In July 1775, the Johnson family, along with 220 Iroquois and other Loyalists, fled the Mohawk Valley to British-controlled territory on Lake Ontario. Two years later, one British army and their Indian allies invaded the Mohawk Valley from the west, while another army moved toward Albany from the north. The rebels, with Oneidas serving as scouts, stopped both armies. Another wave of Iroquois then fled to Canada for safety. Rebels and Oneidas looted Molly Brant’s home along the Mohawk River. By May 1777, about 2,700 Iroquois refugees were living around the British fort at Niagara. Two years later, 3,700 lived there.3
Although the threat of a British invasion ended with the British defeat at Saratoga in 1777, British and Indian raids against Mohawk Valley settlers escalated. Molly Brant’s young brother, Captain Joseph Brant (Thayendanegea), 35, became the most active of the raiders, leading both Indian and white Loyalist troops. Brant was an experienced diplomat and commander who fought alongside William Johnson, his common-law brother-in-law, and even traveled to London. He was a freemason, and pious; he translated the Gospel of Mark into Mohawk. As a fighter, he became notorious among Whigs who blamed him for atrocities whether or not he was anywhere near the site of the raid.
A 1778 raid against the Cherry Valley settlement became a Whig propaganda tool. Brant and Walter Butler, his Loyalist counterpart, led the raid with 321 Indians and one hundred fifty Tory rangers. But Brant and Butler despised each other. About ninety white Loyalists prevailed on Brant to stay for the raid because they also despised Butler. During the raid, the two leaders lost control of most of the Indians, who plundered and killed settlers indiscriminately. Both Butler and Brant tried to save victims, but a massacre ensued. One Indian leader later said his men acted in retaliation for the destruction of their town by Whigs.
To stop the raids, Washington ordered Major General John Sullivan in 1779 to attack the Iroquois. The goal, Washington said, would be “the total destruction and devastation of their settlements,” including their food supplies. This would force the Indians to retreat away from Whig settlements to distant British strongholds at Niagara and Detroit. “It will be essential to ruin their crops now in the ground and prevent their planting more.”4
Despite the expedition’s success, the raids continued. In 1780 and 1781, Brant and other Indian and Loyalist rangers attacked Ohio and upper Mohawk Valley settlements almost at will. In one raid, Brant destroyed the Oneida and Tuscarora towns. Because their residents had been warned ahead of time, they were able to flee to Schenectady for safety.5
“Schenectady,” said Governor George Clinton, “may now be said to become the limits of our western frontier.” The Oneidas in 1777 had shared their corn surplus to help feed Washington’s troops at their winter camp of Valley Forge. Now, they were refugees, more than four hundred mostly women and children—most of their men were with the Whig army. They lived in lean-tos outside Schenectady, suffered from smallpox, and starved. General Philip Schuyler pleaded with Congress to give the Oneidas clothing and blankets. He spent his own money to buy them food. White soldiers harassed the Oneidas, assaulted them, and “barbarously murdered” one. The situation was “an affecting spectacle of distress,” Schuyler said.6
A French military traveler described the Indian camp as “nothing but an assemblage of miserable huts in the wood along the road.” He guessed that Schenectady as a whole, including white refugees, sheltered about four thousand people behind its palisade. Others estimated that two-thirds of Mohawk Valley whites were refugees, of which 380 had become widows, and 2,000 children were now orphans.7
Governor Clinton had to stabilize the frontier. With few resources at hand, he enlisted the help of Colonel Marinus Willett.
Willett, 41, was the second of thirteen children born to a Quaker farmer and his wife in the rural Long Island community of Jamaica. During the Seven Years’ War, he raised a militia company, fought in upstate New York, and participated in an expedition against Fort Frontenac (now Kingston) on the Canadian shore of Lake Ontario. He became familiar with settlements in the Mohawk Valley, and after the war, may have worked there as a cabinetmaker before settling in New York City.8
In New York, he became a leader of the Sons of Liberty, anti-Crown agitators who, after the revolution began, stole arms from a British arsenal. He joined the Continental army’s New York regiment and took part in the disastrous invasion of Canada. When the British invaded New York in 1776, Willett, now a lieutenant colonel, led the militia on Long Island before joining the general retreat.
