Gayogohono

The Gayogohono, or People of the Great Swamp, called Cayuga by colonists, are one of the five founding nations of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy, their homeland on Cayuga Lake in New York. Organized into six matrilineal clans, they sat with the Oneida as Younger Brothers and sent ten chiefs to the Grand Council.

Early in the eighteenth century some Cayuga moved west over the Alleghenies into Ohio, where they were called Mingo. In the Revolution their warriors split between the two sides, but the Sullivan Expedition of 1779 devastated their homeland, burning Cayuga Castle, Chonodote and forty-odd other villages.

Survivors fled to other nations or the Ohio Mingo; most who remained east of Ohio were removed to Indian Territory by 1831, forming the Seneca-Cayuga community. The Pickering Treaty of 1794 recognized the surviving Cayuga as sovereign even as it took most of their New York lands.