The Iroquois and the 1779 Campaign
Near Cooperstown, New York
Long before this was Cooperstown, the country around Otsego Lake belonged to the Haudenosaunee, the six nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, and especially to the Mohawk and Oneida peoples who hunted and fished these waters. The Revolutionary War brought that world to a violent end. In seventeen seventy-nine General George Washington ordered a massive campaign to break the power of the Iroquois nations allied with the British, a scorched-earth expedition led by Generals John Sullivan and James Clinton.
Clinton's force reached the northern end of Otsego Lake by dragging boats overland on a road cut about twenty-four miles through the wilderness. To move his army south down the shallow Susquehanna, Clinton did something ingenious and destructive. He built a temporary dam at the lake's outlet, right about where the village now stands.
Over several weeks the lake rose about two feet. When his men broke the dam, the sudden flood lifted their boats and swept them downriver toward the campaign ahead. That campaign was brutal.
Sullivan and Clinton's troops burned at least forty Iroquois villages and destroyed vast stores of corn, driving thousands of Haudenosaunee people from their homeland to face a starving winter. It was that emptied land, opened by war, onto which William Cooper would arrive just six years later to found his town.
