Buffalo is the county seat of Erie County, and the second most populous city in the U.S. state of New York, after New York City. Originating around 1789 as a small trading community inhabited by the Neutral Nation near the mouth of Buffalo Creek, the city, then a town, grew quickly after the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, with the city at its western terminus. Its position at the eastern end of Lake Erie strengthened the economy, based on grain milling and steel production along the southern shores and in nearby Lackawanna.
In the dawn of the 20th century, Buffalo was one of the most populous cities in the United States. It had hosted the Pan-American Exposition in 1901 and later became a center for the automotive industry.
Later, the opening of the Saint Lawrence Seaway combined with the effects of suburbanization, deindustrialization, and globalization led to the decline of the city's chief industries. The city lost over half of its population from 1950 to 2010. Buffalo retains many industries and has developed a diverse economy based upon advanced manufacturing, healthcare and education.
Etymology
The City of Buffalo, formerly known as Buffalo Creek, received its name from the creek that flows through it. However, the origin of the creek's name is unclear, with several unproven theories existing. Early French explorers reported the abundance of buffalo on the Eastern shore of Lake Erie, but their presence on the banks of Buffalo Creek is still a matter of debate, although American Bison did range into western NY state at one time. Neither the Seneca name Teyohoseroron (the Place of the Basswoods) nor the French name Rivière aux Chevaux (River of Horses) survived, so the current name likely dates to the British occupation which began with the capture of Fort Niagara in 1759.
Another theory holds that a Seneca Indian lived there, either whose name meant buffalo, or who had the physical characteristics of a buffalo, and was translated as such by the English settlers. The stream where he lived became Buffalo's Creek. Unlike other nearby creeks such as Scajaquada Creek and Smoke's Creek which were named after actual historic figures, there is no known reference to any Native American named Buffalo. Also given credence by local historians at one time was the possibility that an interpreter mistranslated the Native American word for "beaver" as "buffalo," the words being very similar, at a treaty-signing at present-day Rome, New York in 1784. The theory assumes that because there were beaver here, the creek was probably called Beaver Creek rather than Buffalo Creek.Another theory holds that the name is an anglicized form of the French name Beau Fleuve (beautiful river), which was supposedly an exclamation uttered by Louis Hennepin when he first saw the Niagara River. This is a relatively recently proposed theory (1909) and is unlikely, as no period sources contain this quote. The earliest known name origin theory is an anecdote originally published in Sheldon Ball's Buffalo in 1825, about a party of explorers whose guide shoots a horse and passes it off as bison meat.
Despite many years of speculation and garbling of previous debate, more recently available sources indicate that the name Buffalo Creek was in common use on the Niagara Frontier by 1764, as John Montresor referenced 'Buffalo Creek' in his journal of that year. The name may have originated with an English speaking person sometime between 1759 and 1764, possibly after seeing animal bones, thought to be bison but possibly elk or moose or domesticated cattle, at the salt lick called Sour Springs located at the head of navigation about 6 miles up the creek.
An alternate explanation put forward in late 2020, is that the origin comes from the French “Riviere du Bois Blanc” meaning “River of White Wood” being used to describe the creek. Bois Blanc pronounced “Boblo” or “Bob Low” around the Great Lakes, morphed into “Buffalo” when the British took control of the region in 1759–1760.
These theories are summarized and ranked on a pamphlet developed by The Buffalo History Museum.
Pre-Columbian era to European exploration Amerindian Crossroads The first inhabitants of New York State are believed to have been nomadic Paleo-Indians who migrated after the disappearance of Pleistocene glaciers during or before 7000 BCE. The societies of the Native Forest dwellers we know as Native Americans or First Nations made highways of the Great Lakes' streams although the colonizers painted them as warriors bent on cruelty and scalp collecting. Their canoes were built from lightweight birch bark or Elm. The farther south the tribe, the more likely Elm was the material used. Buffalo, near the mouth of the Niagara River, was a popular campsite for voyaging tribesmen, in a culture which often included travel, touring neighboring lands, conducting business, and trading of regional commodities.
Prior to European colonization by French settlers, the region's inhabitants were an Iroquoian tribal offshoot called the Wenro people or 'Wenrohronon', who lived along the south shore of Lake Ontario and east end of Lake Erie and a bit of its southern shore. The population of the Wenro was small by comparison to other Iroquoian tribes the French encountered and reported upon, possibly because they'd only recently split off from other groups or because they'd suffered the misfortunes of war. They were possibly (most likely) a sub-group of the main Neutral Confederacy which had colonized the opposite shore, or possibly relatives of the great abutting neighboring Erie Nation, which extended southwesterly through most of present-day Ohio, Western Pennsylvania and West Virginia.
The American Heritage Book of Indians points out there are opposing (on the surface) contradictory theories of the origination and the migration of the Iroquois and Iroquoian peoples that came to inhabit the region around Buffalo and the Niagara River.
