“But when the American soldiers arrived in the Finger Lakes region, they were amazed to see orchards with thousands of fruit trees - apples, peaches, cherries - and advanced agricultural systems with produce previously unknown to them. This same campaign of destruction saw sweet corn introduced to the American palette for the first time -burning an Iroquois corn field. In the records of Sullivan’s campaign we find repeated mentions of peach orchards with hundreds, sometimes thousands of trees in nearly every village. These were all girdled, burned, or cut to the ground by American soldiers. So great was the devastation of this raid that the Seneca, Cayuga, and Oneida tribes never fully recovered - and the only record we have of their advanced agricultural systems comes from the notes of the Americans fighting to destroy them.”
An interesting article on the history of the peach in the US- can you imagine a time when the curculio and all the other pests and diseases hadn’t become a problem yet? Thousands of seedling trees being managed by the natives- It’s just cool to think about. And very sad to think about the destruction of people and orchards.