Devil’s Hole, the cursed gorge

A real Seneca-legend gorge and a documented 1763 ambush

Devil's Hole is a semicircular notch in the wall of the lower Niagara Gorge, north of the city of Niagara Falls, New York. An ancient waterfall cut it, draining part of Glacial Lake Tonawanda, as the main falls ate their way back past this point; the lake dried up and its waterfall with it. Below, the river runs through the Devil's Hole Rapids. In the early 1700s, New York State Parks says, the raging water so terrified people that they supposed the devil lived there, and the name stuck.

The Senecas had their own reasons to fear the place. They held a cave here to be the abode of the Evil Spirit, and poisonous snakes hibernated in it, creatures they thought evil because they came from the earth and not the sky. Legends tell of Senecas losing their lives at the cave, and of the explorer La Salle, warned not to go in for fear of disturbing the demons, going in anyway; his explorations were dogged by misfortune afterwards until his own men killed him in 1687.

The ground above the gorge carried the Niagara portage, the road around the falls and rapids, and up to 300 Seneca men had once worked as porters on it. When the British took the area after the Seven Years' War, John Stedman improved the trail for oxen and wagons and hired his own teams, and the Seneca lost both the work and control of what they thought of as their portage. On 14 September 1763, during Pontiac's Rebellion, a large Seneca band ambushed Stedman's wagon train on its way from Fort Schlosser to Fort Niagara where the trail ran through Devil's Hole, between deep ravines. Wagons, animals and drivers went over the edge, and only a few of the party escaped, Stedman among them. Two companies of the 80th Regiment of Light Armed Foot hurried up from Lewiston and were ambushed in turn about a mile away; 81 soldiers were killed. The Anglo-Americans called it the Devil's Hole Massacre, and the little stream nearby became Bloody Run Creek. Afterwards Sir William Johnson forced the Seneca to give up a strip of land a mile wide on each side of the river from Lake Ontario to Lake Erie, cutting them off from the portage.

Devil's Hole State Park, opened in 1924, covers 42 acres above the gorge. A stone staircase drops to the Devil's Hole Trail along the rapids, joining Whirlpool State Park in a loop with the rim trail. The climb back up is strenuous, and the river is off limits to swimmers.