The land that became the Town of Clay lies at the heart of one of the most consequential political experiments in human history. For centuries before European contact, the Onondaga Nation -- Ononada'gega', the "People of the Hills" -- occupied the central position in the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, the alliance of nations that governed a territory stretching from the Hudson Valley to the Great Lakes 12. The Onondaga were designated Keepers of the Fire, maintaining the symbolic central hearth of the confederacy's metaphorical longhouse. The Grand Council convened on Onondaga land, and the Tadodaho -- the chief arbitrator of the confederacy -- was always an Onondaga sachem 2.
The confederacy's founding, traditionally attributed to the Great Peacemaker (Deganawidah), Hiawatha, and Jigonhsasee (the Mother of Nations), established the Great Law of Peace -- a constitution governing fifty sachems representing clans across the five original nations 1. The founding date remains debated, but oral traditions reference a solar eclipse during Seneca deliberations about joining, and the most probable eclipse occurred in 1142 AD 2. The Peacemaker brought the nations together on the shores of Onondaga Lake, where the Tree of Peace was planted on Onondaga soil 3.
Within this confederacy's domain, the waterways of present-day Clay held special significance. Three Rivers Point, at the confluence of the Oneida and Seneca Rivers, served as a gathering place where the nations met to deliberate matters of peace and war. Clark's 1849 history records that at this spot, the renowned Onondaga orators "Dekanissora, Sadekanaghte and Garangula addressed the braves of the Hurons and Adirondacks, and the Abenaquis" 4. At Caughdenoy, in the northeast corner of what is now Clay, the Onondaga trapped eels in the Oneida River -- the place name itself means "where the eels lie down" in the Onondaga language 67. At Oak Orchard, along the river, lay an extensive burial ground that early settlers found contained scores of skulls, many pierced with bullet holes and marked with sabre cuts, evidence of a massacre during the colonial wars 5.
The Haudenosaunee's power was formidable. During the Beaver Wars of 1609 to 1701, the confederacy defeated the Huron, Petun, Neutral Nation, Erie, and Susquehannock peoples to control the fur trade 1. At its peak around 1700, Iroquois territory extended across present-day New York, into Ontario and Quebec, and southward through Pennsylvania into the Ohio Valley 1. But European diseases had already begun their devastation: smallpox epidemics reduced the Haudenosaunee population by at least 50 percent by the 1640s 1.
The American Revolution proved catastrophic. The conflict fractured the confederacy itself -- the Oneida and Tuscarora supported the colonists, while the Mohawk, Cayuga, Onondaga, and most Seneca sided with the British 1. The Onondaga initially maintained neutrality, but after American forces attacked their primary village on April 20, 1779, they joined the British cause 2. George Washington then ordered the Sullivan-Clinton Campaign of 1779, a scorched-earth expedition that destroyed at least forty Haudenosaunee towns, burned stored crops, and left thousands of Indigenous people destitute 18. The 1783 Treaty of Paris made no provisions whatsoever for Iroquois interests. By 1784, approximately 6,000 Haudenosaunee faced 240,000 New Yorkers 1.
What followed was systematic dispossession. The New York State Legislature carved the Military Tract from Haudenosaunee territory, awarding nearly two million acres to Revolutionary War veterans 8. Between 1788 and 1822, the Onondaga Nation lost possession of approximately 95 percent of its land through a series of treaties that the Nation has since contested as unlawful 89. The 1788 Treaty of Fort Stanwix, negotiated without federal oversight as required by the Indian Trade and Intercourse Act, stripped away vast acreage 3. The clay soils and river bottoms where Onondaga families had fished, farmed, and held council for generations became military tract lots numbered and distributed by lottery to men who had never seen them.
Today the Onondaga Nation maintains a small reservation south of Syracuse, and the Grand Council still meets there. In 2005 the Nation filed a federal land rights action seeking acknowledgment of title to over 3,000 square miles of ancestral lands centering on Syracuse 2. In 2022, 1,023 acres were returned to the Onondaga Nation -- a fraction of what was taken, but a recognition that the story of this land did not begin in 1827 2.