Biography
Delaware County, New York 'Calico Indian' convicted of the August 7, 1845 killing of Undersheriff Osman N. Steele at the Moses Earle farm in the town of Andes during an Anti-Rent rent-distress sale. Steele had ridden out from Delhi to enforce a rent-distress warrant against tenant farmer Earle; he was surrounded by hundreds of disguised Calico Indians, and gunshots from the crowd left him fatally wounded. Van Steenburgh and Edward O'Connor were arrested and tried in Delhi by Judge Amasa J. Parker; both were convicted of murder and sentenced to be hanged. After Governor Silas Wright signed the death warrants, intense Anti-Rent organizing forced their commutation to life imprisonment in Clinton State Prison at Dannemora. Pardoned by Governor John Young in 1847.
