Frisky Fenway

248 years ago today, a Mohawk war chief who had been educated in Connecticut, dined with King George III in London, and translated the Bible into Mohawk burned a New York farming village to the ground and opened the most savage front of the American Revolution. His name was Thayendanegea. The British called him Joseph Brant. He was 35 years old, six feet tall, fluent in three languages, and he believed the Crown was the only thing standing between his people and total dispossession. He was probably right. Cobleskill was a small settlement of about 20 families in the Schoharie Valley, 40 miles west of Albany. On the morning of May 30, 1778, a handful of warriors walked out of the treeline near the edge of town and let themselves be seen. Captain William Patrick of the 7th Massachusetts took the bait. He grabbed 30 Continentals and a few dozen local militia and chased them into the woods. One of his junior officers, Captain Brown, warned him it was a trap. Patrick rode forward anyway. A mile into the forest, Brant sprang the ambush. 350 Iroquois and Loyalist Rangers came up out of the brush on three sides. Patrick was shot off his horse in the first volley. Half his command was dead within minutes. The survivors ran for the houses of Cobleskill and barricaded the doors. Brant's men set the houses on fire and killed the men who ran out. Six soldiers were burned alive inside one cabin. By sundown, every barn, fence, and field of grain in Cobleskill had been put to the torch. The livestock was driven off. Twenty Continentals and militiamen lay dead in the ashes. Cobleskill was the opening move. Over the next 18 months Brant and his allies would burn German Flatts, Cherry Valley, Minisink, and Wyoming Valley. Hundreds of frontier settlers killed. Thousands of refugees pouring into Albany and Schenectady. Entire counties of New York and Pennsylvania emptied of white population. Washington's response in 1779 was the Sullivan Expedition. 4,000 Continental troops marched into Iroquois country with orders to destroy "not merely overrun, but destroyed" every Haudenosaunee town they could find. They burned 40 villages, cut down the orchards, and salted the corn. The Iroquois Confederacy never recovered. The Revolution we remember is Lexington, Saratoga, Yorktown. The Revolution on the frontier was a civil war between neighbors, fought with tomahawks and torches, that ended with the destruction of a thousand year old confederacy. It started 248 years ago today, in a hayfield in Cobleskill.