LITTLE BEARD’S HISTORY
There’s a little stream that winds through the lowlands down Cuylerville-Leicester.
A roadside sign tells the traveler that here is Little Beard’sCreek
Thus is the name of a Seneca Chief, powerful in his time, perpetuated in his old realm in the Genesee Country. Little Beard lived near what is now Cuylerville and there before the Revolution stood the most important stronghold of the Senecas, known as Genesee Castile or Little Beard’s Town. It was to this town that the Indians and their Tory leaders dragged the captured soldiers of Sullivan’s army, Boyd and Parker, to be tortured to death. It was this big town that Sullivan wiped out as the finale of his campaign. After the Revolution, a tract there was set aside as the Little Beard Reservation.
Little Beard had a reputation for cruelty and ferocity in battle but in peace he was described as amiable and he made friends with the white settlers after the war. He was a fluent speaker although not a great orator and was influential at the council fire. He was a straight and slender man of medium height.
He came to an ignoble end. During a drunken brawl in a Leicester tavern in 1808, the chief was thrown out the door and sustained mortal injuries. A few days after his death, there was an eclipse of the sun, something that generation of Indians had never seen. They were terrified and assembled, beating their drums and singing. Believing that the spirit of Little Beard, on its way up the heavenly path, had obscured the sun, they shot their bullets and arrows skyward until the brightness was restored.
From ”Land of the Senecas” by Arch Merrill
From Wikipedia
Little Beard
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Little Beard, Si-gwa-ah-doh-gwih ("Spear Hanging Down") (died 1806), was a Seneca chief who participated in the American Revolutionary War on the side of Great Britain. After the war, he became reconciled[citation needed] with the outcome and continued to reside in New York.
His village, Little Beard's Town was located near two other Seneca villages in modern Leicesterin Livingston County, New York, and consisted of about 130 houses. Little Beard participated in the Cherry Valley massacre of 1778, and presided over the torture and death of Boyd and Parker, captured scouts of the Sullivan Expedition of 1779. Subsequently, Little Beard's Town was destroyed by the American forces. Mary Jemison, then a resident of the village, fled with the natives to more secure villages. The modern town of Cuylerville was built at the spot.
Little Beard was one of the Seneca chiefs signing the Treaty of Canandaigua of 1794 that established some reservations for the Iroquois. He was also a signatory to the Treaty of Big Treein 1797 that opened up Western New York for settlement. He died as the result of injuries received during a brawl at a tavern in 1806.