The names of many of these men are on the battle monument,--names such as Groot, Petrie, Dunckel, Klock, Kraus, Sammons, Schnell, Van Horn, and Zimmerman. We do not need to be told that these were not men of English blood; indeed, many of them belonged to those same Dutch families which we saw settling in the Hudson and Mohawk valleys. And some, like the last one, were not Dutch but German, and their ancestors came not from Holland but from a land farther up the Rhine. They had been driven out by the persecutions of one of the French kings and had come to America. They had had a hard time, suffering much from taskmasters, from poverty, and from the savages, until finally they had gone farther west in the Mohawk valley and had received good lands lying eastward from Utica. There they became comfortable and prosperous. They answered promptly the brave Herkimer’s call to arms, and many of them gave their lives for home and country at Oriskany. We must now tell the other side of the story and see who the invaders were and where they came from. In Revolutionary days nearly all the people of New York were in its two great valleys. One could go up the Hudson from New York, pass Albany and Fort Edward, and, without finding high ground, enter the valley of lake Champlain and go down to Montreal on the St. Lawrence. Here, then, was an easy valley road from the sea at New York into Canada. Coming either way, one could turn off to the west at Fort Orange or Albany and go up the Mohawk and down to Oswego on lake Ontario. In these two valleys were all the farms, the towns, and of course the forts. There were forts at Oswego and where Rome, Utica, and Albany are; at Fort Edward, Fort Ann, Ticonderoga, and many other places, making a chain of defenses in these valleys. West of the Hudson and south of the Mohawk were the high, rough woods of the Catskills; while west of lake Champlain and north of the Mohawk were the rugged Adirondacks, without roads or clearings. And because the roads, the homes, and the forts were in the valleys, we shall almost always find the armies and the fighting there.