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The Itinerate Market, 1800 - 1870 Dispossessed from their land, many Oneidas turned to a way of life combining some farming with seasonal movements around Central New York. An Oneida family would encamp in a grove near a non-Native town for a time, the men typically making bows and arrows for sale. The Oneida women and children created baskets to barter or sell to townspeople and farmers. Susan Cooper, daughter of author James Fenimore Cooper, met such an Oneida family around Cooperstown in the late 1840s: [W]hen it is remembered that the land over which they now wander as strangers, in the midst of an alien race, was so lately their own -- the heritage of their fathers -- it is impossible to behold them without a feeling of peculiar interest (Cooper 1850:117). Three Oneida women -- dressed in gowns of blue calico, broadcloth leggings, and white blankets with beaded decoration -- entered Cooper’s home. They paid very little attention to the objects about them, until the youngest of the three observed a small Chinese basket on a table near her. She rose silently, took the basket in her hand, examined it carefully, made a single exclamation of pleasure, and then exchanged a few words with her companions in their own wild but musical tongue. They all seemed struck with this specimen of Chinese ingenuity (ibid.:119). The Oneidas, Cooper noted, "still love the woods" (ibid.:117). Behind that comment, lay an ancient reverence for the natural world and a sense of harmony in which one does not take without giving back. The itinerant way of life enabled the Oneida family to operate as a communal enterprise and to exercise traditional artistic and motor skills. Oneidas retained spiritual values in the creation of baskets even though baskets had become commodities marketed to non-native people (Tiro 1999:247-49).
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