Town Destroyer
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Town Destroyer, also translated as Town Taker, Burner of Towns, or Devourer of Villages, was a nickname given to George Washington by Iroquois Indians. The name in its original language(s) has been given variously as "Caunotaucarius", "Conotocarious", and "Hanadahguyus." Historians have given different origins of the nickname.
According to some historians, Washington was given the name in 1753 by the Seneca leader Tanacharison (the "Half-King"). Tanacharison — Washington's guide and ally at the outset of the French and Indian War — bestowed the name on Washington because it was the Iroquois nickname given to Washington's great-grandfather John Washington, who had emigrated to Virginia from England in 1657. John Washington was given the nickname because he had swindled American Indians out of some land, or, in another version of the story, after he had ordered the deaths of some American Indians during Bacon's Rebellion. When Tanacharison bestowed the name on George Washington, it may have been as part of Washington's ceremonial adoption as a Seneca, intended to compliment the young Virginian's military ardor.[1]
In other accounts, Washington was given the nickname sometime after the 1779 Sullivan Expedition in the American Revolutionary War, which destroyed at least 40 Iroquois villages. Years later, in 1790, the Seneca chief Cornplanter told President Washington: "When your army entered the country of the Six Nations, we called you Town Destroyer," a title that some Iroquois still use to describe any President of the United States. In relating this story, historian Barbara Graymont also notes that, as President, Washington had a good relationship with the Iroquois in the United States, so much so that the Seneca religious leader Handsome Lake (Cornplanter's half-brother) declared that Washington was the only white man allowed to enter the Indians' heaven.[2]
The two versions of the nickname's origin are not necessarily contradictory. If Washington was first given the nickname during the French and Indian War, it may have gained new meaning for the Iroquois during the Revolution, when four out of the six nations of the Iroquois Confederacy fought against Washington's armies.
[edit] Notes
[edit] References
- Ellis, Joseph J. His Excellency: George Washington. New York: Knopf, 2004. ISBN 1-4000-4031-0.
- Graymont, Barbara. The Iroquois in the American Revolution. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1972. ISBN 0-8156-0083-6; ISBN 0-8156-0116-6 (paperback).
- Lewis, Thomas A. For King and Country: The Maturing of George Washington, 1748-1760. New York: HarperCollins, 1992. ISBN 0-06-016777-7.
- Randall, Willard Sterne. George Washington: A Life. New York: Henry Holt, 1997. ISBN 0-8050-2779-3.
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