The wildest scenery on the gorge drive hides the heaviest history. At Devil's Hole, a shadowed notch in the cliff wall overlooks the river's most violent rapids — and marks the ground where, on September fourteenth, seventeen sixty-three, Seneca warriors ambushed a British wagon train on their own portage road, then destroyed the relief column that came running. It was the deadliest engagement for British soldiers in all of Pontiac's War, and the tour tells it whole: the new wagon road that took Seneca livelihoods, the morning it answered for, and the sovereign Seneca Nation thriving in Western New York today. Free parking, free admission, and a short walk to railed rim overlooks make this one of the easiest stops on the route — and the one visitors carry home.
Below the railing, a half-circle of bare rock is chewed out of the gorge wall — Devil's Hole, the most brooding piece of ground on this whole river. Even in full daylight the shadows pool down in that notch, and the water past the foot of it runs as white and angry as this river ever gets. The cliff falls away some ninety feet sheer, three hundred feet altogether to the river. And along this very rim ran the portage road. Hold that thought, because everything that happened here happened on that road.
Here's the frame, and I'll keep it short, because the tale itself belongs to Boone. The portage was Seneca ground, and portering was Seneca work — at the trade's height, as many as three hundred Seneca men earned their living carrying cargo up and down this escarpment. Then, in the summer of seventeen sixty-three, a Britisher named John Stedman finished a new wagon road and replaced them all with hired teamsters. Land pressed on one side, livelihood taken on the other — in the same season. What the Seneca did about it, on a September morning right along this rim, is a story this ground has never shaken off. I won't steal a word of it.
And the nation that fought here is not a memory. The Seneca Nation today is a sovereign government of more than eight thousand five hundred citizens, with territories across Western New York — including land in the city of Niagara Falls itself, where the Nation's resort tower rises beside this same river.
Stay up here on the rim — the trail below is partly closed, and the view tells the story anyway. Give Boone about thirty seconds.
