their intrepid leader, Brant, and well maintained the unequal contest. "Both tories and Indians were entitled to the credit of fighting manfully. Every rock and tree and bush, sheltered its man, from hehind which the winged messengers of death were thickly sent, but with so little effect as to excite astonishment. The Indians. yielded ground only inch by inch; and in their retreat darted from tree to tree with the agility of a panther, often contesting each new position at the point of the bayonet - a thing very unusual even with militiamen, and still more rare among the undisciplined warriors of the woods.” * The battle had been waged about two hours, when the British and Indians perceiving their forces inadequate, and that a maneuver to surround them was likely to be successful, broke and fled in great disorder.

"This" says John Salmon, of Livingston county, who belonged to the expedition and gave an account of it to the author of the Life of Mary Jemison, "was the only regular stand made by the Indians. In their retreat they were pursued by our men to the Narrows, where they were attacked and killed in great numbers, so that the sides of the rocks next the River looked as if blood had been poured on them by pailfuls."

The details of all that transpired in this campaign are before the public in so many forms, that their repetition here is unnecessary. The route of the army was via "French Catherine's Town," † head of Seneca Lake, down the east shore of the Lake to the Indian village of Kanadesaga, (Old Castle,) and from thence to Canandaigua, Honeoye, head of Conesus Lake, to Groveland. The villages destroyed, (with the apple trees and growing crops of the Indians,) were at Catherinestown, Kendai, or "Apple Town" on the east side of the Lake, eleven miles from its foot, Kanadesaga, Honeoye, Conesus, Canascraga, Little Beard's Town, Big Tree, Canawagus, and on the return of the army, Scawyace, a village between the

" Life of Brant.

Name from Catherine Montour. She was a half blood, is said to have been the daughter of one of the French Governors of Canada. She was made a captive and adopted by the Senecas when she was ten years of age, becoming afterwards the wife of a distinguished Seneca Chief. When on several occasions she accompanied the chief to Philadelphia her extraordinary beauty, joined to a considerable polish of manners, made her the "observed of all observers;" she was invited to a private house and treated with much respect. She resided at the head of Seneca Lake previous to Sullivan's expedition, and afterwards at Fort Niagara, where she was treated with marked attention by the British officers.

Cayuga and Seneca Lakes, and several other Cayuga villages. Captain Machin was at the head of the engineers in this expedition. The industrious gleaner of Border War reminiscences, the author of the History of Schoharie, has found among his papers the following, which accompanied a map of Sullivan's entire route:

Distance of places from Easton, Pennsylvania, to Chenesee, [Genesee] Castle, taken in 1779, by actual survey:

It is probable a better table of distances than has since been made. Among the papers of Capt. Machin, is the following certifi

cate:

"This may certify that Kayingwaurto the Sanakee chief, has been on an expedition to Fort Stanwix and taken two scalps, one from an officer and a corporal, they were gunning near the Fort, for which I promise to pay at sight, ten dollars for each scalp. Given under my hand at Buck's Island. JOHN BUTLER, Col. and

Supt. of the Six Nations and the allies of his Majesty."

This Kayingwaurto was a principal Seneca chief at Kanadesaga. He was killed by a scouting party of Gen. Sullivan's army, and in his pocket the certificate was found. The history of those scalps is one of the most melancholy tales of that era of terrible savage warfare. The chief in 1777, with a scouting party of Seneca warriors, was prowling about Fort Stanwix. Capt. Gregg, and a Corporal of the Fort, had ventured out to shoot pigeons, when they were fired at by the Indian scouts; the corporal being killed and Capt. Gregg severely wounded. Both were scalped; but after the Indians had left

Capt Gregg revived. His dog ran off to some fishermen of the Fort, a mile distant, alarmed them by his moaning, attracted them in the direction of his wounded master. Capt. Gregg was thus discovered, and lived to relate the story of his preservation. It is given upon the authority of Dr. Dwight.

