Bloody Footprints 77choose sides. Only the Christianized Oneidas conceded support for
the separatist settlers.
In response to the decisions by five of the Iroquois Nations, Gen
eral George Washington wrote instructions to Major General John
Sullivan to take peremptory action against the Haudenosaunee, "to
lay waste all the settlements around ... that the country may not be
merely overrun but destroyed .... [Y]ou will not by any means, lis
ten to any overture of peace before the total ruin of their settlements
is effected .... Our future security will be in their inability to injure
us ... and in the terror with which the severity of the chastisement
they receive will inspire them." Sullivan replied, "The Indians shall
see that there is malice enough in our hearts to destroy everything
that contributes to their support."54
By 1779, the Continental Congress had decided to start with the
Senecas. Three armies were mustered to scorch the earth across New
York and converge at Tioga, the principal Seneca town, in what
is now northern Pennsylvania. Their orders were to wipe out the
Senecas and any other Indigenous nation that opposed their sepa
ratist project, burning and looting all the villages, destroying the
food supply, and turning the inhabitants into homeless refugees. The
separatist governments of the New York and Pennsylvania colonies
offered rangers for the project, and, as an incentive for enlistment,
the Pennsylvania assembly authorized a bounty on Seneca scalps,
without regard to sex or age. This combination of Continental Army
regulars, settler-rangers, and commercial scalp hunters ravaged
most of Seneca territory.
With the Iroquois Confederacy disunited regarding the war, the
Continental Army forces were practically unimpeded in their tri
umphal and deadly march. In another scenario typically resulting
from European and Anglo-American colonialism and neocolonial
ism, civil war erupted within the Iroquois Confederacy itself, with
Mohawks destroying Oneida villages. The Oneidas could no longer
give their separatist allies intelligence. "By 1781," Grenier observes,
"after three seasons of the Indian war, New York's frontier had be
come a no-man's-land."55