“The parings of scalps and the hair of our countrymen at every warrior’s camp on the path,” wrote Colonel Brodhead to Washington, “are new inducements to revenge.” Although his men on their return, September 14, were bare-footed and in rags, and had had no pay for nine months, he offered to lead an expedition to Detroit. Of two soldiers whom he sent to General Sullivan, he heard nothing. “I apprehend,” he wrote, “they have fallen into the enemy’s hands.” Dressing many of his men like Indians, he sent out various parties that devastated the region, and made it for a time uninhabitable by the savages. Very few men on our side were lost, and not a soldier but these two fell into the enemy’s hands. Although Brodhead’s “Allegheny expedition,” or “Diversion in favor of General Sullivan’s expedition,” failed to make direct communication with the main body of Continentals, yet his was a vital part of the great expedition of 1779. It aided powerfully in that series of blows which shattered the Iroquois confederacy. By keeping probably five hundred Senecas from Sullivan’s front, Brodhead helped to toll the death knell of savagery on the North American continent. CHAPTER III THE LONG HOUSE OF THE IROQUOIS The Indian country to be invaded by Sullivan stretched from the Hudson to Niagara Falls, and was called by the Iroquois “The Long House.” To this long house there were four “doors,” the northern at Oswego, the southern at Tioga Point, the eastern at Schenectady, and the western at Niagara. In 1779 there were only a few settlements of the white man outside of a thin line in the Hudson and Mohawk Valleys. The Six Nations of Iroquois, the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, Senecas and Tuscaroras, were federated together and usually acted as a whole. Many of the Mohawks living near the settlements were friendly to the American cause, and almost the entire Oneida tribe had been won over to loyalty to the Continental Congress through the efforts of Dominie Kirkland, afterwards a chaplain in Sullivan’s army and the founder of Hamilton College. He was one of the few white men who had been as far west as the great “castle” of the Senecas, on Seneca Lake. The Tuscaroras lived east of Cayuga Lake, the Cayugas between the largest two of the “finger lakes,” Cayuga and Seneca. The Onondagas dwelt around the lake which takes their name, and the Senecas, in the region between the lake named after them and the Genesee river. Roughly speaking, we may think of Schenectady, Utica, Syracuse, Elmira, Geneva and Ithaca as being the centers of the six tribes mentioned in their order, the central council-fire being with the Onondagas, near Syracuse.