Anonymous Works: March 2011

Monday, March 21, 2011

Circa 1841 Tonawanda Seneca False Face Staff

Available at Cowan's. UPDATE: Sold for $11,000.00 (w/o premium).

Here's the auction house description:

Finely carved with head of cane featuring a slightly closed hand holding a red painted false face maskette; body of cane is wrapped with two snakes, the smaller of the two eats a frog; engraved on the head of the larger snake is G.A.M. 1841, probably for George Moses, an important Seneca headman; large brass ferrule, total length 32.5 in.
ca 1841

In 1838, officers from the Ogden Land Company persuaded Six Nations chiefs to sign the Treaty of Buffalo Creek; the agreement sold the remaining Seneca lands (500,000 acres, the reservations of the Allegheny, Callarausus, Tonawanda, and Buffalo Creek) to the Company via the US Government. The Seneca were then moved west (much the way the Cherokee were removed from their homelands) to Kansas to claim their 1.8 million acres which the government had set aside for them. According to Lewis Henry Morgan, the treaty was "carried out with a degree of wickedness hardly to be paralleled in the history of human avarice." In response to this, the Seneca, with the help of Quaker missionaries petitioned the treaty.(For information on the Seneca see Bruce Johansen and Barbara Mann, editors for the Encyclopedia of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Confederacy) published by Greenwood Press in 2000; Morgan's quote is on page 34.)

As a result, another treaty was drawn up in 1842, the Second Treaty of Buffalo Creek or the Compromise Treaty. This document saved the Allegheny and Cattaraugus reservations, but confirmed the sale of Buffalo Creek and the Tonawanda lands.

The Seneca living at Tonawanda had not participated in these negotiations and refused to abide by this treaty as well. They separated themselves from the rest of the Seneca nation and became the Tonawanda Band of Seneca. The Chiefs at Tonawanda then began work on retaining title to their reservation.

It is believed that this staff belonged to George Moses, a Seneca who lived on the Tonawanda reservation. George Moses, as a headman, signed these treaties and protests.

Original owner purchased cane from the Moses family, Tonawanda Reservation