Production Note
Cornell University Library produced this
volume to replace the irreparably deteriorated
original. It was scanned using Xerox software
and equipment at 600 dots per inch resolution
and compressed prior to storage using CCITT
Group 4 compression. The digital data were
used to create Cornell*s replacement volume on
paper that meets the ANSI Standard
Z39.48-1984. The production of this volume was
supported in part by the New York State
Program for the Conservation and Preservation
of Library Research Materials and the Xerox
Corporation.	Digital file copyright by
Cornell University Library 1993.THE LAST OF THE KAH-KWAHS.
READ BEFORE THE SOCIETY, MARCH 13, 1863^
BY DAVID GRAY.
Muse of the storied scroll, whose thoughtful eye
Watched the long pageant of the years gone by;
Whose patient art has touched and kept sublime
All that is deathless of departed time:—
Historic Muse, whose pilgrim feet have stood
Where many a nation’s star has set in blood,
Or followed where the sacred dawn of Right
Crept over Europe’s late and lingering night,
Shedding on Roman hills its passing smile,
And brightening on the “silver-coasted isle”:—
Eorth from thy home amid the graves of Kings
And brooding gloom of half forgotten things,
Come where thy broader path, O! History, waits
And walk with Empire through her western g&tes:
Come where a fairer day to earth is born,—
The Old World’s evening is the New World’s morn,—
Note.—For the thread of story upon which a part of these verses is strung, the
writer is mainly indebted to O. H. Marshall, Esq., whose contributions to the Buffalo
press some fifteen or twenty years ago, over the signature of UQ,” comprise nearly al^that
is known of the early Indian history of this locality. The Kah-Kwah, or, as it was termed
by the French missionaries, the Neutral Nation of Indians, is shown, we think conclusively,
by Mr. Marshall to have been the tribe which inhabited the site of this city previous to the
conquest and occupation of the territory by the Seneca tribe of the Iroquois confederacy.
The Neutral Nation was so called from the fact that it was observed by the Jesuit travelers
to be at peace with the neighboring peoples. The date of the destruction of this remarkable
tribe is fixed at about the year 1647, and various legends survive as to the circumstances44
THE LAST OF
And, in the lustre of that larger sun,
Look forth and see thy grandest task begun.
No pomp or kingly glory here has birth,
Nor crumbling temple sinks to classic earth;
But, young and fair, beneath these western skies,
The emblems of a hundred empires rise.
And here are fields, amid whose thundrous strife
The Future’s Hope, embattled, strikes for life.
Even now the wind is warm with war’s red rain,
And Truth and Treason cross the sword again.
Hither, O! History, come and breathless wait
While Freedom trembles in the scale of Fate;
Here bring the mirror of thy magic page,
And catch the features of this grander age;
Come, for the path that seeks the West is thine,
And lo! we build thee, here, this wayside shrine!
And, sooth, its site, that woos the pilgrim’s stay,
Might lure the Muse herself to brief delay:
Yonder the Lake, with heaven upon its breast,
Sleeps at the open portals of the West ;
And the strong River, like a god in wrath,
Leaps from the calm upon his fateful path.
From yon gray ruin’s shade the forms are fled
That came, but now, up-thronging from the dead;
But the great heart of Commerce, full and strong,
Throbs to the chime of swarthy Labor’s song:
which occasioned the Iroquois invasion. The most dramatic of these was transferred to
paper by Wm. Ketchum, Esq., in the Commercial Advertiser of July 12th, 1845. This
is related as a tradition of the Erie or Cat Nation, but we believe UQ” has proved satisfac-
torily that this tribe inhabited a region to the westward, and that the tragedy embodied in
the legend really refers to the Kah-Kwahs. According to the narrative of Mr. Ketchum,
the fatal quarrel with the Iroquois arose out of a sort of barbaric tournament, which took
place at Tu-shu-way (“ the place of the linden or bass-wood trees,” as the Indian village
formerly located here was called), and in which the young men of the Iroquois and of the
resident tribe participated. A relentless war followed this scene of savage revelry, which
ended only in the almost total annihilation of the Neutral Nation. It is said that the last
battle was fought near the old Indian mission house, a few miles from here.THE KAH-KWAHS.
45
Here, in the coming years, the Muse shall rest,
And here to-night we hail her as our guest;
And, sleeping by the sounding River's stream,
Her slumber with its visioned Past shall gleam,—
Hark, while I strive to read from History’s dream:—
The city sleeps; its changing features fade
In the green depths of many a rustling glade;
The wind of summer whispers sweet and low
'Mong trees that waved three hundred years ago.