The French found the Neutral groups helpful in mediating disputes with other tribes—in particular the League of the Iroquois which became sworn enemies of the French from their first meeting in 1609. By comparison, the Huron also an Iroquoian people, were often at odds with the Iroquois once European traders offered highly desired goods for furs, especially water proof Beaver pelts About 1651 the Iroquois Confederacy declared war on the Neutrals; by 1653, the Confederacy, particularly the Senecas, had practically annihilated the NeutralsCatholic Encyclopedia, "The Hurons"Reville 1920, p. 20. and the splinter tribe of Wenro people. The Wenro's area was subsequently populated by the Seneca tribe.
Also in 1653 the large and populous Erie tribe, having taken in survivors of the Huron, Neutral, Wenro, and Tabacco peoples—Iroquoian peoples one and all, with traditions of adopting outsiders—received demands to send Neutrals to the Iroquois and instead launched a pre-emptive attack on the League, kicking off three years of desperate warfare that eventually shattered the Erie and bled the Iroquois of much of their strength. Ohio and Western Pennsylvania became nearly vacant Iroquois hunting grounds, exploited for furs, but ten years later the Iroquois, having also adopted tribal members of peoples they'd recently thrashed, found themselves in a new war with the Susquehannocks who lived down below the Allegheny Front, the escarpment above most of today's central Pennsylvania along the Susquehanna River valleys—another people believed to have significantly outnumbered the Iroquois —so warring along the Susquehanna Valley from lower New York to Maryland through central Pennsylvania. In 1667-68 the Susquehannocks nearly wiped out two of the Five Iroquois people. At that point the Susquehannock's suffered one or more horrendous plagues, losing up to 90% of their population and military capabilities, and by 1672 the Iroquois became the proverbial 'Last Man Standing' in the Northern Beaver Wars.
First Europeans, 1758–1793 Most of western New York was granted by Charles II of England to the Duke of York (later King James II & VII), but the first European settlement in what is now Erie County was by the French, at the mouth of Buffalo Creek in 1758. Its buildings were destroyed a year later by the evacuating French after the British captured Fort Niagara. The British took control of the entire region in 1763, at the conclusion of the French and Indian War. In 1764, British military engineer John Montresor made an inspection tour of Buffalo Creek before determining on a site for a fortification on the opposite shore. After the 1779 Sullivan Expedition, the British settled Seneca refugees in several villages on Buffalo Creek in the spring of 1780.
The first white settlers along the creek were prisoners captured during the Revolutionary War. The first resident and landowner of Buffalo with a permanent presence was Captain William Johnston, a white Iroquois interpreter who had been in the area since the days after the Revolutionary War and who the Senecas granted creekside land as a gift of appreciation. His house stood at present-day Washington and Seneca streets. Former enslaved man Joseph "Black Joe" Hodges, and Cornelius Winney, a Dutch trader from Albany who arrived in 1789, were early settlers along the mouth of Buffalo Creek. They set up a log cabin store there in 1789 for trading with the Native American community. The British retained control of the area and prevented further settlement by Americans until their evacuation of Fort Niagara in 1796.
Erie Canal, grain and commerce
Holland Land Purchase, 1793–1825
On July 20, 1793, the Holland Land Purchase, including the land of present-day Buffalo, was completed with land being acquired from the Seneca Indians and brokered by Dutch investors from Holland. The Treaty of Big Tree removed Iroquois title to lands west of the Genesee River in 1797. Although other Senecas were involved in ceding their land, the most famous today is Red Jacket, who died in Buffalo in 1830. His grave is in Forest Lawn Cemetery.
In the fall of 1797, Joseph Ellicott, the architect who helped survey Washington, D.C., with brother Andrew, was appointed as the Chief of Survey for the Holland Land Company. Over the next year, he began to survey the tract of land at the mouth of Buffalo Creek. This was completed in 1803, and the new village boundaries extended from the creekside in the south to present-day Chippewa Street in the north and Carolina Street to the west, which is where most settlers remained for the first decade of the 19th century.
Starting in 1801, parcels were sold through the Holland Land Companies office in Batavia, New York. The settlement was initially called Lake Erie, then Buffalo Creek, soon shortened to Buffalo. Although the company named the settlement "New Amsterdam," the name did not catch on, reverting to Buffalo within ten years. Buffalo had the first road to Pennsylvania built in 1802 for migrants passing through to the Connecticut Western Reserve in Ohio.
On October 11, 1803, Ellicott sold Lot 41, Township 11, range 8 in the village of Buffalo to Cyrenius Chapin, a physician, for $346.50. It was one of the first properties Ellicott sold in the village proper and made Chapin Buffalo’s first physician. In 1805, he and his wife Sylvia built the village’s sixteenth frame building, an office/home, on their lot just a half mile from the Seneca reservation on Buffalo Creek. The doctor became a friend to the Senecas, an active politician, and hero in the War of 1812.