Pennsylvania

In a cemetery high on a promontory overlooking the broad waters of the new Allegheny Reservoir in northwestern Pennsylvania stands a stone monument to a once powerful and celebrated Seneca Indian war chief, The Cornplanter, who fought with the British against the Americans during the Revolution, and then became a loyal friend of the United States and a steadfast protector of American families settling in the wilderness of the upper Ohio River basin. The monument has not been at its present site long. In 1964, amid controversy, anger, and the protests of many Seneca Indians, the United States Army Corps of Engineers moved the memorial shaft, together with what was left of the earthly remains of The Cornplanter and more than 300 of his followers and descendants, from an Indian cemetery (“our Arlington,” pleaded a Seneca woman) that was about to be inundated by rising waters behind the engineers’ new Kinzua Dam on the Allegheny River.