His next commands were all in upstate New York: He defended Peekskill against a British raid. He served as second-in-command at Fort Stanwix. There, in 1777, while under siege, he led a diversionary raid that burned the British camp and took its supplies, while the enemy fought and stopped a Whig relief force at Oriskany six miles away. When the British demanded the fort’s surrender, threatening to let their Indian allies murder women and children, Willett refused, saying before he would surrender, “I would suffer my body to be filled with splinters, and set on fire, as you know has at times been practiced by such hordes of women and children killers as belong to your army.” Relief came in the form of a force led by the then-Whig general Benedict Arnold, hero of the Battle of Saratoga weeks earlier.9
Leaving Stanwix in 1778 for New Jersey, Willett fought at Monmouth, then returned the next year with the Sullivan expedition against the Iroquois. He wintered with the main army at Morristown, New Jersey, while conducting foraging and harassing raids against British positions on Staten Island.
Willett had earned a reputation for competence, and Washington praised his “care, attention, and foresight.” But after a reorganization of the New York regiment at the end of 1780, Willett retired from Continental service. That was when Governor Clinton asked Willett to assume command of state troops, militia, and levies (draftees)—troops scattered throughout the New York frontier. Clinton ordered him to fight not just Indians, but Tories as well: “cruel monsters worse than savages.” Willett chose as his headquarters Canajoharie, the former Mohawk town where Molly Brant once lived. But headquarters was more a theory; in practice, Willett turned his troops into a “flying” squad, mobile, and always on the move.10
Willett probably knew of Washington’s interest in land speculation, and in a July 1781 letter, Willett described the Iroquois lands west of Schenectady in detail. “Exceeding rich . . . of the first quality,” he said. “In such a country blessed with so fine a soil lying along a delightful river, which afforded an easy transportation of the produce to a valuable market, with a climate exceeded by none, it might have been expected a greater population would have taken place.”
Then, Willett addressed military business. Indian raids had reduced local militia from 2,500 militia at the start of the war to eight hundred men available for active duty. He estimated one-third of the militia were killed or taken prisoner, another third left the frontier, and the final third deserted. The remaining settlers huddled near twenty-four forts, ranging in population from ten to fifty families. To protect the settlements, Willett had about two hundred fifty men, excluding the militia and about one hundred twenty levies. “But be the force larger or smaller,” Willett concluded, “I can only promise to do everything in my power for the relief of a people of whom I had some knowledge in their prosperous days, and am now acquainted with in the time of their great distress.”11
The challenge would come soon. In September, rumors panicked both Schenectady and Albany that the British and Indians would attack.12
Yorktown was more than a month away when the British governor of Canada, General Frederick Haldimand, ordered a major raid against rebel settlements in the Mohawk Valley. “Destroy all kinds of grain and forage, mills, etc., cattle, and all articles which can contribute to the support of the enemy,” he told Major John Ross. “Avoid the destruction of women and children, and every species of cruelty.”13
Ross was “enterprising and resourceful,” his superiors said. He fought in 1762 against the
Spanish in Cuba, another battle area of the Seven Years’ War. After the war, he travelled the Mississippi River north from Louisiana; he became the first British officer to enter the Indian country of what is now Illinois following the French defeat. Five years later, he was stationed in Ireland, and then was posted to Canada in 1776 after the ill-fated rebel invasion. There, he raised a Loyalist battalion, and he commanded one of several forts on eastern Lake Ontario.14
Ross and his men left Oswego, a British stronghold on the New York shore of eastern Lake Ontario, on October 11, 1781, and rendezvoused with Indian allies and other Loyalist rangers from Niagara. All told, he commanded more than six hundred whites and one hundred thirty Indians.15
His second-in-command was, in Haldimand’s words, “a very zealous, enterprising, and promising officer,” captain Walter Butler, 29—the same Butler who had alienated Mohawk Captain Joseph Brant and other Loyalist rangers. Once, when Haldimand referred to Butler favorably in the presence of Loyalist brigadier general John Johnson, one of William’s sons, Johnson was appalled. “I took the opportunity to give my opinion of him pretty freely,” Johnson wrote a friend. Haldimand himself acknowledged to Butler’s father that Walter’s ego outran his experience: “He rates his services very high and is a little inconsiderate in his expectations and request [for promotion]. . . . I cannot in justice to the service, promote him over the heads of so many officers of merit and long service.”16
Butler’s reputation among Whigs was worse. He was a devil who practiced “diabolical cruelties,” was a “murderer of little children,” and had “damned his soul for all eternity.”17
He was born and raised in relative wealth in the Mohawk Valley. His grandfather, also named Walter, commanded British forts in the valley. His father, John, campaigned in the Seven Years’ War with William Johnson, and received large land grants as a result of his service. John, a lieutenant colonel and deputy Indian superintendent, recruited and led a large Loyalist unit during the revolution, Butler’s Rangers, which fought with Indian allies throughout the frontier, from New York to Virginia, Michigan to Kentucky.
