Mary Jemison (1743-1833) was born during her parents’ voyage from Ireland to the New World. On their arrival, the Jemison family joined other Scotch-Irish immigrants and settled in Marsh Creek, Pennsylvania. During the French and Indian War in 1758, 15 years old Jemison and her family were captured by a raiding party of Shawnee warriors and French soldiers. They were murdered, and she was sold to the Seneca Indians, who adopted her and named her Dehgewanus – Two Falling Voices. She married a Delaware man, and together with their infant son Thomas, they embarked on a 700-mile walk along the Genesee River to the Sehgahunda Valley. Her husband died on the journey, and the young widow remarried a Seneca man named Hiakatoo, bringing six children with him. During the Revolutionary War, the Senecas allied with the British. The Senecas were forced to cede their lands after the war; thanks to Jemison’s help with the negotiation, her tribe received favorable terms to the Treaty of Big Tree. Jemison, who became known as the White Woman of the Genesee, remained on her 2-acre parcel for a few more years, and in 1831, at the age of 88, she sold her part and moved to the Buffalo Creek Reservation, where she died two years later. Forty years later, the Senecas’ burial ground at Buffalo Creek was destroyed. The owner of the land, William P. Letchworth, accepted the request of Jemison’s grandchildren and brought her remains back home to the banks of the Genesee. In March 1874, her grave was relocated to the grounds of what would become Letchworth State Park and marked by a granite monument. In 1910, the granite became the base of a seven-foot-high bronze statue of her. Created by Henry K. Bush-Brown, it depicts young Jemison, wearing her traditional Seneca clothes, carrying her child Thomas on her back from Ohio to the Genesee Valley. Next to the statue stands the original cabin Jemison built for her daughter Nancy in 1800. The original stone of her grave from Buffalo Creek is preserved in the park’s museum. Another statue of Jemison had been standing near her home in Adams County, Pennsylvania, since 1921. Read more...