The prisoners, nevertheless, were doomed to a long captivity. From Niagara they were transferred to Montreal, thence to a prison in Chamblee, and thence to Quebec. They were afterward sent down to Halifax, and only restored to their country and homes after the peace of 1783. Their sufferings, during the three intervening years, were exceedingly severe, particularly in the prison at Chamblee, which is represented as having been foul and loathsome to a degree. [FN]
[FN] In the early part of this narrative of Harper's and Patchin's captivity, the name of Becraft, a Tory, occurs as one of their captors. His conduct toward the prisoners was particularly brutal throughout. On one occasion, when he and his Tory associates were enumerating their exploits, Becraft boasted of having assisted in massacring the family of a Mr. Vrooman, in Schoharie. The family, he said, were all soon despatched, except a boy of fourteen years old, who ran from the house. Becraft pursued and overtook him at a fence which he was attempting to climb. He there deliberately cut his throat, took his scalp, and hung his body across the fence! After the peace, he had the hardihood to return to Schoharie. But no sooner was it known, than a party of several indignant citizens, among whom were the prisoners who heard him make the confession here given, assembled and seized him. They stripped him naked, bound him to a tree, and ten of them, with hickory whips, gave him a tremendous castigation. They plied the whips with full vigor, and at intervals paused, and informed him for what particular misdeeds they were to inflict the next ten scorpion lashes, and so on. Having punished him thus, they dismissed him with a charge never to show himself in that county again. He never did.
Another of these Tories, who were guarding Harper and his party during the same night of their journey, made a yet more horrible confession than that of Becraft. His name was Barney Cane. He boasted of having killed, upon Diamond Island, (Lake George,) one Major Hopkins. A party of pleasure, as he stated, had been visiting the island on a little sailing excursion, and having lingered longer upon that beautiful spot than they were conscious of, as night drew on, concluded to encamp for the night—it being already too late to return to the fort. "From the shore where we lay hid," said Cane, "it was easy to watch their motions; and perceiving their defenceless situation, as soon as it was dark we set off for the island, where we found them asleep by their fire, and discharged our guns among them. Several were killed, among whom was one woman, who had a sucking child, which was not hurt. This we put to the breast of its dead mother, and so we left it. But Major Hopkins was only wounded, his thigh bone being broken; he started from his sleep to a rising posture, when I struck him," said Barney Cane, "with the butt of my gun, on the side of his head; he fell over, but caught on one hand; I then knocked him the other way, when he caught with the other hand, a third blow, and I laid him dead. These were all scalped except the infant. In the morning, a party from the fort went and brought away the dead, together with one they found alive, although he was scalped, and the babe, which was hanging and sobbing at the bosom of its lifeless mother."—Gen. Patchin's Narrative.
The Indians were likewise early busy in other directions. Some scattering settlements, situated between Wyoming and the older establishments, were fallen upon by them, and a number of persons killed, several houses burned, and eight prisoners carried away.
But the Dutch border settlements along the base of the Kaatsbergs, or Catskill mountains, from Albany down to Orange county, were again severe sufferers during this period of the revolutionary war. Many of the inhabitants were friendly to the royal cause, and numbers of them had joined the royal standard. Some of these served as leaders and guides to the Indians, in parties for prisoners, scalps, and plunder. This petty mode of warfare was reduced to such a system, that those engaged in it were supplied with small magazines of provisions, concealed in the earth and among clefts of rocks at suitable distances from the western sides of the Kaatsbergs, over to the Delaware, and thence down to the point whence they were wont to cross with their prisoners and booty to the Susquehanna, and thence again by the usual track, along the Chemung and Genessee rivers to Niagara. The sacking of Minisink, and the incursions into Warwasing, in the preceding year, have already been chronicled. But there were several irruptions into the Dutch settlements farther north, along the western borders of Ulster County, in the Spring of 1780, some of which were marked by peculiar features of atrocity, or of wild adventure. Among these was an attack, by a small party of Indians and Tories, upon the families of Thomas and Johannes Jansen, wealthy freeholders in a beautiful but secluded portion of the town of Shawangunk. One of these gentlemen was a colonel of militia. Both had erected substantial stone-houses, and were living in affluence. Their mansions were plundered by Indians and Tories, who were known to them; several of their neighbors and their Negroes were made prisoners; and among those who were slain, under circumstances of painful interest, were a Miss Mack and her father, residing somewhat remote in one of the mountain gorges; and also a young lady on a visit at Shawangunk, from the city of New-York. From considerations of acquaintanceship with the Jansens, however, the females of their families were not injured, although their houses were plundered and their barns laid in ashes. [FN]
[FN] An elaborated narrative of this tragic visitation was published fifteen or twenty years ago by Charles G. De Witt, Esq.
The same savage party, or rather a party composed in part of the same band of Tories and Indians who had committed the outrages just related, fell upon a settlement in the town of Saugerties, in May of the same year—making prisoners of Captain Jeremiah Snyder and Isaac Snyder his son. After plundering his house of provisions and money, they marched the Captain and his son over the mountains to the Delaware, and thence to Niagara, by the same route traversed by Thayendanegea and his warriors in conducting Harper and his fellow captives to that post. The adventures of these prisoners during their rough and wearisome journey were but the counterpart of those endured a month before by Captain Harper and his company, excepting that their captors, being acquaintances, rendered their sufferings less severe. Their supplies of food, though coarse, were sufficient. They were pinioned at night, and the Indians lay upon the cords by which they were fastened to saplings, or other fixtures of security. They met several parties of Indians and Tories after crossing the Susquehanna, and on one occasion fell in with a beautiful white woman, married to an Indian. By all these they were treated kindly. While traversing the valley of the Genessee, their principal Indian conductor, named Runnip, pointed them to a couple of mounds by the way-side. "There lie your brothers," said he to Captain Snyder, in Dutch. "These mounds are the graves of a scout of thirty-six men, belonging to Sullivan's army, which had been intercepted and killed by the Indians." [FN]