The River Ran Red With Blood

Heart pumping, Hugh Mitchell rushed into his burning home. Face covered against the smoke, his mind raced. Where could he begin? But his mind emptied of all thought when he saw what lay before him. The bloodied bodies of his wife and four children.

Hugh had been out working the fields when he saw the raiders approaching. Too far away to run to his house, he fled into the nearby woods, hoping the Indians would show mercy to his family should they have failed to escape. He hurried to his home as soon as it was safe to do so, only to find his worst fears confirmed.

With melancholy remorse, he extinguished the fire before returning to the corpses. One still breathed—barely. Extending his arms under her, he gently lifted her, then placed her at the door for fresh air. As he bent down to examine the extent of her injuries, he saw another party heading toward the house. He barely had time to hide undetected behind a log fence.

He did not move. He could not. He watched helplessly as one of Butler’s rangers, later identified as Sergeant Newbury, stepped up to the girl and, with a single blow of his hatchet, killed Mitchell’s last surviving child.¹

A year later, Hugh Mitchell would testify to this brutal act at Newbury’s trial. The British soldier was found guilty and hanged for his crime.²

But justice was the exception.

And in 1778, exception was giving way to pattern.

*     *     *     *     *

The fate of Mitchell’s family in the Cherry Valley Massacre reveals how warfare intensified in New York’s western frontier following the Battle of Oriskany. In Cherry Valley, war left the battlefield and crossed the threshold. It felt sudden to those who suffered it. Yet it had been building in small, brutal steps before culminating in atrocities that even contemporary accounts struggled to describe.

Violence Escalates Toward the Cherry Valley Massacre

The path to the Cherry Valley Massacre began immediately after Oriskany. Those Iroquois allied with the British sought to punish the Oneida. An official British report stated, they “burnt their houses, destroyed their fields, crops, & killed and carried away their cattle.”³ The Oneidas responded in kind. At the Upper Mohawk Town, they exacted their revenge by raiding the family of Joseph Brant’s sister, “robbing them of cash, clothes, cattle, etc… and driving them from their home.”⁴ The Oneida then did the same upon the woman and children of the Lower Mohawk Town.⁵

Oriskany energized the British allies, and these retributive skirmishes stirred their American counterparts. In September of 1777, General Schuyler informed Congress, “the Oneidas, Tuscaroras, and a few Onondagas and Mohawks” arrived in Albany and agreed to fight on the side of the Patriots.⁶

While the fractured Iroquois Confederacy fought amongst themselves, neither was all quiet on New York’s western frontier. Following Oriskany, the British sent a flag to “to invite the inhabitants to submit and be forgiven,” with the “assurance given to prevent the Indians from being outrageous.”⁷ Ensign Walter Butler, along with “10 soldiers and 3 Indians,”⁸ traveled to German Flatts, where they convened at the home of Loyalist Rudolph Shoemaker.⁹

While the host may have favored the Crown, not all the local guests shared that sentiment. Butler made the mistake of calling Major General Philip Schuyler a “damn’d Rebel,” prompting the good citizens of German Flatts to arrest him as a spy.¹⁰ Butler was tried by court-martial when General Benedict Arnold arrived a few days later.¹¹ Convicted and sentenced to death, the intercession of officers from New York’s first regiment caused Arnold, after initially approving the sentence, to delay the execution.¹² Schuyler ordered Arnold to bring Butler to Albany for imprisonment.¹³ He remained there for several months until, with the help of some friends, he escaped to Fort Niagara.¹⁴

Who was Walter Butler? To some, a capable officer. To others, something far darker.

Trained as a lawyer, he was the son of Colonel John Butler, who was commissioned to raise a company of Rangers following the Fort Stanwix expedition, better remembered for the Battle of Oriskany.¹⁵ To Patriots, he soon became something close to a frontier villain. Walter Campbell, whose grandmother was taken during Butler’s Cherry Valley raid, describes Butler as having a “severe, acrimonious disposition”¹⁶ who wasn’t afraid to place friends in harm’s way for the sake of the mission.¹⁷

His British counterparts, on the other hand, saw him in a more charitable light, labeling him “a youth of spirit, sense, and ability.”¹⁸ Walter’s father (the Colonel) assigned his son to take command of a company of Rangers, even though Walter was still in prison.¹⁹

Frontier War Becomes Systematic Destruction

By the spring of 1778, that escalation had become something far more deliberate. When Walter Butler returned to Fort Niagara, the British had a plan. And his father was tasked with carrying it out.

