The Esopus Indian Nation’s Revolutionary War Experience

Editor's Note: This series of blog posts recounts the dramatic story of the Esopus Indian Nation’s Revolutionary War exodus. The original inhabitants of Ulster County, the Esopus Indians successfully maintained their sovereignty and traditional way of life in the face of overwhelming odds for over a century. These blog posts are summaries of a much fuller story that will be published in 2027.

Map: Sauthier, Claude Joseph (1776) "A map of the Province of New-York" Library of Congress Geography and Map Division G3800 1776 .S3 Medal: 1766 Peace Medal, American Numismatic Society Raymond.1925.929; Fuld,Tayman.HWU12; Stahl.Scully.28

Part 6. Revenge: 1780-1781

Over the course of 1779, the Esopus Indian Nation had become refugees for the fourth time in as many years. With their women, children, and elders now safe on Buffalo Creek, a river that flows into Lake Erie, the warriors of the Esopus Indian Nation continued to return to their ancestral homeland in Ulster County on war expeditions. Due to the devastation of their towns and those of the rest of Indian Country in 1778 and 1779 from the Butler and Sullivan Expeditions, respectively, thousands of warriors were ready for retribution. Early in May of 1780, a small Esopus Indian warparty appeared near Saugerties with the aim of capturing Rebel officials. Led by Benjamin Shanks and John Runnupe, the small mixed expedition of Esopus and Catskill Indian warriors captured Captain Jeremiah Snyder and his son Elias.[1] Capt. Snyder was a militia leader who had recently commanded the fort at Shandaken. The two were busy working in a farmfield when they were taken. They would spend the rest of the war as prisoners in Canada. In July, John Runnupe returned on a second raid with six other Esopus and Catskill Indians, this time to Shawangunk. He intended to capture Colonel Johannes Jansen, but only succedded in taking seven of Jansen’s African slaves. Runnupe never made it back to Fort Niagara: at an unknown location, deep in the wilderness of the Catskill Mountains, the captured slaves waited for an opportune moment and killed Runnupe and three others before returning home to enslavement.[2]

According to British Indian Department records, over the spring and summer of 1780 around twenty five Esopus Indian warriors were involved in at least five expeditions to their ancestral homeland, with targets including the Saugerties area, Shawangunk and the Delaware River around Cochecton.[3] As noted earlier, they seem to have been frequently accompanied by the few Catskill Indian warriors that remained. For many generations, the Catskill Indians had been their close friends and neighbors to the north in what is now Greene County. Later in the summer, thirty four Esopus and Catskill Indians were noted as serving directly under Joseph Brant, likely in a raid against the Mohawk Valley.[4] In the meantime, their wives, children, and other non-combattants survived as best they could on Buffalo Creek, growing corn and other crops, hunting and fishing. In September, Benjamin Shanks returned to Ulster County with three other Esopus warriors to try again and recapture Colonel Johannes Jansen; upon arrival, they were joined by an old friend with Loyalist sympathies, prominent settler Samuel Gonsalus.[5] They failed to capture Col. Jansen, and in their haste to get back to Fort Niagara (in all likelihood, they urgently needed to return to support their families with hunting before winter), they had to kill all the civilian prisoners they had taken, including two of Jansen’s slaves, who may have been among the captives that had killed John Runnupe the year previous.[6]

Winter did not bring a break to the retaliatory raids: with so many thousands of refugees now living in Seneca Country, game animals quickly disappeared, and many of the refugees were on the brink of starvation. Expeditions to their distant Delaware and Hudson Valley homeland removed some mouths to feed while supporting the strategy of weakening Rebel forces by capturing commanders and burning farmland. As often as not, cattle, horses and other livestock captured in the raids were quickly consumed by the starving warriors. In February of 1781, an expedition of fourteen Esopus and Catskill warriors headed towards Ulster and Greene Counties, led by their chief sachem, Philip Houghtaling; they may have been part of the party that captured prominent local Rebel militia captain David Abeel in nearby Coxsackie.[7] According to British Indian Department accounts, in May of 1781 the total number of Esopus Indians living on Buffalo Creek included sixty five men, women and children who, but three years before, had been living in the shadow of the Catskill Mountains. Another 188 men, women and children on the census, who had lived on the Susquehanna River near the town of Chughnut, were also primarily Esopus Indians.[8] Along with Munsees from Chemung and their former Nanticoke and Shawnee neighbors of the Susquehanna, they were organized under Indian Department Lieutenant Henry William Nelles, a former resident of the Mohawk Valley.

