American Indian Culture and Research Journal

The Cayugas, considered to be one of the smallest nations in the Iroquois Confederacy, once were established in some nine villages on the east side of Cayuga Lake, in central New York. Four additional villages - two elsewhere in central New York, and two in Ontario - seem to have represented their principal areas of settlement. To the east, the Cayugas were adjacent to their elder brothers, the Onondagas, and their nearest neighbors to the west were the Senecas, also elder brothers, with whom they shared some linguistic similarities. At the time the Iroquois League was organized, the Cayugas provided ten local clan chiefs who became Confederacy chiefs. At the outbreak of the American Revolution, the Cayugas sided principally with the British against the American rebels, although their support of the British is by no means consistently clear-cut . The Cayuga chief Fish Carrier, for example, offered his support and that of 88 tribesmen to Colonel Guy Johnson for a war party in February, 1780. Yet in 1792 General George Washington gave Fish Carrier a silver medal of appreciation for his bravery in the Colonial army during the Revolution, and it was later observed that because of Fish Carrier's influence, the Cayugas joined the colonists in their struggle against the British.s Yet it is also a matter of record that the United States signed a treaty of peace with the Six Nations at the close of the Am erican Revolution, to which Mohawks, Onondagas, Senecas, and Cayugas were signers.