Wyoming County: Extensive Meadows and Sullivan's March
Near Scranton, Pennsylvania
The name Wyoming comes from a Lenape word meaning extensive meadows, and the broad, fertile valley of the Susquehanna that gives the county its identity earns that description. Wyoming County was carved out of Luzerne County in April of eighteen forty-two, with Tunkhannock as its county seat, a town that had been settled since seventeen ninety. But the valley itself carries a far older and darker history.
In August of seventeen seventy-nine, the Continental Army's Sullivan-Clinton Campaign passed through here, a retaliatory expedition ordered by General Washington in response to the Wyoming Valley Massacre of the previous year. Major General John Sullivan led his force northward through this valley, destroying Haudenosaunee towns and food supplies to break the Iroquois Confederacy's capacity to raid the frontier. The campaign succeeded militarily but drove thousands of Indigenous people into a bitter winter of starvation.
The meadows that gave Wyoming its name were crossed by armies moving in both directions across the long history of this contested valley.
