The Man Who Documented What He Helped Destroy — Cadwallader Colden
At Coldengham, his estate in the Hudson Valley, the desk holds two kinds of paper. On the left, a Mohawk-English wordlist from his survey work, and notes from fifty years of conversations with Haudenosaunee leaders. On the right, a botanical key from Linnaeus in Sweden and a letter in Latin to a correspondent he has never met in person. His daughter is at the next table, pressing specimens from the garden, her descriptions already sharper than his. Outside the window, the Catskills. He is the most informed man in the colony about the people his Crown employs him to dispossess.
It is 1745.
He does not just survey New York. He serves as Surveyor General of the Province of New York from 1720, walking its terrain and its Native boundaries and its competing claims until he knows this land better than almost any other Crown official alive.
He does not just administer. He writes the first systematic English-language history of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy in 1727, expanded in 1747, drawing on colonial records and treaty documents and his own contact with the nations he surveys — creating the primary English-language reference on the Iroquois for more than a century, written from the Crown perspective of a man who calls the Five Nations a people depending on the Province of New York.
He does not just write. He corresponds with Linnaeus, Franklin, and the naturalists of the transatlantic Republic of Letters from his estate at Coldengham, supplies botanical specimens and observations that move through the same network as John Bartram’s boxes, and raises a daughter whose botanical work surpasses his own and who corrects Linnaeus himself in her own correspondence.
He does not just serve the Crown. On November 1, 1765, a crowd of several hundred New Yorkers breaks into his coach house, carries his coach to Bowling Green, tears down the iron palisades, and burns his coach and his effigy together in the street beneath the charged guns of the fort, because he has said he will enforce the Stamp Act.
His Spark of Liberty was the record itself — meticulous, irreplaceable, and made in the service of an empire that used it as a surveyor’s tool.
He died on September 20, 1776, at his estate on British-occupied Long Island, eleven days after the Declaration of Independence reached Long Island. He died a subject of the Crown he had served for fifty-six years, in the wreckage of the order the Declaration rejected.
Now, “Where History Comes to Life.”
Born in Ireland to Scottish parents on February 7, 1688, trained in medicine at Edinburgh, he emigrated first to Philadelphia and then to New York in 1718. As Surveyor General of New York from 1720, he compiled the knowledge that became The History of the Five Indian Nations, Part I published in New York in 1727 and the expanded edition in London in 1747. The book was written from the perspective of a British Crown official — the Five Nations are described throughout as peoples depending on the Province of New York, which is not how the Haudenosaunee understood their own sovereignty. It is foundational. It is partial. It is the work of a man who gave more sustained attention to the Haudenosaunee than almost any contemporary, while serving the colonial system that dispossessed them. He served as Lieutenant Governor of New York from 1761 and died in office. His daughter Jane, working at the same desk, became the first person in America to apply Linnaean nomenclature systematically to native flora. Her work is her own.
His name was Cadwallader Colden.
Now We Know Em
by Christopher B. Gordon
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