The Dawn Country

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Table of Contents

Title Page
Copyright Notice
Nonfiction Introduction
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-one
Twenty-two
Twenty-three
Twenty-four
Twenty-five
Twenty-six
Twenty-seven
Twenty-eight
Twenty-nine
Thirty
Thirty-one
Thirty-two
Thirty-three
Thirty-four
Thirty-five
Thirty-six
Thirty-seven
Thirty-eight
Thirty-nine
Forty
Forty-one
Forty-two
Forty-three
Forty-four
Forty-five
Forty-six
Forty-seven
Forty-eight
Forty-nine
Fifty
Epilogue
BY KATHLEEN O’NEAL GEAR AND W. MICHAEL GEAR FROM TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES
The Broken Land
- A PEOPLE OF THE LONGHOUSE NOVEL
Places to Visit
Selected Bibliography
About the Authors
Copyright Page

To Mike D. O’Neal in memory of the lost years
when we didn’t get to see each other.
It’s great to have you back in this world.

Nonfiction Introduction

A
s those of you who read the introduction for
People of the Longhouse
know, during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the size of Iroquois villages began to grow. Archaeologists call this “population aggregation,” meaning that more and more people were crowding together within the palisaded walls of villages. We see these expanded longhouses at places like the Furnace Brook and Howlett Hill sites in New York, where archaeologists excavated houses that were 210 and 334 feet long. This Middle Iroquoian period also saw the people becoming increasingly dependent upon maize-bean-squash agriculture. As in historic times, men cleared the fields, built the houses, and hunted, while women were the farmers. They cultivated the soil, planted, tended the fields, harvested and stored the crops. When women began to account for more and more of the food, their lineages also probably became the dominant social avenue for prestige.

At around AD 1400, the first evidence for individual tribes appears. Differences in pottery styles, burial customs, and types of houses demonstrate divisions between Iroquoian groups. As well, small villages began to amalgamate with larger ones, forming cohesive social groups, or, we suspect, nations.

AD 1400 is also the time when the Iroquois were building the most impressive longhouses, and many were elaborately fortified. At the Schoff site outside of Onondaga, New York, the people constructed a longhouse 400 feet long, 22 feet wide, and nearly as tall. The palisaded settlement may have housed 1,500 to 2,000 people, consisting of many different clans.

For archaeologists, this type of aggregation is a telltale sign of interpersonal violence. Simply put, people crowd together for defensive purposes. Cannibalism also first appears in the Iroquoian archaeological record at this point, in the form of cut and cooked human bones.

The Dawn Country
takes place at this critical moment in time.

Why did warfare break out? The fact that the climate had grown cooler and drier certainly contributed to the violence. We know that droughts were more frequent, growing seasons shorter, and we can tell from the skeletal remains that food shortages were more common. Larger villages deplete resources at a faster rate. Game populations, nut forests, firewood, and fertile soils would all have played out more quickly, which means the Iroquois must have had to move their villages more often. Moving may have brought them into conflict with neighbors just as desperate for the food resources.

At the Alhart site in the Oak Orchard Creek drainage in western New York, archaeologists found evidence of burned longhouses and food, and the dismembered remains of seventeen people—most of them male. Historically, it was common practice for women and children to either be killed on site, or taken captive and marched away while the male warriors were tortured to death. The fragments of a child’s skull were found in one storage pit at the Alhart site, and the skull of a woman in another storage pit. As well, fifteen male skulls were found in a storage pit on top of charred corn, and were probably placed there as severed heads, in the flesh. Some of them were burned. Two had suffered blows to the front of the head. These are just a few examples of warfare. For more detailed information, please read the nonfiction introduction to
People of the Longhouse
.

Let’s take a few moments to discuss the Iroquoian perspective on captives. By the l400s, as it was in historic times, warfare and raiding for captives was probably the most important method of gaining prestige in Northern Iroquoian societies. When a person died, the spiritual power of the clan was diminished, especially if that person had been a community leader. The places of missing family members literally remained vacant until they could be “replaced,” and their spiritual power—which was embodied in their name—transferred to another person.

Historical records tell us that during the 1600s, the Iroquois dispatched war parties whose sole intent was to bring home captives to replace family members and restore the spiritual strength of the clans. These were called “mourning wars.” Clan matrons usually organized the war parties and ordered their warriors to bring them captives suitable for adoption to assuage their grief and restock the village. When the captives arrived in the village, they were stripped, bound hand and foot, and forced to run a gauntlet where they were struck with clubs, burned with firebrands, cut with knives—but not killed.

After the torture, the tribal council assigned the captives to families that had lost loved ones to the enemy. Sometimes prisoner exchanges occurred, and the captives were returned to their own peoples, but usually one of two things happened: They were either adopted into their new family, or the adoptive family could condemn the captive to death by torture. If he was adopted, he
might
be given the name and title of the dead person he replaced. Such adoptees underwent the Requickening Ceremony. In this ritual, the dead person’s soul was “raised up” and transferred to the captive, along with his or her name.

This may seem odd to modern readers, but keep the religious context in mind. The Iroquois believed that each person had two souls. While specific traditions vary slightly, in general, the afterlife soul of those who died violently could not find the Path of Souls in the sky that led to the Land of the Dead. They were excluded from joining their ancestors in the afterlife and doomed to spend eternity wandering the earth. The souls of men and women killed in battles that were not “raised up” were believed, according to some Seneca traditions, to move into trees. It was these trees with indwelling warrior spirits that the People cut to serve as palisade logs, thereby surrounding the village with Standing Warriors.

Iroquoian oral history speaks of this as a particularly brutal time, a time when the Iroquois almost destroyed themselves, and clearly the archaeological record supports their stories.

One

N
ightfall had silenced the mountains. No owls hooted; no trees snapped in the cold wind that swayed the branches. There was only the faint roar of the fire in the distance.

Sonon pulled his black cape more tightly around him and studied the frozen ground. The warriors’ feet had hewn a dark swath through the frost that glittered in the gaudy orange halo. His gaze followed their trail to the burning village. The Dawnland People had called it Bog Willow Village. Yesterday it had contained over one hundred houses.

He hadn’t expected the village to be this bad.

As he walked toward it, ash fell around him like fine flakes of obsidian, coating his cape and long hair, turning them gray. The forty-hand-tall palisade that surrounded the village had burned through in too many places. That had been their doom. They must have watched in horror as the enemy streamed through those gaps and raced across the village, killing everything in their path.

He turned back around to stare at the victory camp. Hundreds of celebrating warriors danced to the sound of drums and flutes. Most were from the Flint or Mountain Peoples, but the war party had contained a few Hills People warriors, too. He knew them from their distinctive tattoos, and the designs painted on their bows and capes. On the far side of the camp, near the river, captive women and children huddled together, shivering, watching their captors with wide stunned eyes. Before dawn came all would be sold and marched away to enemy villages. The lucky ones would be adopted into families and spend the rest of their lives trying to forget this night. The others wouldn’t have to worry about it.