“The parings of scalps and the hair of our countrymen at every warrior’s camp on the path,” wrote Colonel Brodhead to Washington, “are new inducements to revenge.” Although his men on their return, September 14, were bare-footed and in rags, and had had no pay for nine months, he offered to lead an expedition to Detroit. Of two soldiers whom he sent to General Sullivan, he heard nothing. “I apprehend,” he wrote, “they have fallen into the enemy’s hands.” Dressing many of his men like Indians, he sent out various parties that devastated the region, and made it for a time uninhabitable by the savages. Very few men on our side were lost, and not a soldier but these two fell into the enemy’s hands.
Although Brodhead’s “Allegheny expedition,” or “Diversion in favor of General Sullivan’s expedition,” failed to make direct communication with the main body of Continentals, yet his was a vital part of the great expedition of 1779. It aided powerfully in that series of blows which shattered the Iroquois confederacy. By keeping probably five hundred Senecas from Sullivan’s front, Brodhead helped to toll the death knell of savagery on the North American continent.
CHAPTER III
THE LONG HOUSE OF THE IROQUOIS
The Indian country to be invaded by Sullivan stretched from the Hudson to Niagara Falls, and was called by the Iroquois “The Long House.” To this long house there were four “doors,” the northern at Oswego, the southern at Tioga Point, the eastern at Schenectady, and the western at Niagara.
In 1779 there were only a few settlements of the white man outside of a thin line in the Hudson and Mohawk Valleys. The Six Nations of Iroquois, the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, Senecas and Tuscaroras, were federated together and usually acted as a whole. Many of the Mohawks living near the settlements were friendly to the American cause, and almost the entire Oneida tribe had been won over to loyalty to the Continental Congress through the efforts of Dominie Kirkland, afterwards a chaplain in Sullivan’s army and the founder of Hamilton College. He was one of the few white men who had been as far west as the great “castle” of the Senecas, on Seneca Lake.
The Tuscaroras lived east of Cayuga Lake, the Cayugas between the largest two of the “finger lakes,” Cayuga and Seneca. The Onondagas dwelt around the lake which takes their name, and the Senecas, in the region between the lake named after them and the Genesee river. Roughly speaking, we may think of Schenectady, Utica, Syracuse, Elmira, Geneva and Ithaca as being the centers of the six tribes mentioned in their order, the central council-fire being with the Onondagas, near Syracuse.
The Senecas were, in 1779, the largest and most active of the tribes, and “the Seneca country” was a general name for the great region which Sullivan was to traverse. Our soldiers were to enter the Long House through the southern door, at Tioga Point, near which, on the fertile slope of the valley, was Esthertown, or the Indian Queen Esther’s country and castle. One of their hardest marches would be through the swampy valley stretching from the town of Chemung west of Esthertown to the castle of Queen Catherine Montour, her sister, at Montour Falls, N. Y.
The mention of Queen Esther’s name recalls the fact that the savages were not entirely alone in their schemes of hostility, but that the brain and hands of white men assisted them in their bloody forays. Indeed, it was one of the counts in the Declaration of Independence that the colonies were justified in their war of independence, because George III. “has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers the merciless Indian savages whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.” There were several hundred white men aiding and abetting the Indians in the arts of war and in methods of fortification. Besides the British regulars, Johnson’s Greens, loyalists, Canadians and half-breeds, two of the most eminent Iroquois women called “Queens” had white blood in their veins. Both boasted descent from the French Count Frontenac, and were married to powerful chiefs. Esther, at Sheshequin, near Tioga Point, and Catherine, at Montour Falls, near the modern Watkins Glen, were the owners of large and well-worked corn fields and of fenced gardens, of horses, cattle, hogs, and other live stock and of houses made of sawed and carved timber and spoken of as “palaces.”
It must not be forgotten that from the missionaries of France, who had at various times lived among the Indians for over a hundred years, and from the traders, gunsmiths, and friendly whites of various disposition and ability, supported by the British government, the Iroquois Indians had reached a comparatively high point of progress. Even when the white men first met them these federated warriors were the most advanced of all others within the limits of the United States. They had their own myths and legends. They met in council and had orators to argue both sides of a question or proposal. They sent embassies from one tribe to another, and these envoys were very ceremonious and careful in dress and etiquette. When they made a treaty of peace they solemnly buried the hatchet and smoked the calumet, or pipe of friendship. To dig up the same weapon meant war. Instead of our letters, seals, and documents of paper and parchment, they used wampum made of shells drilled and laced together, which in belts or strings served as money, as messages, as historical records. Some of the Indian orators, Logan, Red Jacket and others, were very famous. To become such these men practiced elocution and rhetoric very much the same as do our public speakers. As the Iroquois raised and stored corn and other vegetable foods, they were able to wage systematic war and go on long campaigns. Thus they excelled and conquered the other savages. When they left the stone age, by obtaining guns from Europeans, their lust of conquest was fired more than ever. When the white men of Pennsylvania and Virginia paid the Indians for lands, the avarice of the Iroquois was still further excited. Many tribes, even as far as Canada and the Mississippi Valley, were vassals of the confederacy. In the Iroquois we see the highest type of pagan man.
Our debt to the Indian is very great. He taught our fathers the use of tobacco, maple sugar, corn, succotash and various methods of getting food, besides the use of the birch bark canoe, the moccasin, and the snow shoe.