Autumn 1833, Niagara River. Lumber businessmen Stephen White and Lewis F. Allen on an inspection of Grand Island and Tonawanda Island. An imagined scene based on documented people, places and circumstances.
The sidewheel steamer churned the emerald water. Stephen White and Lewis F. Allen of the East Boston Timber Comany stood at the forward rail of the promenade deck, dressed, as always—indeed, almost since they were out of swaddling—in crisp dark coats, waistcoats and trousers. Along the riverbanks, beyond the pale-yellow willows at the water’s edge, maples burned orange among bronze beeches and dark hemlocks. On Grand Island, the great white oaks had only begun to turn, wine-colored at their crowns and still green beneath.
As they approached the much smaller island (currently known as “Carney’s Island”) a following wind drove the steamer’s smoke and vapor across their view. For several moments they saw only fragments of the shore: trees, a strip of pebbly beach, the roof of Carney’s cabin. Then the plume thinned and disclosed the great swelling of earth beyond it.
Stephen White gripped the rail and leaned forward as far as his judgment would permit. “Well—what in Creation do you make of that?”
Allen pressed his gloved fingertips together and raised one shaggy eyebrow. “An Indian mound, I should think. I told you it was prominent. It makes a picturesque object from the river, though the summit wants shaping.”
“Prominent? It is colossal.” White began to laugh. “Pilot, put her in toward the head!”
Allen continued to survey the shore. “The cabin is of no consequence. As for the mound, we might carry a walk around it. A small plantation here would soften the slope—or perhaps take several feet from the summit and build a ramp for—”
White no longer heard him.
Behind them stood the wealth of Grand Island: rank upon rank of immense white oak, some already shaped by nature into the knees, curves and compass timbers coveted by shipbuilders. He saw the trees felled and squared, the new mill driving its gangs of saws, the canal bearing the timber eastward toward Albany, New York and Boston. He saw docks, storehouses, workmen’s cottages and an island settlement rising around the enterprise.
Before him, the ancient mound loomed over a bluff. White did not take it for an obstacle, much less a warning. It appeared instead as a monument already raised at the entrance to his prospective domain—as though the island had been awaiting him.
“No, no,” White said. “We’ll leave it. It’s perfect.”
Native traces
The first white settlers of the Tonawandas encountered evidence of Native life all around them. Near the mouth of Tonawanda Creek, nineteenth-century plowing exposed an acre of flint chips, broken points and unfinished tools. Around Goundry Street and Payne Avenue, residents also reported “numerous” arrowheads and pieces of flint. In 1884, two human skeletons were uncovered during construction of the DeGraff mansion there; four years later, workers digging the cellar for Charles Weston’s house on the opposite corner found more remains. All were believed at the time to be Native, leading some to conclude that this fashionable enclave of lumbermen’s mansions had once been an “Indian” burying-ground. The most striking discovery of all, however—and the one that attracted the most sustained attention and inspired the wildest flights of fantasy—was the feature rising near Tonawanda Island’s southern end: a great Native burial mound.
Stephen White’s Beechwater mansion
Bones and all
While doing business on Grand Island, Stephen White of Boston purchased or leased Tonawanda Island, mound, bones and all. White built an incongruously lavish mansion there at great expense in 1835, dubbing it “Beechwater.” The burial mound was incorporated into the surrounding pleasure grounds, amid the fruit trees, ornamental shrubs and walking paths.
Digging for relics
The burial mound was hardly preserved as a respectful feature of the landscape. By 1849, it had already been reduced to six or eight feet, its center excavated “at different periods, in search of relics,” according to Orsamus Turner’s Pioneer History of the Holland Purchase. A “large number of human bones,” together with arrows, beads, hatchets and other objects, had been carried away. The genteel White household that cultivated the grounds and entertained Daniel Webster also appears to have treated the burial as its own cabinet of curiosities.
The so-called “giant” chief
Stephen White died in 1841, shortly after his timber company declared bankruptcy. Beechwater was immediately offered for lease and operated by White’s widow, Mary (his second wife). She was said to have dug out the skull and bones of a giant human body from the mound with her own hands. The remains were afterward displayed as those of an eight-foot “Indian chief,” on the authority of unnamed “scientific men.” Such discoveries encouraged speculation that the mound had been built by a race of ancient Goliaths—or some other vanished civilization. According to modern mysteriophile Mason Winfield, sensational accounts in frontier newspapers claimed at least two “very bizarre skulls” were excavated from the enclosure, with a “portentous, protruding lower jaw and canine forehead,” and buried in a way inconsistent with the traditions of the locals. I have not located these accounts, but if nothing else, Winfield’s interest shows the fascination the mound continues to hold.
The mound remained an item of public curiosity, attracting a visit from pioneering archaeologist and journalist E. G. Squier.
