Cherry Valley Massacre

The raid on Cherry Valley was one of many in the Mohawk Valley and central
New York during the American Revolution. Tories and Patriots lived in close
proximity to each other. Neighbors, even members of the same families, now
considered themselves enemies. The Revolution was for them in effect a civil
war. Cherry Valley and the settlements south along the Susquehanna River
and the Palatine settlements to the north and east were the frontier. These
frontier areas supplied food to American armies, and were adjacent to the
Champlain-Hudson corridor that held vast military significance. Upstate New
York was then the land of the Haudenosaunee, the Iroquois Confederacy.
These Native nations had intended to stay neutral in the American war for
independence, but for various reasons many of them took sides in the conflict,
dividing their Confederacy. The violence grew worse after the Battle
of Oriskany in August of 1777.

For nearly two centuries the lives of the Haudenosaunee people had become
heavily intertwined with European colonial politics, trade and warfare. Once
the war had begun, forcing native people to take sides, there was no going
back. By the time of the Cherry Valley Massacre, both white and Indian
villages were vulnerable to attack and strategic plunder. This civil war on the
New York frontier had also become a war for control of the future of land
ownership: who would keep their land, who would receive land, and who
would be disinherited.