Just beyond this horrible swamp of 1779 lay the village of Sheaquaga, or “French Catherine’s town,” three miles from Seneca Lake, on the site of the present town of Havana, or Montour Falls. It was the capital of the Indian Queen Catherine Montour, and contained her “palace.” It consisted of about forty “long,” or apartment, houses of timber and bark, with splendid cornfields, orchards, and fenced enclosures, in which were horses, cows, calves and hogs. It looked as though the army would have, for a little while at least, meat rations. Here had been the home of Catherine, sister of Queen Esther and granddaughter of Adam Montour, who was the offspring of Count Frontenac. A Dutch family had also lived here among the Indians. It seemed strange to our men to find feather beds and other evidences of civilization so far in the wilderness. Some of it was the plunder from Cherry Valley and Wyoming. The town was deserted, but our troops had to wait all day Thursday for the pack horses and cattle that emerged one by one, or in parties, from the darkness of the dreadful swamp. They found an old squaw, whom they compelled to give information about the Indians. Then they built for her a hut and left her some provisions. Moving northward along the eastern shores of Seneca Lake, through open woods and level country, they found corn roasting in the fire, their supper left untasted and all the evidences of the hasty movement of a large body of Indians. The next day they moved as far as North Hector, to a village consisting of one very large apartment house with several rooms and fires. To this day the new timber, grown up in the place of the old forest cut through for the artillery, can be easily discerned. Resuming their march, they came on Sunday, September 5, to Kendaia, or Apple Town. This was an Indian village of the first class, over twenty large, long apartment houses built of timber and bark, some of them well painted. There were apple and peach orchards, with many hundreds of trees ripening their fruit, and a cemetery, in which there were tombs erected to the chiefs and made of hewn and painted planks. Here they met with a white captive, Luke Sweetland, whom the Indians had kept employed in making salt. All this lake region is underlaid with beds of the purest chloride of sodium, and in times of peace the Senecas and Onondagas drove a thriving trade with the other tribes in this necessity of life. They made their salt by boiling the brine from salt springs. To-day at Ithaca and Ludlowville the white crystals fill daily a freight train.