Seneca War Chief Used A War Post to Talley Prisoners and Scalps
Jemison said that to commemorate great events and to preserve the chronology of them, the war chief in each tribe kept a war-post, a peeled stick of timber ten or twelve feet high erected in the town. For a campaign the chief made a perpendicular red mark about three inches long and half an inch wide ; on the opposite side of this, for a scalp, they made a red cross, thus X on another side, for a prisoner taken alive, they make a red cross in this manner ><, with a head or dot."* These hieroglyphics enabled them to represent with no little certainty the facts they wished to record.
Iroquois Prisoners Who Suffered Death at the Torture Stake -Haunt A New York Woods
History of Livingston County, New York, 1870
Standing near the westerly border of the spring, was the fatal post to which the condemned prisoner was fastened for torture ; and hither, from other Seneca towns, was brought captives of consequence, the prisoners of state. Horatio Jones pointed out to John McKay, the precise spot where the post stood, as the two strolled one evening along the Spring creek. "John," said the former, "do you ever see ghosts after nightfall wandering through these woods? If Indian hunters are to be credited, sights are often seen here that would make your hair, rise." The Indian burial-place was located about twenty rods northeast of the spring, where, in digging, wells and cellars, bones in abundance have been disinterred. A venerable lady, yet living, while in pursuit of her cows in an early day, passing near the burial-place observed a grass-grown hillock by the foot-path Thrusting in her walking-stick, she disturbed a quantity of bones from their slight covering, doubtless those of poor captives who had suffered torture at the stake. Articles of pottery, bearing curious devices, copper kettles similar in style to those in use among Spanish colonists, and rudely-formed hatchets and arrowheads, have been met with here.
