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The Patriots living in the Mohawk Valley and northeastern Pennsylvania had been devastated by Loyalists and their Indian allies in 1778. So much so that many fled this fertile area which had been the breadbasket for the Continental Army. Reestablishing control over this area would be a priority for Congress and General George Washington in 1779.
The Spring and Summer of 1778 was terribly hard on the Mohawk Valley with partisan conflicts raging across much of New York state, and atrocities committed by both sides. Unfortunately, some of the worst mayhem was still to come.
The Spring of 1778 in New York and Pennsylvania saw the opening of one of the most brutal phases of the American Revolution. In a conflict that was more of a civil war than a British versus American fight, mixed bands of Loyalists and Indians wreaked havoc on their Patriot adversaries that terrible year.
When the American Revolution began, most of western New York state was unsettled by Europeans and remained the dominion of the Iroquois Confederacy. Over the course of the next eight years, the clash of cultures would result in some of the bloodiest and most brutal fighting of the war.
By the spring of 1780, the bloody civil war in the Mohawk Valley had been raging for four long years. The suffering in the region was universal, having affected Loyalists, Patriots, and the Iroquois Confederacy. Despite the punitive Sullivan Expedition in the fall of 1779 which laid waste to the heart of the Iroquois homeland, the Loyalists and Indians were not vanquished.