The streamlet seeks the path it knew of yore,
And Erie murmurs to a lonely shore;
The birds are busy in their leafy towers;
The trampled earth is wild again with flowers;
And the same River rolls in changeless state,
Eternal, solemn, deep and strong as fate.
It is the time when still the forest made
For its dusk children a protecting shade;
And by these else untrodden shores they stood,
Embodied spirits of the solitude!
When still at dawn, or day’s serener close,
The smoke-wreaths of the Kah-Kwah lodges rose.
No hoary legend of their past declares
Through what uncounted years our home was theirs—
How oft they hailed, new-glittering in the West,
The moon, a phantom-white canoe, at rest
In deeps of purple twilight—this alone
Of all their vanished story has not flown:
That, through unnumbered summers’ long increase,
The Neutral Nation was the home of peace.
Far to the north the Huron war-whoop rang,
And eastward, on the stealthy war-path, sprang
The wary Iroquois; but like the isle46
THE LAST OF
That, locked in wild Niagara’s fierce embrace,
Still wears the smile of summer on its face—
(Love in the clasp of Madness)—so the while
With peace the Kah-Kwah villages were filled.
And, as the Lake’s dark heart of storm is stilled,
The fury of its surge constrained to calm
Beneath the touch of winter’s marble palm,
So, when the braves of warring nations met,
They changed the hatchet for the calumet,
And hid with stolid face their mounting ire
From the bright glimmer of the Kah-Kwah fire.
Year followed year, and peaceful Time had cast
A misty autumn sunshine o’er the past,
And, to the hearts that calmly summered there,
The forehead of the future shone as fair;
Save that perchance some wise and wakeful ear
In the great River’s ceaseless song could hear,
Through the mirk midnight, when the wind was still,
The murmured presage of approaching ill.
It came at last—the nation’s evil day,
Whose rayless night should never pass away.
A calm foreran the tempest, and, a space,
Fate wore the mask of joy upon his face.
It was a day of revel, feast and game,
When from the far-off Iroquois there came
A hundred plumed and painted warriors, sent
To meet the Kah-Kwah youth in tournament.
And legend tells how sped the mimic fight;
And how the festal fire blazed high at night,
And laugh and shout through all the greenwood rang
Till, at the last, a deadly quarrel sprang,
Whose shadow, as the frowning guests withdrew,
Deepened, and to a boding war-cloud grew.THE KAH-KWAHS.
47
And not for long the sudden storm was stayed;
It burst in battle, and in many a glade,
Were leaves of green with fearful crimson crost,
As if by finger of untimely frost.
Fighting they held the stubborn pathway back,
The foe relentless on their homeward track;
Till the thinned remnant of the Kah-Kwah braves
Chose, where their homes had been, to make their graves,
And rallied for the last and hopeless fight,
With the blue ripples of the lake in sight.
Could wand of magic bring that scene again
Back, with its terrors, to the battle-plain,
Into these silent streets the wind would bear
Its mingled cry of triumph and despair;
And all the nameless horror of the strife,
That only ended with a nation’s life,
Would pass before our startled eyes, and seem
The feverish fancy of an evil dream.
For in the tumult of that fearful rout
The watch-light of the Kah-Kwah camp went out.
And, thenceforth, in the pleasant linden shade,
Seneca children, only, laughed and played.
And still the River rolled in changeless state,
Eternal, solemn, deep and strong as fate.
A few strange words of a forgotten tongue
That still by Lake and River’s marge have clung,
Are all that linger, of the Past, to tell,
With their weird-sounding music, how it fell
That here the people of that elder day
Sinned, suffered, loved, hoped, hated, passed away.
So History’s dream is told, and, fading, fleet
The shadows of the forest from the street;THE KAH-KWAHS.
But is it much to ask, if it were sought,
That it return at times to tinge our thought?—
To tell us, when the winter-fires are lit,
And in the happy heart of home we sit,
That other fires were here, ere ours had shone,
And sank to ashes years and years agone;—
That where we stand, and, watching, see the West
Ebb, till the stars lie stranded on its breast,
Or homeward ships, more blest than they of Greece,
Returning with the prairie’s Golden Fleece,
To other eyes long since perchance was given,
Through the same sapphire arch, a glimpse of heaven.
And haply not in vain the thought shall rise
To sadden, it may be, our reveries,
That here have throbbed, with all the bliss of ours,
Hearts that have mouldered upward into flowers!