against the long-feared Algonquin tribes.
But with the coming of the American Revolution, the Mohawks chose the wrong white men as their allies and when the British were defeated, they joined them in a Canadian exile, where many of their descendants still live. Yet it was not just military defeat which led to their disappearance from a beloved homeland. Their numbers were already sadly depleted by waves of disease brought by the Europeans, and they had managed to survive in any strength since the European arrival largely by adopting captives from their defeated enemies.
The people who once lived here could not have imagined that future, any more than we can envision our own. For them, the earth was an enduring source of food and tools, disease was rare, and it was only their enemies who could take away the good things of life. How different, really, are we who now inhabit their land?
Have we too built our society around fear of enemies, as if it were only armed human beings who could destroy us? Have we retreated to our own version of an isolated hilltop, where we can rejoice in the death of an enemy chieftain and ignore the reality of a climate that is rapidly heading toward disaster?
At least 40,000 Mohawks still survive. This site and this site are good starting points for those who wish to know more of this proud people.
A shorter version of this diary was published by the Albany Times Union as "In Search of Sacred Ground."