When Brant burned Minnisink I trembled anew for Caughnawaga; and breathed freely only when our General Sullivan marched on Tioga with six thousand men.
Yet, though he cleaned out the foul and hidden nests of the Iroquois Confederacy, I, knowing these same Iroquois, knew in my dreading heart that Iroquois vengeance would surely strike again, and this time at the Valley.
Because, out of the Mohawk Valley, came all their chiefest woes; Oriskany, which set the whole Six Nations howling their dead; Stillwater; Unadilla; Tioga; The Chemung—these battles tore the Iroquois to fragments.
The Long House, in ruins, rang with the frantic wailing of four fierce nations. The Senecas screamed in their pain from the Western Gate; the Cayugas and Onondagas were singing the death song of their nations; the proud Keepers of the Eastern Gate, driven headlong into exile, gathered like bleeding panthers on the frontier, their glowing gaze intent and patient, watching the usurpers and marking them for vengeance and destruction.
To me, personally, the conflict in my Northland had become unutterably horrible.
Our battles in the Jerseys, in Pennsylvania, in Delaware, and farther south, held for me no such horror and repugnance; for if the panoply of war be dreadful, its pomp and circumstance make it endurable and to be understood by human beings.
But to me there was something terrifying in secret ambush and ghastly massacre amid the eternal twilight of the Northern wilderness, where painted men stole through still places, intent on murder; where death was swift and silent, where all must watch and none dared rest; where children wept in their sleep, and mothers lay listening all night long, and hollow-eyed men cut their corn with sickle in one hand and rifle in the other.
We, in the Jerseys, watching red-coat and Hessian, heard of scalps taken in the North from babies lying in their cradles—aye, the very watch-dog at the gate was scalped; and painted Tories threw their victims over rail fences to hang there, disembowelled, like dead game.
We heard terrible and inhuman tales of Simon Girty, of Benjy Beacraft, of Billy Newbury—all old neighbours of mine, and now turned child-killers and murderers of helpless women—all painted men, now, ferocious and without mercy.