The Haudenosaunee and the Erie Canal

In his address during the Erie Canal Centennial Celebration in 1926, Dr. John H. Finley remarked that the Canal’s economic benefits, though immense, were outweighed by its social and political significance. He noted that George Washington himself feared that without improved inland navigation, settlers in the Ohio territory (then the western frontier) would become dependent on trade with British Canada and Spain, and with these commercial ties would come closer political ties, weakening the infant union. The Erie Canal served to bind together the Midwest to the Atlantic Seaboard, strengthening the nascent republic. However, early leaders never seriously considered the Indigenous peoples of the state when planning canal projects. The primary impetus was to acquire the land by any means, whether legal, illegal, or fraudulent. There was also a widely accepted assumption that Haudenosaunee would simply “fade away”or be forced westward as settlers streamed in. Native Americans were often viewed as a relic of the past with no place in the post-revolutionary world of the nineteenth century. This belief in the “myth of the  Vanishing Indian ” allowed Americans from the colonial period forward to avoid a sense of culpability in dealing with the continent’s indigenous inhabitants. Thus, the Canal Period became an important factor in the dispossession of the Haudenosaunee.

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