The march of Sullivan, the devastations committed by his army, would at this distant period seem like Vandalism, in the absence of the consideration that he was acting under strict orders; and that those orders were approved, if not dictated by Washington. The campaign was a matter of necessity; to be effectual, it was not only necessary that its acts should be retaliatory and retributive, but that the haunts, the retreats, of a foe so ruthless, must be broken up. The object was to destroy all the means of subsistence of the Senecas, desolate their homes, prevent their return to them, and if possible, induce their permanent retreat beyond the Niagara River. The imprudence, the want of sagacity, which Col. Stone has imputed to Gen. Sullivan in alarming every village he approached by the sound of his cannon, the author conceives, a misapprehension of his motives. Stealthy, quiet approaches, would have found as victims in every village, the old men, the women and children the warriors away, banded with their British allies. Humanity dictated the forewarning, that those he did not come to war against could have time to flee. It would have been a far darker feature of the campaign than those that have been complained of, and one that could not have been mitigated, if old men, women and children, had been unalarmed, and exposed to the vengeance of those who came from the valleys of the Susquehannah and the Mohawk to punish murderers of their kindred and neighbors. The march of Gen. Sullivan, after leaving the Chemung, was bloodless, except in a small degree-just as it should have been, if he could not make victims of those he was sent to punish.

The third expedition of this campaign, which has generally been lost sight of by historians, was that of Gen. Broadhead. He left Fort Pitt in August with six hundred men, and destroyed several Mingo and Muncey tribes living on the Allegany, French Creek, and other tributaries of the Ohio.

The heavy artillery that Gen. Sullivan brought as far as Newton, would indicate that Niagara was originally the destination. There the General and his officers, seeing how long it had taken to reach

that point, in all probability determined that too much of the season had been wasted, to allow of executing their tasks in the Indian country, making their roads and moving the army and all its appointments to Niagara before the setting in of winter. Besides, before the army had reached the valley of the Chemung, the fact was ascertained that there would be a failure in a contemplated junction with the army under Gen. Broadhead.

After the expedition of Gen. Sullivan, the Indians never had any considerable permanent re-occupancy of their villages east of the Genesee river. They settled down after a brief flight, in their villages on the west side of the river in the neighborhood of Geneseo, Mt. Morris and Avon, and at Gardeau, Canadea, Tonawanda, Tuscarora, Buffalo Creek, Cattaraugus and Allegany. For retreats of the Johnsons, Butler and their troops, see narrative of William Hincher, in subsequent pages; and for Gen. Washington's official account of Sullivan's expedition, as copied from the manuscripts of a Revolutionary officer for the History of the Holland Purchase, see Appendix, No. 3.

NOTE. The author derives from James Otis Esq. of Perry, Wyoming County, a more satisfactory account of the retreat of the Indians upon the Genesee River, than he has seen from any other source. He became acquainted with Mary Jemison in 1810. She told him that when Sullivan's army was approaching the place of her residence, Little Beard's Town, the Indians retreated upon the Silver Lake trail. When about two miles from the Lake they halted to await expected re-inforcements from Buffalo Creek. They had a white person with them that they hung by bending down a small tree, fastening to it a bark halter they had around his neck, and letting it fly back; thus suspending their victim in the air. The bones and the bent tree attested the truth of the relation long after white settlements commenced. Reinforcements from Buffalo arrived, a council was held which terminated in the conclusion that they were too weak to risk an attack of Sullivan. When their invaders had retreated, the great body of the Indians went back to the sites of their old villages upon the River. Mrs. Jemison, went around on the west side of Silver Lake, and then down to Gardeau flats, where she found two negroes living that had raised some corn. She husked corn for the negroes and earned enough to supply her family with bread until the next harvest. This occupancy continued, Mrs. Jemison had the Gardeau tract granted to her at the Morris treaty.

PART SECOND.

CHAPTER I.

OUR IMMEDIATE PREDECESSORS -THE SENECAS

THE IROQUOIS.

WITH A GLANCE AT

It is not the design of this work to embrace a detailed account of the Five Nations. The Senecas, however, the Tsonnontouans of French chronicle, who guarded the western door of the Long House, looking out on the Great Lakes, demand a passing notice, as we are approaching a series of events connected with the "partition" of their wide and beautiful domain.

In common with the red races, they are the "autochthonoi" of the soil-"fresher from the hand that formed of earth the human face," than the present rulers of the land that was once theirs. On their hunting grounds, the pioneers of the Genesee country, preparatory to settlement, kindled their camp-fires. Our clustering cities and villages are on the sites of their ancient castles, forts and places of burial. In the vallies where they lived, and on hills where blazed their beacons, a people with the best blood of Europe in their veins, at one and the same time, are founding halls of learning, and gathering in the golden harvests. The early annals of their occupation, to which the reader is soon to be introduced, are intimately blended with this once powerful and numerous branch of the Iroquois confederacy, that furnished under the totewic bond, at the era of confederation, two of the presiding law-givers and chiefs.*

An opinion prevails, that the guardians of the Eastern Door, the Mohawks; or, as called by their brethren, "Do-de-o-gah," or