Battle of Wyoming, 1778: the Wyoming Valley massacre

Few battles of the Revolution were fought by so few men or remembered with such horror. Wyoming was a small frontier fight between neighbors as much as between nations: settlers from two colonies who had fought each other for years over the same land, Loyalist refugees who had been driven out of it, and the Iroquois allies of the Crown. Its toll, and the stories told about it, made it a byword for frontier savagery.²

Background: a valley claimed twice

The Wyoming Valley, a stretch of about 25 miles of the Susquehanna River around today's Wilkes-Barre, was contested long before the Revolution. The royal charters of Connecticut and Pennsylvania both covered it, and after Connecticut's Susquehanna Company was formed in 1753 to settle it, Yankees from Connecticut and Pennamites from Pennsylvania fought a series of small wars over farms and forts.³ › Greatest battles of the American Revolution

The quarrel turned bloody early. In April 1763 the Delaware leader Teedyuscung, who had settled in the valley, burned to death when his house was set on fire in the night. The Delawares blamed the Connecticut settlers, and a war party fell on their new settlement and killed some twenty or more of them; the survivors fled.⁴

When the Yankees returned, they looked for allies. In 1771 Captain Lazarus Stewart and his Paxton men, Scotch-Irish frontiersmen from Lancaster County, came to fight for them against the Pennamites in return for land in a township of their own, Hanover. Stewart would die on 3 July 1778.⁵

Connecticut incorporated the valley as the town of Westmoreland in 1774 and later made it a county. How many people lived there is uncertain: the Encyclopedia of the American Revolution speaks of some 3,000 by 1775, while a Connecticut census of the time counted 1,922. Yankees and Pennamites alike backed the Patriot cause.⁶

The newcomers were another matter. Loyalist families moving in from New York, above all the Wintermoots, built a fort of their own at the head of the valley. Patriot committees arrested suspected Tories and sent several to prison in Connecticut; others fled to the British post at Niagara. Thomas Verenna argues in the Journal of the American Revolution that Pennamites burned out by the Yankees made willing recruits for the Loyalist rangers being raised there.⁷

The valley had also stripped itself of defenders. Two companies of 82 men each, raised in 1776 for its own protection, were ordered to join Washington's army, leaving the settlement short of trained defenders.⁸

Armies and commanders

In June 1778 Major John Butler left Niagara with his Rangers, a detachment of Johnson's Royal Greens and Loyalist volunteers, about 400 men by the Encyclopedia's count, supported by about 500 Iroquois, mainly Senecas and Cayugas, under the Seneca chief Gi-en-gwahtoh. Verenna gives a smaller count, over 100 rangers and a few hundred Seneca warriors; an account published by the New England Historic Genealogical Society gives about 400 British troops and six or seven hundred Indians. All agree that Butler outnumbered the militia he would meet.⁹

The Wintermoots surrendered their fort to him and told him that no Continental troops could be spared for the valley, since Washington was busy with the Monmouth campaign. The Patriot defense rested on a volunteer company of 40 to 60 men at Forty Fort under Captain Detrick Hewett and on Colonel Zebulon Butler, a Continental officer home on leave and no relation to the Loyalist commander.¹⁰ › The Battle of Monmouth, 1778

Zebulon Butler gathered some 300 men. Charles Miner, the valley's nineteenth-century historian, counts about 230 enrolled militia and 70 old men, boys, magistrates and other volunteers; many of the militia insisted on staying to guard the valley's other small forts and the families sheltering there.¹¹

The battle in phases

The march out. On 3 July the Patriot officers decided to attack rather than wait in Forty Fort. As they approached, they saw that Wintermoot's fort was in flames. The Encyclopedia reads the fire as part of a ruse, with Butler pretending to retreat to draw the militia into the open; Miner, writing from survivors' accounts, says the motive was never understood.¹²

The lines. The Patriots formed across the plain, Zebulon Butler on the right, Colonel Nathan Denison on the left and the companies, Hewett's among them, in between. John Butler anchored his left on the burning fort, where he commanded the Rangers in person, placed the Royal Greens in the center and the Iroquois on his right, stretching to a swampy wood at the foot of the mountain.¹³

The clash. The two lines exchanged fire. Then the Iroquois rushed in on the Patriot left with axes, knives and hatchets, before the militia could reload, and turned the flank.¹⁴

Turning point: the rout

The Patriot line collapsed. The militia broke and fled, many throwing away their muskets. Dozens ran for the river and leapt into the Susquehanna, and the warriors followed them into the water and killed most of them. Others ran for Forty Fort and were cut off. At least 20 militia officers and three Continental officers were killed, Hewett among them; by Miner's account every captain who led a company into action fell at the head of his men.¹⁵

No one knows exactly how many died. John Butler reported 227 scalps taken for the loss of two Rangers and one Iroquois, and only a handful of prisoners; Verenna and other accounts put the Patriot dead at over 300. The killing of fugitives and the torture of prisoners went on through the night, though some of the most lurid stories cannot be confirmed.¹⁶

Aftermath

On the morning of 4 July Denison, at Forty Fort with the women and children, accepted John Butler's terms: the settlers would not take up arms again in the war, would pull down their forts and would stop persecuting Loyalists. Despite the capitulation, warriors plundered the homes of the people who had surrendered, and many fled the valley.¹⁷

Butler left on 8 July, having laid the settlement waste, and bands of warriors kept raiding the defenseless valley. When the settlers returned in the autumn they found the dead still lying in the fields. The Encyclopedia says they were buried in a common grave on 22 October; the genealogical account speaks of two mass graves.¹⁸

John Butler always denied that any massacre had taken place. In his report he wrote that no one had been hurt except those in arms, to whom, he admitted, the Indians gave no quarter. Across the colonies, newspapers turned the defeat into an atrocity story in which, it seemed, not a soul in the valley had survived, and the outrage had consequences: in 1779 Congress sent General John Sullivan against the Iroquois, and his army burned their villages and crops.¹⁹

Legacy and memory

Wyoming fed a cycle of revenge on the frontier. The Encyclopedia's verdict on the battle itself is harsh: Zebulon Butler's handling of 3 July was singularly inept, while John Butler, after a march of almost 200 miles through the wilderness, achieved what it calls a battle of annihilation. Verenna stresses the older roots of the tragedy, arguing that without the feud between Connecticut and Pennsylvania the massacre might never have happened.²⁰

The quarrel that had prepared the ground outlived the war. In 1782 arbitration gave the territory to Pennsylvania, but the fight over the settlers' land titles went on for years; Verenna traces it to 1799.²¹

Visiting the battlefield today

The bones of the dead were later gathered and an obelisk raised over them, the Wyoming Monument, in what is now the borough of Wyoming, near the battlefield.²²

Since the centennial of 1878 the Wyoming Commemorative Association has held a ceremony at the monument every year around the anniversary of the battle; its 144th annual service took place in 2022.²³