History
Political relations between the Cayuga, the British, and the Thirteen Colonies during the American Revolution were complicated and variable, with Cayugas fighting on both sides (as well as abstaining from war entirely). Most of the Iroquois nations allied with the British, in part hoping to end encroachment on their lands by colonists.
In 1779, General George Washington of the Continental Army appointed General John Sullivan and James Clinton to lead the Sullivan Expedition, a military campaign designed to unseat the Iroquois Confederacy and prevent the nations from continuing to attack New York militias and the Continental Army. The campaign mobilized 6200 troops and devastated the Cayuga and Iroquois homelands, destroying 40-50 villages, including major Cayuga villages such as Cayuga Castle and Chonodote (Peachtown). The expedition, with attacks from the spring through the fall, also destroyed the crops of the Indians, to drive them out of the land. Survivors fled to other Iroquois tribes, or to Upper Canada. Some were granted land there by the British in recognition of their loyalty to the Crown. The Cayuga in the United States were the only Haudenosaunee nation to be left without a reservation.
Some Senecas and Cayugas had left the area earlier, going to Ohio. After the Sullivan Campaign, more Cayugas joined them, as well as some other bands of Iroquois who left New York before the end of the Revolutionary War. In 1831 those Indians left Ohio for removal to the Indian Territory in what became Oklahoma. The Seneca-Cayuga Tribe of Oklahoma is a federally recognized tribe.
On November 11, 1794, the (New York) Cayuga Nation (along with the other Haudenosaunee nations) signed the Treaty of Canandaigua with the United States by which they ceded much of their lands in New York to the United States. It was the second treaty the United States entered into. It recognized the rights of the Haudenosaunee as sovereign nations. The Treaty of Canandaigua remains an operating legal document; the U.S. government continues to send the requisite gift of muslin fabric to the nations each year.
The state of New York made additional treaties. It went on to arrange sales of more than 5 million acres (20,000 km2) of former Iroquois lands to encourage development in the state. Land-hungry Yankees from New England flooded into New York in waves of new settlement.
Read more about this topic: Cayuga People
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