A BYPATH OF THE REVOLUTION
The settlers on the New York frontier were many of them Scotch-Irish, nursing an inherited hostility to England. The greater part of the Iroquois Indians, more particularly the Mohawks, had a sentimental regard for the covenant which, for a century, had made the red men loyal to the British king. Here was a native antagonism between settlers and Indians which during the Revolution partly contributed to the warfare of torch and scalping knife that raged in the Susquehanna region.
Brant, the Mohawk chief, although himself a full-blooded Indian, known among his own people as Thayendanegea, had become, through long association with Sir William Johnson and his friends, a king's man and churchman. With the doctrines of the Church of England which he had embraced on becoming a communicant, he adopted also the contempt for dissenters which was so common among churchmen. Once, on tasting a crabapple, it is said, Brant puckered up his mouth, and exclaimed, "It is as bitter as a Presbyterian!" While in other parts of the country many churchmen espoused the cause of American independence, it happened that in the Susquehanna region the patriots were generally Calvinists.
Joseph Brant
From the portrait by Romney
Another contributory cause of trouble between the Indians and frontiersmen had to do with the lands around the Mohawk villages, concerning which there had been frequent disputes since the Fort Stanwix treaty.[36]
In May, 1777, Brant established himself with a band of Indian warriors and some Tories at Unadilla, driving out the settlers, and serving notice upon all that they must either leave the country or declare themselves for the English cause. At a conference held among officers of the American forces it was decided that General Nicholas Herkimer, the military chief of Tryon county, (which then included the region that later became Otsego county), should go to Unadilla to parley with the Indians. Herkimer, with 380 men, came down from Canajoharie through Cherry Valley to Otsego Lake, and thence along the Susquehanna River to Unadilla, which he reached late in June. Thus the Indian trail which passed near Council Rock was first used as the path of the paleface warriors.
The conference at Unadilla found the Indians fully determined for the British cause, and came to an abrupt termination, beneath darkened skies, amid a hubbub of Mohawk war-whoops and the rattle of a sudden hailstorm that swooped down upon the assemblage. Herkimer marched his men back to Cherry Valley.[37]