By Bill Burk
She knelt by the water, where the tip of Long Point State Park reaches out into Chautauqua Lake. In the small hills behind the peninsula, up where what is now Ellery Center, fires burned, screams and whoops echoed up and down the bluff. This was the end, the dying gasp of a people, of an identity, of her tribe. Anyone who survived the slaughter would be taken into slavery by the marauders.
She was trapped on this narrow spit of land. She could swim across the narrows to the other side of the lake, but there was really no escape, they’d be waiting by the time she reached shore. She couldn’t go back the way she came, there was only one path that led to the opening of the point.
She waded into the shallows.
In a world where information is ubiquitous, it’s amazing that the word Chautauqua doesn’t have an authentic, agreed-upon translation. An etymological search will tell you it has Haudenosaunee origins. -Haudenosaunee being another name for the Iroquois nation- describing something “tied in the middle,” like a bag. That is the general shape of Lake Chautauqua with its northern and southern basins separated by the narrows at Bemus Point and Stow. That crossing is measured in yards, while the widest places, both north and south are around two miles from shore to shore (the lake itself is about seventeen miles end to end). Chautauqua can also refer to everything from indigenous lands in Colorado, to a cultural and educational movement from the late 1800s. That’s a wide swath of interpretation for a single word.
What’s known is that the Erie Indians who occupied our current borders, the original Chautauqua Lakers, were wiped out of existence (along with no fewer than eight other native tribes), by the French and the Iroquois Nation in the Beaver Wars, massacred or taken hostage by the martial factions. Before the people of Europe settled here, the bucolic landscape we know as Chautauqua County saw a fair share of carnage and bloodshed.
The speed with which the Iroquois engulfed regional Indian communities meant that no one had time to do an extensive study of the Erie language, and their native tongue died with them. What’s left are loose translations adopted from leftover Iroquois dialect, hence the word Chautauqua has renditions sweeping from the above mentioned “bag tied in the middle” to the vastly different “place where fish are taken.”
Then there’s the romantic, tragic myth of the Erie Indian Princess.
Legend has it her name was Chautauqua. Chat was a French supplied nickname for the Erie people, meaning “cat,” and Taquan which means “spiritually aware and prone to self-sacrifice.” When her people chose to fight the Iroquois rather than surrender, fool’s errand for the agrarian, mostly peaceful Erie tribe, they were destroyed by the fierce and combinative nation, eradicated as a show of force to discourage other tribes from resisting.
The Iroquois League was known for adopting captives and refugees into their tribes. Any surviving Erie were absorbed by other Iroquoian tribes, particularly families of the Seneca, the westernmost of the Five Nations. Susquehannock families may also have adopted some Erie, as the tribes had shared the hunting grounds of the Allegheny Plateau and Amerindian paths that passed through the gaps of the Allegheny. The members of remnant tribes living among the Iroquois gradually assimilated to the majority cultures, losing their independent tribal identities.
The Erie Indian people simply went away, and with them any coherent, stipulatory meaning of the word Chautauqua.
The Erie Princess Chautauqua waded deeper into cool waters off Long Point. She looked back at the land she knew, her birthplace and home. She pictured the faces of her family, her father, mother, brave brothers, and sisters. All gone now. She knew they wouldn’t survive the slaughter. There was nothing left for her but to commit the ultimate act of Indian royalty, the last great measure.
As the Iroquois warriors (along with French and Haitian mercenaries) approached from land, she repeatedly turned and walked into the depths of the lake. In an act of defiance and sacrifice she drowned herself. And thereby christened the body of water Chautauqua.