There's "Injuns" in the Valley!

It is the spring of 1913 in March, a boy’s dream happen along Whitemans Creek. Smoke rising from what is called the “Little Field” caught the attention of two boys, Shirley and Roy Davis.
Being their farm, they went to investigate.

At the corner of the field was a wigwam… and as they approached the flap opened and out stepped an Indian with rabbit snares in his hand. Through the tent doorway they could see a smoldering fire surrounded by flat rocks. On top sat two black kettles. Behind, was a cedar bough bed with blankets on top.

The boys brought vegetables to their visitor which he added to his rabbit stew. One day they brought a syrup pail with fresh milk. The Indian poured the milk into his smaller black pot. He put small sticks around the inside rim, threw a hide over it and left it outside to freeze. When he wanted milk he chopped out small pieces.

Their visitor stayed for over two weeks trapping muskrat, snaring rabbits and fishing along the creek. One day when they came to visit, everything was gone… no rocks… no boughs… no wigwam poles. There was not a sign of their visitor ever being there.

This is a photo taken of the "Little Field" along Whitemans November, 2008

In the spring of 1914 the boys daily checked the “Little Field” for the return of their friend… and one morning, there he was. And that was the last spring he was ever seen on the creek.

Around this same period Bob Milburn, just up the road experienced this. One day while down in the barn doing milking there was a knocking at the outside stall door. When Bob opened the door… there stood an Indian with a big fish. The Indian gave Bob the fish and left.

Artifacts collected along Whitemans Creek

The Secret Room… Tom Longboat’s Garage… Aunt Pearl’s Gang of Indians.

In 1905 when our Pottruff family moved to live in the Major Burrowe’s residence overlooking the mouth of Whiteman’s, they found a unique feature… a secret hiding room. As you went up the stairs there was a landing half ways. On this landing was a big built-in closet where the floor lifted up into a small cell room below. There was a breathing pipe through the wall. No one knows why Burrows built it… but one story is that he hid a white man there that the Indians were searching.

This is the Major Burrowes home overlooking the mouth of Whitemans built 1844, torn down by Five Oaks to stop Six Nations from their claim that the house was theirs.

Also in 1905 on the Burrowe’s estate… Tom Longboat with his mother and father moved into the old garage, fixed it up and installed a stove. They lived there for two years. Tom was 18 at the time and often in the evening Tom would run to Brantford and back. His goal was to qualify for the Boston Marathon. My great uncles, Clarence & Earnest, 14 & 13 years, tried to run with him… but never lasted.

But Tom made his mark:

On April 19, 1907, against snow, rain, slush, the tough hills of the old course and 125 other entrants, Tom Longboat won the Boston Marathon in the record time of 2:24:24, a new record by five and a half minutes, the equivalent of a mile of running. It had become the fastest time ever made in a marathon race in all sports history. This new record was not to be broken until the course was made easier.

A stone axe head from Attawandaron times

But my favorite story that I heard as a child was my “Aunt Pearl and her jalopy full of Indians visitors.

It was in the early 1930’s in September, Aunt Pearl and her daughters where cooking up a big dinner for a crew of men working on the farm, when her one daughter came rushing in wide-eyed. “Mom, there’s a carload of Indians coming up the drive!" Aunt Pearl stepped out and watched four men and one very old woman get out of a worn old Ford and slowly come to the door.

At the door the old lady said “I am Catherine Silver and I have come to eat dinner at my house”. The men said nothing. Aunt Pearl invited them in. The woman said she was 97 years old and that the Indians owed all the land around here and out to Burford. She then pulled out an old deed that was as yellow as a duck’s foot. And sure enough it was to the land that Aunt Pearl was on.

She then said “As long as one of us walks through this land once a year for 99 years… it is our land.

Aunt Pearl asked why had they left?

The woman said “A plague came, Indians would sit and in five minutes drop dead. They were buried where ever they dropped. Finally the ones left got scared and went Lake Superior way, and when the next generation came back, the land was taken”.

Aunt Pearl invited them for dinner since there was lots of food. After dinner the old lady walked alone outside with Pearl between the house and the bluff of the Grand. She did not want the men to hear.

“My ancestors are buried right out here and pointed to one of the low spots. There is a pot of gold buried by a white man here. His daughter fell in love with an Indian which he had forbidden. When the rich white man was walking across a log over the creek an Indian hit him on the head with a stick and he drowned.” Then she pointed at this big old multi-root elm and said “the treasure is there buried at the end of the roots”.

Aunt Pearl said there was always Indians walking across the land.

The plague Catherine Silvers was talking about was cholera… and the Iroquois did leave… the Smoke, Jamieson family and others. When they came back, they found a white squatters living in their homes. The first known white squatters at the creek mouth were Enos and Alexander Bunnel who ended up running a mill in Brantford.

As rare and sought after as the sacred white buffalo... a quartz white arrowhead

Other Loose Strands of History

The mouth of Whitemans was a spring fishing spot where Indians would camp and fish. Fishing was very good from Apps Mill down to the mouth. Jack Migill. born 1877 mentions that as a boy he helped an Indian at the fish camp pull straw from a straw stack for his bed.

Jack also talks about memories of the “honest Gypsies” that would come in the summer by wagons from Hamilton, block off the old Tollgate road and camp there. During the day they would travel by wagon selling pots and pans and whatever they could trade. These gypsies were very gifted at handling horses… and often visited the Six Nations to do horse trading.

Upstream of Whitemans there is the Indian Field which was a village burial ground area for the Iroquoian Attawandarons of the 14th century. Further up is another Attawandaron village and the village grindstone is still there in the ground. The Attawandarons had a very large camp at the mouth of Whitemans which the visiting French Jesuits called “the Camp of the Angels. By 1540 European traded goods were in the valley though a European had yet to visit.

Uncle Ernest, one day when digging a post hole hit a steel plate, when he lifted it up there were bones underneath. Albert Weir also dug up a human skull when installing a water pipe line at the Five Oaks Center above Whitemans.

An assortment of flint chert arrowheads

In the fall of 2007 I had the pleasure of taking a Jamieson (a senior Cayuga Iroquois) on a Grand River rafting trip. When we met to start our rafting trip... he asked what he was suppose to do? He had never been down the river in his life. As we drifted I told him about the history and interaction between the Attawandarons, Ojibwa and Five Nations, which he thoroughly enjoyed.