During that evening, after everything had been made ready for the march at an early hour next morning, we lads gave to Peter Sitz messages for the loved ones at Cherry Valley, promising that we would never bring disgrace upon the settlement, and so burdening his mind with this matter and the other that, if the poor man remembered but the half of all the words we entrusted him with, he must have had a most prodigious memory.
Right proud was I when I marched out of the fort next morning at the head of my company, followed by the two baggage-wagons; but yet there was a sorrow in my heart because it seemed, in a certain degree, at least, as if by becoming regularly enlisted men we gave up our claim to the name of Minute Boys of the Mohawk Valley.
Those under whom we served did not view the matter in the same light I did, however, for we kept the title we liked best during all the time we served in the army.
It would please me to set down here an account of the adventures which were ours after becoming enlisted men, but it must not be done, else I might never bring the tale to a close, for we saw very much during the time our people were convincing the king, and surely did our duty at Bemis Heights, otherwise our company would never have been mentioned in the flattering terms it then was.
It causes me most profound sorrow to say that our company was far away, fighting for the Cause to the best of our ability, when our homes at Cherry Valley were destroyed and many of our loved ones massacred by the fiendish savages, and there is always in my heart a cruel joy that we lads who had been trained by Sergeant Corney avenged that dastardly act of Thayendanega's in such manly fashion that he must have remembered the reprisals to his dying day.
Then it was we showed ourselves to be Minute Boys of the Mohawk Valley in good truth, however we may have been spoken of elsewhere, and if it so be the good God spares my life sufficiently long I propose to set down the story of that vengeance, when more than one of us, sorely wounded, continued the chase, upheld even when exhausted nigh unto death by the thoughts of what our loved ones had been made to suffer by that wolf in human shape--Joseph Brant.