What’s in a Name?: The Connection Between the Native Americans and the Streets of Buffalo, 1802-1857
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Deirdre Reynolds Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.buffalostate.edu/exposition Part of the Social History Commons Recommended Citation Reynolds, Deirdre (2015) "What's in a Name?: The C onnection Between the Native Americans and the Streets of Buffalo,
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What’s in a Name?: The Connection Between the Native Americans and the Streets of Buffalo,
1802-1857
By Deirdre Reynolds
On 25 July 1797, Theophile Cazenove, the General Agent of the Holland Land Company,
wrote a letter to his agent in the Philadelphia, Joseph Ellicott. Its purpose was to inform Ellicott
of his instructions for the upcoming treaty with the Seneca Indians regarding the sale of their
lands to the company. Instead of being worded generally, asking to make advantageous deals in
the neutral legalese expected by modern corporations, Ellicott was instructed to “obtain [the]
Indian title of the greatest quantity of [the] best lands,” and to “[liberate the land] from the Indian
claim.”1 Cazenove’s instructions left little room for doubt: the agent wanted the prime land
holdings of the Seneca Indians in order to develop what became known as the city of Buffalo.
Though this was a common attitude for land companies of the time, it foreshadowed the future
relations between the Indians and the city of Buffalo. What started off as seemingly friendly
relations soon deteriorated into mutual hostility and distrust, with both sides struggling fiercely
for the right to live on the disputed lands. As this fighting continued over the course of 55 years,
various streets in the city were named after Native American names and words in the attempt to
both mask the cooling of relations between the two groups and strip the Native Americans of
their cultural indigeneity.
Street names are an important link to the history of an area, its values, and what it wishes to
emphasize as its heritage. Street names serve as a memorial to the “official” version of history,
and as soon as they no longer represent the values the city wishes to highlight, the names are
changed for those which do. The evolution of the street names in Buffalo indicate an attempt to
1 Theophile Cazenove to Joseph Ellicott, July 25, 1797, Reports of Joseph Ellicott, Buffalo and Erie County
Research Library, Buffalo, NY.
mask the tense diplomatic relations between the Native American tribes and the city of Buffalo,
and to make the Native Americans irrelevant to the white-dominated world, as seen through the
city’s formative period of 1802 to 1857.
When discussing the evolution of the city of Buffalo, most specifically in the discussion
of street names, the location of an end date is problematic. As the city was founded in 1802,
the beginning date is logical, and certainly in the case of street names makes sense. The first
logical c
ut off point is 1830
, when the city was incorporated. This is when the city plan was
approved by the federal government, and major changes to the city plan rarely occur.
However, in discussing the evolution of street names, this end point is rather early on in the
historical narrative, and does not take into account the changing government or the effect of
the Erie Canal, implemented in 1825 and highly influential until approximately 1880. Also
integral to the narrative of the relations between Native Americans and Buffalo and their
effect on street names are the Seneca. The Seneca had a tumultuous relationship with the
city of Buffalo, and as such there are a number of important dates for them. However, the
most important date in terms of land claims is 1857, when the Senecas successfully won a
court battle to stay on their reservation, rather than be shipped off to Kentucky and have their
reservation appropriated for use by the city. This is the lowest point in the relations between
the two groups in Buffalo’s early period, so it stands to reason that this is the impetus for
many of the street name changes. As such, it will be used as the ending date for the period in
question.
Although memorials and street names have existed for many years, only recently have
historians begun looking at the correlations between memorials, street names, monuments, and
other forms of public commemoration in any serious depth. The objects chosen, in any form, are
used to remember or celebrate a specific part of the society’s past. However, although historians
throughout the last hundred years have informally addressed this topic, only in the past ten years
has there been a more serious interest taken in these topics.
The consensus among most historians is memorials and monuments are named with the
needs and desires of the present society in mind, rather than straight history. The editors Daniel
J. Walkowitz and Lisa Maya Knauer in their collection of (...truncated)