Stolen lands, settler dreams
By Rick Cross
Op-ed for the Sun
The story of Jason Cross, my third great-grandfather, cannot be told without understanding the land he settled. That understanding requires confronting the history that made that land available. His journey—from New Hampshire to Vermont, from Vermont to Western New York, and later to Michigan—follows the pattern of a nation moving ever westward. But beneath that familiar pioneer story is a deeper truth, one that came into focus only after I watched Ken Burns’s account of the Sullivan–Clinton Campaign in Episode Five of The American Revolution. That campaign reshaped the very ground Jason later called home.
Jason Cross belonged to the generation shaped in the turmoil of the Revolution and formed on its frontiers. He served in Lieutenant Elijah Stearns’s New Hampshire militia, a company whose work took them into the forests of the upper Connecticut River valley—cutting roads, marking boundaries, and opening a young nation’s interior. When the war ended, he did what many of those frontier-trained young men did: he took up one of the new lots being surveyed in northern Vermont. Lot 16 in Cabot was his beginning.
The librarian in Cabot told me those early lots were no prize—stony slopes, thin soil, hard to clear and harder to keep. “Most of the original grantees didn’t stay long,” she said. Jason didn’t either. He had learned enough about land to recognize when the land was answering back. Vermont offered toil; it did not offer a future.
By the early 1790s the future lay west, in the Genesee Country of New York. The valley of Honeoye Creek, where Jason eventually settled, was unlike anything in northern New England. Deep soil, easy clearing, waterpower, and a landscape already shaped for agriculture. But this richness had a cost. It was not wilderness waiting for settlers—it was the reclaimed homeland of the Seneca people.
Fifteen years earlier, in 1779, as Burns’s film shows, General Sullivan’s troops had marched through this valley, burning forty Seneca towns and destroying an agricultural system that had flourished for centuries. The campaign’s purpose was not military victory—it was removal. Within a few years, treaties compelled the Seneca to cede vast tracts of their homeland, and the Phelps & Gorham Purchase opened the land to newcomers like Jason.
Jason arrived in 1794 and married Mary Moon in what local history describes as the first wedding at Norton’s Mills. That mill stood beside a creek the Seneca had once used for their fields, orchards, and longhouses. Jason built his life on land cleared long before he arrived, made “available” only by the unmaking of another people’s world. He probably never thought of it this way. Most settlers didn’t. They saw good soil, running water, and a chance to start again.
But in retracing his steps, I can see what he could not. Jason was not a conqueror; he was a beneficiary of a chain of events far larger than himself—war, dispossession, survey lines, migration tides. His story is not separate from the story Burns tells; it is one of its outcomes. And like so many frontier families, his children repeated the arc: from New York to Michigan, pushing ahead as new lands were opened and old ones were left behind.
Four generations of his descendants, including my parents, are buried beside him at Cherry Hill Cemetery. This is not just a family plot but the imprint of a nation expanding westward, one decision, one clearing, one farm at a time. Beneath Jason’s feet was a land reshaped by forces he did not command but from which he undeniably benefitted. Understanding that doesn’t diminish him; it places him in history—fully, honestly, and humanely.
Jason’s story reminds me that the American frontier was never a blank canvas but a layered one—new lives written over older ones, new beginnings rising where others had already taken root. The Revolution did not simply open land; it opened absences, and into those absences stepped men like Jason, often without understanding the deeper history beneath their feet.
Standing at his grave in Cherry Hill Cemetery, I’m struck by how ordinary his intentions were. He wasn’t trying to shape a continent—he was trying to survive, to farm, to create a life for his family. Yet his choices placed him at the hinge point of a nation expanding westward, its progress built on both hope and harm. Seeing that complexity does not diminish him. If anything, it brings him into clearer focus. It reminds me that history lives not just in battles and treaties but in the quiet decisions of people who never imagine they are part of something larger.
To understand where we come from requires that kind of honesty: about the land beneath us, the lives that preceded ours, and the stories we inherit without ever being told. In acknowledging all of it—the courage, the opportunity, the loss—we honor both our ancestors and the people whose worlds made theirs possible.
Rick Cross lives in Northport.
