Cherry Valley Massacre

On the eleventh of November, seventeen seventy-eight, a force of roughly three hundred twenty Haudenosaunee warriors and about two hundred Loyalist rangers and British regulars descended on the small frontier settlement of Cherry Valley, in what is now Otsego County, New York. The raid was one of the most devastating attacks on a civilian community during the entire Revolutionary War.

The operation was jointly commanded by Mohawk war captain Joseph Brant and Major Walter Butler of Butler's Rangers, a Loyalist unit based at Fort Niagara. The campaign was not random. American forces had recently destroyed the Haudenosaunee towns of Unadilla and Onaquaga in retaliatory raids, and the British strategy called for destabilizing the entire northern frontier through coordinated strikes.

Cherry Valley was supposed to be protected. Fort Alden stood in the village, garrisoned by a Continental regiment under Colonel Ichabod Alden. But Alden had dismissed warnings of an imminent attack, and on the morning of the raid many soldiers, including Alden himself, were quartered outside the fort's walls in civilian homes. Alden was killed in the first minutes of the assault. The gates of Fort Alden held, but the surrounding settlement did not.

By the time the attack ended, about thirty civilians, most of them women and children, lay dead, along with about fourteen soldiers. Another seventy or more were taken prisoner and marched toward Canada. Joseph Brant reportedly tried to restrain the violence against non-combatants, while Walter Butler was widely blamed, perhaps unfairly, for ordering it. The disputed question of responsibility inflamed frontier passions for years afterward.

The massacre helped convince the Continental Congress to authorize the Sullivan-Clinton Campaign of seventeen seventy-nine, a massive punitive expedition that burned dozens of Haudenosaunee towns across western New York and permanently shattered the power of the Iroquois Confederacy. The quiet farming village you pass near today was rebuilt after the war, but it never fully recovered its pre-war population. A cemetery on the edge of town holds the graves of the civilian victims, many of them children, their names still legible on the old stones.