In early August of 1781, an expedition of nearly four hundred warriors and Loyalist rangers raided the Rondout Valley. They burned dozens of houses around the settlements of Napanoch and Wawarsing and as far east as Mombaccus – areas that, mere decades earlier, formed the heart of Esopus Indian Country.[9] Although most of the warriors were Seneca, they were piloted by Esopus Indian scouts, who were intimately familiar with the settled parts of Ulster County. The Esopus Indian pilots, which included war captain Ben Shanks, abandoned the expedition as soon as it entered the Rondout Valley. According to one account, the Esopus pilots had been drying some damp black powder by the fire when it accidentally set abalaze, badly burning them.[10] The force of now-mostly Seneca warriors was soon completely lost, but “behaved beyond expectation while in the settlement[s] and on the road, having lost and got their people wounded.”[11] It’s possible that that the Esopus Indian pilots also decided to abandon the Seneca raid into their own homeland because of the failure of the Senecas to distinguish between Loyalists and Rebels, civilians and non-combatants in raids and battles elsewhere. From the early days of the war, the Esopus Indians’ leadership had always shown reluctance to cause unnecessary harm to their former Ulster County settler neighbors, many of whom they had once counted as close friends.
                                                                     To Be Continued…

Citations:
[1] The Catskill Indians were a Mohican-speaking band whose traditional homeland included all of Greene County and parts of Schoharie and Albany Counties to the north of the Esopus Indians. For at least two centuries, the Catskill Indians were the Esopus Indian Nation’s primary allies and the people with whom they shared the Catskill Mountains.
[2] “The Captivity of Jeremiah Snyder… During the Revolutionary War”  in The Ulster Sentinel, Kingston, NY on Wednesday, Jan. 31, 1827; transcribed by Archivist Lisa Bruck.
[3] Haldimand Papers, Reel h1448.1305. National Archives of Canada.
[4] Ibid., Reel h1448.1090.
[5] Quinlan, James Eldridge. History of Sullivan County. GM Beebe & WT Morgans, Liberty, NY: 1878. 395-396.
[6] Gray, John A. The Indians: Or Narratives of Massacres and Depredations on the Frontier in Wawasink and Its Vicinity During the American Revolution. Rondout, NY: 1846. 42.
[7] “Return of the Indian War Parties” in Haldimand Papers 21767 Pt 4. National Archives of Canada.
[8] Haldimand Papers, Reel h1449.55. National Archives of Canada.
[9] Public Papers of George Clinton, Vol VII. Albany, NY: 1900. 198-199.
[10] Gray, John A. The Indians: Or Narratives of Massacres and Depredations on the Frontier in Wawasink and Its Vicinity During the American Revolution. Rondout, NY: 1846. 45.
[11] Smy, William A. The Butler Papers, Part III (1780-1782). Brock University Collections, 1994.

Author

Author Justin Wexler is an ethnoecologist who has spent the last 25 years conducting archival and ethnographic research to better understand the history, culture, and land management practices of the Native Peoples of the Hudson and Delaware Valleys. He has a BA in History and Anthropology from Marlboro College and an MA in Teaching History from Bard College. He and his wife Anna Plattner run Wild Hudson Valley, a forest farm and educational organization focused on Hudson Valley and Catskill Mountain history, ecology, wild foods, and land stewardship practices.

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