Over 5000 Indian refugees showed up at Fort Niagara on the southwest shore of Lake Ontario that winter, and keeping them properly fed proved a Herculean task for Colonel Bolton. And though he awarded the chiefs red coats and feathered hats, and their women petticoats and horn combs, the Cayugas lost any small faith they might have had in the English and their ability to protect them from rebel forces. They became so angry at Butler that many wanted to turn him over to the enemy.
Yet, though they had been driven from their homes, the Iroquois as a whole were not kept down for long, for the next summer they were out in force under Cornplanter and Brant, raiding the frontier settlements with a renewed vengeance, and many Cayuga warriors participated. James Madison, in a letter to Thomas Jefferson, wrote, “The expedition of General Sullivan against the Six Nations seems by its effects rather to have exasperated than to have terrified or disabled them.” Even so, their vengeful raids brought no tangible results, and when the war ended a few years later the Iroquois were not even mentioned in the treaty between the Americans and the British, their fate left in the hands of their enemies.
The result was that New York State claimed jurisdiction over all Indian lands, turning their vast ancestral lands into private property for white settlement. And while many acres were given to the Revolutionary Soldiers as bounty for their service, only a few small parcels were allowed as reservations, mostly for the Seneca and Onondaga, but even these became smaller over the years, the land cheaply bought for goods or money. The Cayuga eventually sold all their holdings in the state, and many went to live with the Seneca, some as far away as Kansas and Oklahoma, although Canada offered the Iroquois land in Southern Ontario. Often the tribes themselves were their own worst enemy, unable to speak with one voice, and never able to present a cohesive legal representation in their own behalf. Wrangling and court battles by the various and scattered Iroquois tribes to reclaim land holdings continue to the present day, with scant results.
As for the common soldier, more than a few came back and took up farming in the conquered Indian country. But most of the military parcels given to the soldiers in payment for their services were bought cheap by land speculators, many of them former officers in the army, or government officials, who resold them in later years for hefty profits. Most of Sullivan’s force was sent to New Jersey after the campaign, to join with Washington’s army.
Timothy Murphy survived the war and even afterwards became involved in many scouts and Indian fights, claiming to have killed and scalped over forty of the enemy. He returned to Schoharie after the campaign and married Margaret Feeck against her father’s wishes. As if to confirm an exciting life, his wedding party was interrupted by an Indian attack. Murphy was even there at the siege of Yorktown, then went scouting and tracking down various Indians and killing them to avenge alleged murders they were rumored to have committed. He finally settled down to the life of a miller in the late 1780s, and married his second wife, twenty-seven year old Mary Robertson in 1807, and moved to Otsego County. He died of throat cancer in 1818 at the age of 67, and is buried in Middleburgh cemetery.
Congress had to investigate General Sullivan’s many complaints, and in the end they released him permanently when he offered to temporarily resign, thinking him too high-strung and egocentric for his own good, and more unlucky than incompetent as a commander. He served two terms as Governor of New Hampshire, then was made a Federal Judge by Jefferson. But his heavy drinking, nervous disposition, and spending habits did him in and he eventually became so senile that he had to give up the bench. He died on January 23, 1795, at the age of fifty-five, deeply in debt. Back in those days, creditors could attach the body of a debtor and keep it from being buried until the debts were paid, and this happened at Sullivan’s funeral, but one of Sullivan’s fellow officers from the campaign, Joseph Cilley, now a General, came brandishing a couple of loaded pistols and threatened to shoot anybody who interfered with his late commander’s burial.
Washington was called “Town Destroyer” by the Iroquois, but then all presidents are called this, and so it is doubtful that it came about because of the Clinton-Sullivan Campaign. It is, however, interesting to note that Washington is the only white man allowed into the Indian heaven, according to Handsome Lake, who later led a religious revival of the Iroquois.
The dirty three-year old child found at Canadesaga that Captain Machin named Tomas Machin succumbed to smallpox before anybody ever found out who his parents were.
Various commemorative events were held by the participants of the campaign in later years, most at the Battle of Newtown site, where they made high flown speeches glorifying their destruction of the “beasts of prey”, and justifying their campaign of destruction by saying they made the country safe for “fruitful fields,” and “industrious” Christian white habitation, by driving away the “heathen” savages.
We might imagine what happened to the people of Neodakheat, those fictional people I had to invent because next to nothing is known about them from those days other than their traditional names, except that they were driven from their homes. We might believe that Looks Both Ways did all he could to keep up the spirits of the people that long hard winter, and that he and Too Tall Pine put their differences aside for the common good and came together again as a formidable team, one representing the heart and mind of the people, the other the courage and the action. We might also hope that Yellow Bear married Deep Colored Flower, and grew to be a sound and practical sachem in his own right, highly regarded by his people and leading them into the years following peace, with his bright and happy children at his side. For such is the imagination, hopeful for happy endings.
The reality was that the years after the war were even more difficult for the People of the Longhouse, for the struggle of the Cayuga to hold onto the small plots of land still left to them in New York State proved futile as forces both internal and external worked against them. In later years many Cayuga families ended up living on the Canadian government’s Six Nations Reserve near Brantford, Ontario, their life along the banks of the great long lake known as Tiohero only a fond and distance memory; the once great Confederacy of Six Nations scattered to the four winds.