Northampton County PA Archives History - Books .....Battle And Massacre Of Wyoming 1920 ************************************************ Copyright. All rights reserved. http://www.usgwarchives.net/copyright.htm http://www.usgwarchives.net/pa/pafiles.htm ************************************************ File contributed for use in USGenWeb Archives by: Joy Fisher http://www.genrecords.net/emailregistry/vols/00001.html#0000031 November 13, 2008, 4:34 am Book Title: History Of Northampton County CHAPTER XIII BATTLE AND MASSACRE OF WYOMING The Wyoming Valley at the outbreak of the Revolution was blessed with peace and prosperity. Its people realized the condition of those in the fanciful "Happy Valley" of Rasselas. The intense patriotism of the settlers had caused the expulsion of some forty of their number, mostly of German and Scotch-Irish descent, from their midst on account of their Toryism. This had aroused a great enmity among the Tories, and incurred the most active and implacable animosity of the individuals cast out. Therefore there was a great storm gathering in the north that was to bring devastation and ruin on the peaceful valley that was basking in sunshine. The defeat of Burgoyne at Saratoga released the Indian allies of the British, and their war-roused passion was wreaked on the defenceless border settlements. Sir William Johnson was dead; but the great captain of the Six Nations was Joseph Brant, a brother of Molly Brant, a mistress of Sir William. Therefore the old-time influence of the English representative of Indian affairs was continued through his son and nephew and Molly Brant. In the summer of 1778 the signs of danger increased at Wyoming; wives besought their husbands to return from the army, and the people clamored for protection to the Continental Congress and the Pennsylvania authorities, but no effective measures were taken for their aid. Finally a number of the officers resigned from the army and a score of privates deserted to hurry home to protect their threatened families. By common consent Colonel Zebulon Butler was made commander of these hastily gathered forces. There was not only lack of men but ammunition, and the women were set to work to undertake the manufacture of this needed commodity by utilizing the saltpetre obtained from the soil, blending this with prepared charcoal to form powder and casting in moulds, bullets and rifle balls. The Indians and British forces were concentrated at Tioga towards the close of June, 1778. The army totaled 1,200 fighting men, and was divided into three elements. First there were 400 British provincials, consisting of Colonel John Butler's Rangers and Sir John Johnson's Royal Greens, in smart uniforms, those of Butler's Rangers being a rich green. There was also a rabble of Tories from New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, who were garbed in every form of backwoods rusticity, tattered and torn. There were not less than 700 Indians, chiefly Senecas, with detachments from the Mohawks and other tribes; they were half-naked, or in savage attire, with their war-paint and barbarous adornment. With them was a band of squaws —if possible, more bloodthirsty than their masters. If the rank and file and rabble were of a nondescript character, the personality of its commanders offered contrasts as strange and startling and incongruous. The expedition was under the command of Colonel John Butler, known by the sobriquet of "Indian Butler." He was a descendant of an ancient Anglo-Irish family that traced their genealogy to the dukes of Normandy before the Conquest, of which the great Duke of Ormond (1610-88) was a member. Indian Butler was the ablest and certainly the most atrocious Tory leader of the period; fat and squat of figure, with a round and rough visage, he did not present the appearance of an ideal leader nor a man of prepossessing personality. He figured as the commander of a motley band of marauding whites and Indians in 1776, and was at their head at the battle of Oriskany. The Indian chief was Joseph Brant, the great Mohawk chieftain, the virtual head of the Six Nations. This semi-civilized brother of Sir William Johnson's mistress was at this time in his prime of manhood, being thirty-six years of age. He did not descend the river, but was instrumental in assembling the Indians for the expedition at Tioga Point. In strange contrast to the dignified and able savage Brant and the degenerate scion of nobility Indian Butler, was a third person of sinister and subtle influence in this strangely mixed mass of harsh humanity. This was a woman, the redoubtable eccentric enthusiast "Queen Esther." Her real name was Catharine Montour, a half-breed, the reputed daughter of one of the French governors of Canada. She had received a liberal education, possessed refinement, and had been petted and feted as a romantic and engaging young woman by the best society of colonial Philadelphia, Albany and New York. Queen Esther was the widow of a chief and enjoyed the repute of being a seeress. This gave her strange power over the people of her race, and the recent loss of a son made her a veritable fury who swayed her followers into the utmost extravagances of fanaticism. This wild aggregation of soldiers, Indians, renegade whites, who had been brutalized by three years of fierce frontier warfare, descended the Susquehanna river to a point a score of miles above the Wyoming settlement. Their approach was observed by a solitary Wyoming scout who, from his lofty mountain station, watched every movement of the approaching enemy. The frontiersmen at Wyoming were fully aware of the superior force of the enemy, and had only vague hopes of the arrival of reinforcements, but the idea of flight never occurred to them. Their forces numbered about 300 men, nearly ail of whom were undisciplined. Of the 230 enrolled men, many were minors, and the remaining seventy were either boys or old men. They were divided into six companies, and were mustered at Forty Fort, on the west side of the river, while the families of the settlers were in refuge on the east side. The officers of the little force under Colonel Butler were Colonels John Durkee, Nathan Dennison, Lieutenant-Colonel George Dorrance, Major John Garrett, Captains Dethic Hewitt, Asaph Whittlesey, Lazarus Stewart, James Bidlack, Jr., Rezin Geer and Aholiab Buck. There were other officers engaged in the battle, namely: Captains Samuel Ransom, Robert Durkee and William McKarrican. Such was the situation of affairs on July 3, 1778, when the British and Indians advanced deliberately down the valley. In their march they had destroyed everything in their way; Jenkins' Fort had capitulated, a score of murders had been perpetrated, and Wintermoot's, which had been built by the Tories to aid the