At sixteen, Walter served in his father’s militia regiment. In his late teens and early twenties, he studied and practiced law in Albany. There’s a record of him interceding with authorities on behalf of an imprisoned debtor in 1775. He was, said an Albany judge, “a youth of spirit, sense, and ability.” Another Albany resident described him as a “pretty able young lawyer.”18
When the war began, the Butlers, Johnsons, and other Loyalists were rewarded with a forced flight to Canada to escape rebel jails. Butler’s mother and John Johnson’s wife weren’t as lucky. Rebel militia took them hostage hoping to prevent the Butlers and Johnsons from fighting.
It didn’t work. Now a lieutenant, Walter Butler was second-in-command of 125 Loyalist rangers and Indians, who captured the rebel leader Ethan Allen near Montréal in September 1775. The next year, he skirmished with more rebels along the Saint Lawrence River. He and his father wintered at Fort Niagara, where Walter was promoted to captain. “He seems a promising young man,” said General Guy Carleton.19
He fought at Oriskany in 1777, where the British, Loyalist rangers, and Indians stopped a rebel relief column. (Willett, at the time, was raiding the British camp.) After the battle, and while the siege against Stanwix continued, Butler volunteered to lead a small group to valley settlements to proclaim amnesty to rebels who joined the besieged. At a midnight meeting, the advance guard of another rebel relief force captured him, and charged him with being a “traitor and spy.” Willett, who had left Stanwix, served as the judge in Butler’s court-martial, which convicted him. Whig general Benedict Arnold, bringing relief to Stanwix, ordered Butler hanged.20
Some of Arnold’s officers had known Butler before the war, and they protested the sentence. Arnold listened, and instead of being hanged, Butler was sent to Albany in chains. There, he remained manacled. Butler protested and asked “in the most pathetic terms” to be paroled, according to the Whig commander. Butler’s mother, still detained as a hostage, petitioned to be allowed to visit her son. After six months in jail, the Whigs paroled Butler with the requirement that he be confined to a guarded home in Albany. He escaped Albany in mid-April 1778, riding a horse provided by a friend.21
The November 1778 raid against Cherry Valley in which Butler and Brant lost control of their men became Whig propaganda. Publicly, the Whigs pilloried Butler alone. However, internal British letters noted that Butler tried to stop the massacre. “Men, women, and children all promiscuously butchered by the savages, nor could Capt. Butler or other officers keep any restraint on them,” one eyewitness said. Butler himself admitted that he had “much to lament” because he couldn’t prevent some of the women and children from “falling unhappily to the fury of the savages.”22
Nonetheless, Butler took as hostages a small group of women and children to use as trade bait for his still-imprisoned mother and other Loyalist women. Then, he threatened to use Indians against the Whigs. “If you persevere in detaining my father’s family with you . . . we shall no longer take the same pains to restrain the Indians from prisoners, women, or children that we have hitherto done,” he wrote the Whig commander. And he defended the Indians at Cherry Valley by saying they were merely retaliating for the Whigs “burning of one of their villages, then inhabited only by a few families—your friends—who imagined they might remain in peace and friendship with you, till assured, a few hours before the arrival of your troops, that they should not even receive quarter.” He added that when he was manacled in Albany, “I experienced no humanity, or even common justice, during my imprisonment among you.” The Whigs agreed to the prisoner exchange, but it didn’t occur until 1780.23
Butler continued to fight with joint ranger-Indian forces. In 1779, they failed to stop Sullivan in central New York, near what is now Elmira. For the rest of the year and through 1780, Butler traveled throughout the west, from the Ohio Valley to Montréal, providing intelligence and seeking supplies for Butler’s Rangers.