Archaeological analysis
What E. G. Squier found
In the autumn of 1848, E. G. Squier—a self-educated journalist, antiquarian and pioneering field archaeologist—came to the Buffalo area while surveying the ancient earthworks of Western New York. He published his findings the following year, including this description of the island mound:
I was fortunate enough to discover one upon Tonawanda Island, in Niagara River, which had escaped [relic hunters’] midnight attentions. It was originally about fifteen feet in height. At the base appeared to have been a circle of stones, perhaps ten feet in diameter, within which were several small heaps of bones, each comprising three or four skeletons. The bones are of individuals of all ages, and had evidently been deposited after the removal of the flesh. Traces of fire were to be discovered upon the stones. Some chippings of flint and broken arrow-points, as also some fragments of deers’ horns, which appeared to have been worked into form, were found amongst the bones.
Aboriginal Monuments of the State of New York, Smithsonian Institution (1849)
Squier’s claim that the mound had escaped the “midnight attentions” of relic hunters is difficult to square with Turner’s report that its center had already been dug into “at different periods,” Whatever its condition when Squier arrived, enough remained for him to recognize a deliberate communal burial: several grouped deposits of human bones whose flesh had been removed (or had decayed) before placement, representing people of all ages, enclosed within a ring of stones. He tentatively connected this “secondary burial” practice to the Northern Iroquoian “Feast of the Dead,” though the connection is at best distant one.
A relic of the Neutral (Attawandaron) people?
An 1865 presentation before the Buffalo Historical Society claims the mound is of Neutral (also known as “Attawandaron”) origin. The Neutrals were a Northern Iroquoian people whose principal villages lay west of the Niagara River. They were essentially wiped out by the Seneca by the 1650s (already weakened by disease and famine). In 1909, Niagara Frontier archaeologist Frederick Houghton also attributed the mound to the Neutral. The evidence is thin. The Neutrals were known to practice secondary burial, but so did many Northern Iroquoian peoples, and the mound produced no specific artifacts to positively ID its builders or time period it was built.
Still, unless new evidence emerges, Houghton’s attribution is probably as close as we will come to identifying the builders of the Tonawanda Island mound. Squier had examined it while it still stood, but no modern archaeological excavation ever would. Within forty years, the island’s transformation into an industrial lumber district erased the mound—and maybe whatever evidence remained beneath it.
Tonawanda Island transformed by the lumber market
Tonawanda Island is soon swallowed whole by the lumber business. In 1886, Smith, Fassett & Company purchased the island from William Wilkeson for $45,000. The natural harbor formed by Tonawanda Island and the Little River was perfect for stacking, processing and moving around lumber.
Smith and Fassett promised to reserve twenty acres around the old mansion for residential use. Fassett and his wife moved into the renovated mansion. One of the new owners even declared that they would keep “the inroads of business” from encroaching upon the mound. Yet grading was already exposing other human bones across the island, while docks, railroad tracks, factories and lumber yards advanced around the supposedly protected relic. The promise would not hold.
The mound is last measured in 1888; excavated and apparently obliterated in May 1889. The mansion is soon abandoned and believed haunted. It is torn down in April 1907.
Sources
Beauchamp, William M. Aboriginal Occupation of New York. New York State Museum Bulletin 32, vol. 7. Albany: University of the State of New York, 1900.
Houghton, Frederick M. “The Indian Occupancy of the Niagara Frontier.” Bulletin of the Buffalo Society of Natural Sciences 9, no. 3 (1909): 261–375, especially 317 and 324–25.
“In Excavating for the Cellar of Mr. Chas. Weston’s New House.…” Tonawanda Herald, May 24, 1888, p. 3. Reproduced in “Human Remains Discovered in Goundry Street Area,” North Tonawanda History.
“Indian Bones Uncovered.” Buffalo Express, August 14, 1884. Reproduced by North Tonawanda History.
Noble, William C., and Michelle Filice. “Neutral Confederacy.” The Canadian Encyclopedia, March 14, 2016.
Squier, Ephraim George. Aboriginal Monuments of the State of New-York: Comprising the Results of Original Surveys and Explorations, with an Illustrative Appendix. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1850.
Squier, Ephraim George. “Ancient Monuments in the United States.” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 20, no. 120 (May 1860): 737–753.
“Tonawanda Island: Its Origin and Early Occupants, Both Red and White.” Buffalo Courier, October 9, 1887. Reproduced by North Tonawanda History.
“Tonawanda, or White’s Island.” Gleason’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion, 1853. Reproduced by North Tonawanda History.
Turner, Orsamus. Pioneer History of the Holland Purchase of Western New York. Buffalo: Jewett, Thomas & Co., 1849.
“Tuesday Forenoon the Bones of a Skeleton.…” Tonawanda Herald, August 7, 1884, p. 3. Reproduced in “Human Remains Discovered in Goundry Street Area,” North Tonawanda History.
White, Marian E. “The Orchid Site Ossuary, Fort Erie, Ontario.” Bulletin of the New York State Archeological Association, no. 38 (November 1966): 1–23.
White, Marian E. “On Delineating the Neutral Iroquois of the Eastern Niagara Peninsula of Ontario.” Ontario Archaeology 17 (1972): 62–74.
Winfield, Mason. “The Search for the Lost Giants (in WNY), Part 2.” Buffalo Rising, February 15, 2015. Accessed July 27, 2026.
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