Using Unadilla as a base, Butler’s Rangers and their Iroquois allies could quickly strike into the breadbasket of the Continental Army. “It became an object of no small importance to destroy the coming harvest before it could be lodged in their magazines.”²⁰

Cobleskill became the first target. In May of 1778, Joseph Brant planned an ambush of its small militia (only 17 men). After knocking out the settlement’s meager defense, “the invaders passed down the valley, leaving houses, barns, and stacks of hay in ashes, and such stock as they found they either killed or drove along.”²¹ This was only a taste of things to come.

From small raids, Col. Butler’s plans shifted to wholesale campaigns. Adam Crysler described the sequence in his journal. Crysler, who rose to the rank of Captain in Butler’s Rangers, exemplified the spirit of that corps. Taught to fight like their allies, Crysler proudly described scalping his victims.²² Butler’s Rangers, together with Brant’s Indians, roamed the frontier, wreaking havoc on the ability of the continentals to make war as well as creating a diversion to draw American forces away from the coastal objectives of the British.²³

By far the bloodiest encounter was the Battle of Wyoming on July 3-4, 1778. The British recorded the event with chilling detachment. Here’s the July 27^th journal entry of Captain John Montresor, Engineer Corps of Great Britain:

“27th. Wind South-somewhat Easterly and rain this night. Wind rather high. Two private victuallers got in from Cork. Account of the Tories and Indians with some regulars from Detroit taking the Rebel Fort at Wyoming and Killing 374 out of 400 Inhabitants.”²⁴

A half-century after the Wyoming Massacre, nineteen eyewitness survivors presented their testimony to Congress in the “Petition of the Sufferers of Wyoming, Pennsylvania, by depredations committed by the Indians in the Revolutionary War.” Among those was Colonel George P. Ransom, 14 years old at the time of the battle, who testified, “[after the battle] we afterwards went in with Colonel Butler, to restrain the ravages of the Indians, and helped to bury the dead as soon as it could be done. The battlefield presented a distressing sight; in a ring, round a rock, there lay 18 or 20 mangled bodies. Prisoners taken on the field were placed in a circle, surrounded by Indians, and a squaw set to butcher them. Lebeus Hammond, for many years afterwards a respectable citizen of Tioga county, New York, was one of the devoted. Seeing one after another perish by her bloody hand, he sprang, broke through the circle, outstripped his pursuers, and escaped.”²⁵

Feeling a sense of déjà vu? You should. You’ve seen the name “Lebeus Hammond” before. It appeared in Jasper Parrish’s story. Lebeus was the one running through the fields to warn Jasper’s father that they had been attacked. Jasper and his father were shortly taken captive.

Cherry Valley Massacre Erases the Line Between War and Terror

The campaign of 1778 reached its grim culmination at Cherry Valley. Crysler simply put in his journal, “In November I went under the command of Captain Butler (Walter Butler) to Cherry Valley and destroyed that whole settlement.”²⁶

That included both friends and foes. No distinction remained.

The Wells family showed how completely that distinction had vanished. John Wells first settled in Cherry Valley, served as a King’s Magistrate, and died before the Revolutionary War. His son Robert was a major in the Tryon County Militia.²⁷ As a Tryon County judge, John was close friends with Sir William Johnson and with Col. John Butler, who both often visited his home.²⁸

The family had tried to remain neutral with regard to the colonial uprising. That did not save them. In fact, it was a Tory who boasted that he killed Robert Wells while the man was at prayer. Also killed were Robert’s wife, mother, four children, his brother John, and his sister Jane.²⁹ An entire family tree.