There would be one final battle—one final encounter with Marinus Willett.
Ross, Butler, and their rangers and Indians arrived on October 24 at their first target, Currytown, a settlement eight miles east of Canajoharie. They had come 130 miles through “the brooks and rivers, the hills and mountains, the deep and gloomy marshes.”24
Currytown offered no resistance, but Ross’s new prisoners warned that two thousand Whig troops were in Schenectady and other neighboring towns. It was raining, and roads were becoming impassable. Ross decided to cut a path of destruction as close to Schenectady as he could.
Before dawn the next morning, Ross reached Warrensbush (now Florida, Montgomery County), twenty miles west of Schenectady. The settlement was “a nest of rebels.” Ross’s men torched its buildings. They continued to destroy settlements on the road to Schenectady, coming as close as twelve miles to the town. Guessing that the rebels by then were assembling their forces to respond, Ross turned sharply away from Schenectady and headed to Johnstown—former home of Johnson and Molly Brant—all the while destroying what he could.25
Later, the Whigs estimated that Ross destroyed at least twenty-two homes, twenty-eight barns, a grist mill; 1,500 bushels of wheat, 105 of rye, 957 of peas, 1,875 of oats, and 964 of corn; 109 tons of hay; about thirty-five horses, eighty cattle, thirty-one sheep, and sixty-four hogs. The British said they destroyed one hundred farms, three grist mills, a large granary, and “cattle and stock of all kinds.”26
Ross’s guess that rebel defenders were on his tail was correct. When Ross attacked Warrensbush, Willett, with four hundred state and Continental troops, was about twenty-five miles away. He put out a call for militia and levies, and then, with a force that grew to more than 1,200 men, began to chase Ross.
They met in the mid-afternoon twenty-five miles northwest of Schenectady at Johnstown, where Ross was seizing provisions and destroying Whig food supplies. Ross charged the rebels, many of w
hom, Willett conceded, “turned and fled without any apparent cause.” But Ross was unable to follow up the initial rout; his allies failed to cooperate. “I then lamented the want of a good body of Indians,” Ross said. If they had, he could have “crushed the spirit of the rebels.” As night fell, Ross retreated beyond Johnstown. Each side lost fourty to fifty men, either captured or killed.27
Ross now headed for British territory at the head of the Saint Lawrence River. It was a slow retreat, hampered by snow and sleet, as well as “excessive fatigue and hunger, the party now living entirely upon horses they had taken.” At one point, most of the Indians left to return to Niagara.28
Willett, with about five hundred men including sixty Oneidas, followed Ross’s trail. “We pursued them as closely and warmly as possible,” he said. “Their flight was performed in an Indian file upon a constant trot, and one man’s being knocked in the head or falling off into the woods never stopped the progress of his neighbor.”29
Ross’s rear guard, led by Butler, tried letting the main body put some distance between themselves and the rebels. On a foggy October 30, after fording West Canada Creek, eighty-five miles northwest of Schenectady and more than one hundred miles from the British fort and safety, Butler made a stand. “Creek” is a misnomer for the seventy-six-mile-long river—the Mohawk’s major tributary. This was a cold river, and fording it was “difficult.”30
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