British and Indians, opened its gates to the invading party. The little army of the settlers, though their foe outnumbered them four to one, in the middle of the afternoon marched up the valley, the river being on their right, with drums beating, colors flying and in true military array. On the approach of the enemy the column deployed to the left and formed in line of battle, with its right wing on the high bank of the river and its left extending across the plain to a swamp. Colonel Butler, as the enemy advanced, gave the order to fire, and a volley rang out along the entire line with precision and some effect. The British flinched but only for a moment, and pressed forward again. The brave Butler then attempted the almost impossible feat of moving his thin line forward against the overwhelming force that faced it. But this was all in vain, for as the line advanced the Indians slipped singly and by dozens into the brush of the swamp and flanked the left wing of the Americans. The little band of Wyoming men became confused though they did not retreat, and the Indians, seizing the opportunity, rushed forward with their frightful whoops and tomahawked right and left those who had not been previously killed in the battle. The little band melted like wax before a fire. The Indians pressed the survivors towards the river, along the banks of which wives and mothers of the brave fighters had crowded in agonized watchfulness. Some of the settlers swam the river and escaped, others were tomahawked in the water or shot from the shore. A few, promised quarter, returned, but were treacherously struck down as they climbed the bank. Massacre began when the battle terminated; one hundred and sixty had been killed, and the balance was soon captured. Every species of torture to the captives was indulged in by the Indians. Captain Bidlack was thrown alive on blazing logs, pinned down with pitchforks, and held in spite of his powerful paroxysms until death relieved him. William Mason, a boy captain, was similarly slain. A debauch of blood followed for the especial delectation of Queen Esther; a score of prisoners were brought before her for torture and assembled around a great boulder. They were bound and compelled to kneel about the rock, and then this Hecate seized a tomahawk and, raising a wild song, swept swiftly around the circle, dashing out the brains of sixteen victims, while the warriors crowded close about the scene of butchery, leaping and yelling, expressing their fierce joy. The four that escaped the sacrifice were pursued by fleet-footed Indians and quickly despatched. Night came on, but still the insatiate savages built fires, stripped the remaining prisoners naked, drove them back and forth through the flames, finally thrusting them on the embers with their spears until they fell from exhaustion, and all were despatched. In the battle and massacre three hundred men were killed, and that day in the valley made one hundred and fifty widows and nearly six hundred orphans. While the massacre was in progress, the flight of the survivors commenced; the Indians, however, divided into small bands, passed up and down the valley, burning every building and slaughtering all the inhabitants they found, except some children, whom they took into captivity. Finally they rendezvoused and withdrew to the northward, a swarming, triumphant body, the squaws bringing up the rear on stolen horses, their bridle-reins hanging heavy with strings of sodden scalps. Desolation reigned supreme throughout the valley. There were only the charred ruins of cabins and the unburied dead lying stark naked under the serene sky and pitiless sun of the 4th of July, 1778, where had so lately been happy homes and thronging, varied and busy human life. The wild flight of the survivors streamed through the wilderness to the Delaware and Lehigh settlements, chiefly to the safety afforded by Fort Penn, located where Stroudsburg now stands. This place of refuge was sixty miles distant, over mountains and through almost impregnable swamps, in a region absolutely uninhabited. Women, more than men, made up the throng, and in one band of nearly one hundred women and children, there was but a solitary man to advise or aid them. They were without food, many scarcely clothed, but they pressed on, weak, trembling, and growing constantly worse from their unaccustomed labor through the thickets, mire and ooze. One by one the weakest gave out; some wandered from the path and became lost; some fell from exhaustion, some from wounds incurred in the battle, but the majority maintained life in some miraculous way and pressed on. Children were born and children died in the fearful, forced march. Finally the refugees, half-famished, reached Fort Penn and the towns of the good Moravians. They were given food, and those who needed it, tender care until they could go to their old homes or find new ones. The far-reaching results of the massacre soon became self-evident. Wyoming had won the heart of the world for the struggling colonies of America, against whom the mother country had armed and arrayed savages who could perform such atrocities. The massacre had struck confusion into the camp of the Tories in England, who had to endure the odium of employing Indians in subduing rebellion, and finally when men had gone far enough from the event to see clearly its meaning, they read that what had seemed at first an unmitigated disaster was in reality a disguised victory, and that Wyoming must take rank with Lexington. Concord and Bunker Hill in effect upon the long fight for freedom. The victims who fell in the valley before British muskets in Indian hands were really the marked martyrs of the Revolution, and the blood of the Revolution and the blood of the martyrs was the seed of independence and of the republic. The bodies of the murdered men of Wyoming remained where they had fallen, a prey for wolves nearly four months, when on October 22d a military guard repaired there, collected and buried them in one huge grave. The blood of the martyrs called aloud for retribution, and slowly but surely preparations were made to shatter the whole system of the hostile Indian alliance in New York. To avenge this great wrong. General John Sullivan, one of the best soldiers and most picturesque personages of the Revolution, was selected to chastise and humble the Six Nations, and most effectually he performed the duty. Additional Comments: Extracted from: History of Northampton County [PENNSYLVANIA] and The Grand Valley of the Lehigh Under Supervision and Revision of WILLIAM J. HELLER Assisted by AN ADVISORY BOARD OF EDITORS VOLUME I 1920 THE AMERICAN HISTORICAL SOCIETY HOSTON NEW YORK CHICAGO This file has been created by a form at http://www.genrecords.net/pafiles/ File size: 13.6 Kb