Except for one. Robert’s son, John, had left the frontier for Schenectady, where he was staying with his aunt while attending the grammar school there.³⁰

Upon hearing the Wells family had been killed, Col. Butler lamented, “I would have gone miles on my hands and knees to have saved that family, and why my son did not do it, God only knows.”³¹ Joseph Brant expressed similar remorse, maintaining he might have saved the Wells had he not been slowed down by a muddy plowed field.³²

Despite his feelings, Brant’s participation in the Tory terror cemented his reputation among its victims. Years later, John Wells (the grandson) heard Brant was visiting Albany to trade war stories with his old foes. The young Wells sought to avenge his family by taking Brant’s life. Fortunately, John’s friends convinced him to change his mind. Brant appeared untroubled and invited the young man in. Later, John Wells became an eminent lawyer in New York and would go on to be associated with Alexander Hamilton and the publication of The Federalist Papers.³³

Brant appears to have shared Col. Butler’s concern about Walter’s extremes. The Mohawk chief once said Walter was “more savage than the savages themselves.”³⁴

Suffice it to say, Walter did himself no favors. In February 1779, he wrote to General Clinton:

“We deny any cruelties to have been committed at Wyoming, either by whites or by Indians; so far to the contrary, that not a man, woman, or child was hurt after the capitulation, or a woman or child before it, and none taken into captivity. Though should you call it deep inhumanity, the killing men in arms in the field we in that case plead guilty. The inhabitants killed at Cherry Valley do not lie at my door.”³⁵

Butler distinguished Wyoming—a military action gone awry—from Cherry Valley. Both could be described as massacres, but one involved an action among (mostly) soldiers while the other targeted civilians.

Despite Butler’s words to General Clinton, this escalation toward chaos on the frontier only intensified. These atrocities demanded a response.

And only one remained.

 

¹ Campbell, William W., ed. Annals of Tryon County, New York, J. & J. Harper, 1831, p. 113.
² Ibid. p. 114.
³ Broadhead, John Romeyn, “Colonel Claus to Secretary Knox, November 6, 1777,” Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York, Vol. VIII, E.B. O’Callaghan, ed, Weed, Parsons & Co, 1857, p. 725.
⁴ Ibid.
⁵ Ibid.
⁶ “Extract of a letter to Congress, dated Albany, September 27, 1777,” Collections of the New York Historical Society for the year 1879, Publication Fund Series Vol XII, New York, 1880, p. 190.
⁷ Broadhead, Vol. VIII, “Colonel Claus to Secretary Knox, October 16, 1777,” p. 721.
⁸ Ibid.
⁹ Simms, Jeptha, The Frontiersmen of New York, Geo. C. Riggs, Albany, 1883, p. 86.
¹⁰ Letter of Dr. William Petry to Major General Philip Schuyler, dated August 15, 1777. https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-10-02-0635, retrieved May 3, 2026.
¹¹ Simms, p. 87.
¹² 1831 Willett, William M., A Narrative of the Military Actions of Colonel Marinus Willet, G.&C.&H. Carvill, New York, p. 62.
¹³ Letter of Major General Philip Schuyler to George Washington, dated August 17, 1777. https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-10-02-0635, retrieved May 3, 2026.
¹⁴ Campbell, p. 109.
¹⁵ Broadhead, Vol. VIII, “Colonel Claus to Secretary Knox, October 16, 1777,” p. 722.
¹⁶ Campbell, p. 175.
¹⁷ Ibid., p. 117.
¹⁸ Cruikshank, Ernest, The Story of Butler’s Rangers and the Settlement of Niagara, Tribune Printers House, Welland, Ont., 1893, p. 12.
¹⁹ Ibid., p. 43.
²⁰ Ibid.
²¹ Roscoe, William E., The History of Schoharie County, D. Mason & Co., Syracuse, 1882, p. 43.
²² Simms, p. 739.
²³ Halsey, Francis Whiting, The Old New York Frontier, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1902, p. 203.
²⁴ Collections of the New York Historical Society for the year 1881, Publication Fund Series Vol XIV, New York, 1882, p. 502.
²⁵ Hayden, Rev. Horace Edwin, The Massacre of Wyoming, Wyoming Historical and Geological Society, Wilkes-Barre, PA, 1985, p. 51.
²⁶ Roscoe, p. 43.
²⁷ Sawyer, John, History of Cherry Valley from 1740 to 1898, Cherry Valley, NY, Gazette Print, 1898, p. 20.
²⁸ Campbell, p. 112.
²⁹ Ibid., p. 111.
³⁰ Ibid.
³¹ Ibid., p. 112.
³² Ibid., p. 16.
³³ Halsey, p. 323.
³⁴ Ibid., p. 249.
³⁵ Ibid.