Toseoway & Tehoseroron
1804 Ellicott Map of Morris's Purchase-Detail (raremaps.com)
Joseph Ellicott's 1804 map of Western NY shows "Toseoway" the Seneca word for "place of basswoods" which is the designation they have given to Buffalo Creek.
Toseoway, could also mean "where basswood is", and Tehoseroron, another native American word means "among the basswoods", according to William Ketchum's History of Buffalo. The naming of the creek shows the importance of the Basswood to the Native Americans in providing a material that was of much use on the Niagara Frontier.
The Stanwix Treaty of 1784 shows "Tehoseroron" as the Native American word to describe Buffaloe Creek which is used as a boundary in the treaty.
1786 Stanwix Treaty-Detail (greatwarriorspath.blogspot.com)
The Native Americans must have insisted that this designation be put into the treaty so that there was no doubt as to which waterway was being used as a boundary. The Senecas and the other Native Americans had moved into this area after being swept out of the Finger Lakes region by Sullivan during his advance through the area in 1779. Until this time the area around Buffalo and the south portion of the Niagara had been lightly inhabited by the Seneca and used primarily for hunting, fishing and exploring.
Orsamus H. Marshall, one of the early Buffalo historians confirms the above, in an 1865 publication about the Niagara Frontier:
At the time of the arrival of the Senecas, the striking- feature of this locality was the predominance of the linden or basswood over all the other trees of the forest. They fringed both borders of the creek, and spread their ample foliage over its fertile bottoms. Seneca tradition tells us, that in the season when the tree was in flower, the hunting-parties from the Genesee could hear, ere they reached the creek, the hum of the bee as it gathered, in countless swarms, its winter stores from the abundant blossoms. Michaux, the French naturalist who traveled through this region in 1807, states as a peculiarity of this locality, in his great work on the forest trees of America, that the basswood constituted two-thirds, and, in some localities, the whole of the forest between Batavia and New Amsterdam.* Early settlers say, that the peninsula, bounded by Main street, Buffalo Creek and the canal, embracing what is now intersected by Prime, Lloyd and Hanover streets, was almost exclusively covered with this tree. It was occasionally found more than eighty feet high and four feet in diameter. Its giant trunks furnished, at that conve- nient locality, a light and soft wood from which to fashion the Indian canoe, and a bark easily converted into various utensils useful in savage life. This bark formed the exclusive covering of the temporary huts, erected for the shelter of the hunting and fishing-parties that frequented this region. The Senecas, in conformity with their well-known custom, seized upon this marked peculiarity of the place, and conferred upon it a name, strikingly euphonious in their tongue, and meaning " The place of basswoods."+
*North American Sylva, vol. iii. p. 131.
+ Do'-syo-wa. Also called Te-hos-e-ro-ron, in the treaty at Fort Stanwix, it being a variation, in Mohawk, of the Seneca name.