On his refusal, he was given into the hands of a Seneca demon, named Little Beard; and after being hacked and plucked to pieces with a refinement of cruelty which the pen refuses to describe, his torments were ended by disembowelling. [Sidenote: Devastation of the Iroquois country] Such horrors served only to exasperate the American troops, and while they do not seem to have taken life unnecessarily, they certainly carried out their orders with great zeal and thoroughness. The Iroquois tribes were so far advanced in the agricultural stage of development that they were much more dependent upon their crops than upon the chase for subsistence; and they had besides learned some of the arts of civilization from their white neighbours. Their long wigwams were beginning to give place to framed houses with chimneys; their extensive fields were planted with corn and beans; and their orchards yielded apples, pears, and peaches in immense profusion. All this prosperity was now brought to an end. From Tioga the American army marched through the entire country of the Cayugas and Senecas, laying waste the cornfields, burning the houses, and cutting down all the fruit-trees. More than forty villages, the largest containing 128 houses, were razed to the ground. So terrible a vengeance had not overtaken the Long House since the days of Frontenac. The region thus devastated had come to be the most important domain of the Confederacy, which never recovered from the blow thus inflicted. The winter of 1779-80 was one of the coldest ever known in America, so cold that the harbour of New York was frozen solid enough to bear troops and artillery,[23] while the British in the city, deprived of the aid of their fleet, spent the winter in daily dread of attack. During this extreme season the houseless Cayugas and Senecas were overtaken by famine and pestilence, and the diminution in their numbers was never afterwards made good. The stronghold at Niagara, however, was not wrested from Thayendanegea. That part of Sullivan's expedition was a failure. From increasing sickness among the soldiers and want of proper food, he deemed it impracticable to take his large force beyond the Genesee river, and accordingly he turned back toward the seaboard, arriving in New Jersey at the end of October, after a total march of more than seven hundred miles. [Portrait: John Sullivan] [Sidenote: Reign of terror in the Mohawk valley]