American Indian Culture and Research Journal

The Revolutionary War and its aftermath brought ruin to the Indians of the upper Susquehanna Valley. The majority allied themselves with the British, infuriating local colonists who mostly sided with the Continental Army. General John Sullivan’s campaign of 1779 devastated the Susquehanna Indians’ towns, as well as the communities of Indians living farther north and west throughout Iroquoia. At the end of the war these Valley Indians were displaced, impoverished, and ignored; they lived at the edges of the new republic but could not enjoy the benefits of citizenship. While recent studies of the Revolutionary period have described crucial decades in the nation’s past, historians still have not examined the influence of the Anglo-American crisis on Indians in sufficient depth. Barbara Graymont’s The Iroquois in The American Revolution traces the experiences of the Six Nations but treats primarily the political and military aspects of these Indians’ lives. Anthony F. C. Wallace’s The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca, while putting the Revolutionary period into a broader historical and cultural context, focuses almost exclusively on the Senecas. But this westernmost tribe in Iroquoia managed to retain at least a portion of its land in the post-Revolutionary period, thereby distinguishing the tribe’s history from that of many Indians who were completely displaced from their territory, The Indians who inhabited the upper Susquehanna Valley, many of whom were not members of the Six Nations tribes, have received insufficient attention from scholars. Even Barry Kent‘s recent analysis, Susquehanna ’s Indians, contains little on the Revolutionary period, primarily analyzing the earlier Indian occupation of the region.