Apples on the Border: Orchards and the Contest for the Great Lakes by William Kerrigan In the fall of 1791 Elkanah Watson toured western New York, searching for real-estate opportunities. Ten years earlier there had been few white setdements in this region; itwas the heart of Iroquois country. But the American Revolution had shattered the power of the Six Nations. The war had forced many Iroquois to flee to Canada; others remained inNew York, but they found themselves eking out a living on bounded treaty lands?reservations that would continue to shrink in size during the next several decades as white settlers' demand for these lands increased. Attempting to take full advantage of this situation, Watson had come to the region intent on making a fortune speculating in land, which he expected would soon fill up with white settiers. While searching for desirable land on an early September morning, Watson discovered evidence of the recent war. Climbing into a small boat inGeneva, New York, he had crossed Seneca Lake to the site of a former Seneca Indian village. "We pitched our tent atApple-town, a fine tract of land, formerly the headquarters of the Seneca nation. It contains extensive orchards of scattering old trees, the only fruit trees in the country." Watson could find no sign of the Seneca in or around Apple town, but all about him lay evidence of the disaster which had befallen them. "Many of the trees are girdled, and marks of the destructive axe of the soldiery are yet to be seen in every direction. The S?necas were, formerly, a powerful nation," Watson asserted, but "not a vestige [of the Seneca nation] is now to be seen in this vicinity." Instead, the site of the former Seneca capital was rapidly filling up with white setders, and "we were astonished to see one hundred and fifty people collected at a meeting here. This is a prelude to the assembling of thousands, who are destined shordy to possess these fertile regions."1 The following year Maj. William McMahon crossed into the Ohio Country and traveled down the Tuscarawas River Valley. Gen. 1Elkanah Watson, Men and Times of the Revolution, or Memoirs ofElkanah Watson (New York: Dana and Co., 1856), 307-8. Michigan Historical Review 34:1 (Spring 2008): 25-41 ?2008 by Central Michigan University. ISSN 0890-1686 All Rights Reserved. 26 Michigan Historical Review Anthony Wayne had sent him on a scouting mission to assess Indian strength in the region. Although white setders were already pouring into the Ohio Country in 1792, the fertile bottomlands of the Tuscarawas were still Indian country, and violence between the Native Americans who resided there and the encroaching whites was escalating. In the previous three years, two attempts to crush Indian resistance to white setdement in the region had been foiled by Indian forces. Traveling down the Tuscarawas River in the late summer of 1792, McMahon encountered the remains of three abandoned Moravian Delaware setdements at Schoenbrunn, Gnadenhutten, and Salem. He noted that "peach trees at the three places bore an abundance of peaches, but nearly all the branches had been broken down by bears." At Gnadenhutten, where Scots-Irish frontiersmen had methodically murdered ninety Delaware converts in cold blood just ten years earlier, McMahon discovered "the best apples he had ever tasted."2 Two years later, Anthony Wayne would launch the third invasion of the Ohio Country. One week before the decisive Battle of Fallen Timbers, Wayne stopped at the confluence of the Maumee and the Au Glaize rivers to regroup and establish Fort Defiance. The place where these rivers came together was also the site of a large Wyandot Indian village, and Wayne noted that the cornfields planted there seemed to stretch on forever, but also that there were extensive peach and apple orchards at the location.3 The Seneca village of Apple-town, the Moravian Delaware communities along the Tuscarawas, and theWyandot community along the Au Glaize were three scenes of action in the larger story of the contest for control of the Great Lakes region. What they shared most obviously is that they were places where Native Peoples of the region suffered terrible, violent...