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Explanation:
n 1778 the Continental Congress authorized funds and instructed General George Washington to send an expedition of the Continental Army into Iroquois country to “chastise,” or punish, “those of the Six Nations that were hostile to the United Stated.” For more than two years, four of the Iroquois Confederacy’s Six Nations, specifically the Cayuga, Onondaga, Mohawk and Seneca, along with many of the tribes they considered their “dependents” and allies, had “taken up the hatchet” in the king’s favor.
Although led by their own war chiefs, the war parties were often accompanied by officers and rangers of the British Indian Department, who coordinated their efforts with the British military. Other Crown forces were also operating against American settlements. One was a corps of Loyalist volunteers and Mohawk warriors commanded by Captain Joseph Brant, or Thayendanegea, a Mohawk leading warrior and officer of the British Indian Department. Another was Butler’s Rangers, a corps of Provincial regular light infantry raised specifically to “cooperate” with the allied warriors and fight according to the Indian “mode” of warfare. It was commanded by long-time Indian Department officer John Butler. Butler served concurrently as the Deputy Superintendent for the Six Nations with the Indian Department rank of lieutenant colonel, while at the same time holding a major’s commission in Provincial service as the commander of his ranger battalion. Together they these forces conducted a campaign that terrorized American frontier settlements of New York, Pennsylvania and Virginia.
These attacks had several objectives. First, they could divert the attention of Continental forces from the movements of their regular field armies. Second, keeping the backcountry alarmed would interfere with the recruitment of potential volunteers from those districts, and hinder the ability of the militia to reinforce the hard-pressed Continentals. This strategy also constituted a form of economic warfare. By attacking productive agricultural communities, laying fields to waste and destroying harvested crops and livestock before they were taken to market could prove destructive to American commerce. The British could also interfere with the American supply system by reducing the availability of provisions that could be purchased to stock military supply magazines, and force state governments to draw on the provisions already stored in them for the relief and subsistence of suffering inhabitants. The plunder taken from the targeted American farms also presented British irregulars and their allied Indian war parties a source of supply when donations from “friends of the king” were insufficient. There was also an element of psychological warfare in the British plans. Under the threat of attack and devastation lest they swear allegiance to the king, the war on the frontier could weaken support for the cause of independence. These “depredations” reached a peak in 1778, especially with the particularly brutal Wyoming and Cherry Valley Massacres, and all intelligence indicated the raids would continue into 1779. Answering calls by the governors and congressional delegates from those states most affected, the Continental Army prepared to take the offensive.
Washington began developing a plan for a coordinated campaign to “scourge the Indians properly.” He envisioned an operation “at a season when their Corn is about half grown,” and proposed a two-pronged attack, the main effort advancing up the Susquehanna from the Wyoming Valley, and a supporting wing advancing from the Mohawk. Both would be supported by a third expedition advancing up the Allegheny River and into Iroquois country from Fort Pitt as a diversion. In his planning guidance, Washington specified the “only object should be that of driving off the Indians and destroying their Grain.” Once accomplished, the expedition would return to the Main Army whether or not a major engagement was fought.
