Onaquaga | |
---|---|
Former Iroquois Village | |
Country | United States |
State | New York |
County | Broome |
Onaquaga (also spelled many other ways) was a large Iroquois village, located on both sides of the Susquehanna River near present-day Windsor, New York. During the American Revolutionary War, the Continental Army destroyed it and nearby Unadilla in October 1778 in retaliation for British and Iroquois attacks on frontier communities.
Onaquaga was originally home to members of the Oneida tribe, one of the Five Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy. The Iroquoian-speaking Tuscarora people joined in outlying settlements when they migrated north from South Carolina and became the Sixth Nation of the confederacy in 1722. In 1753, Nanticoke refugees from Virginia also moved into the village. That same year, Reverend Gideon Hawley established an Indian mission in the village. The establishment of the mission led to an increase in population of Christianized Indians living in and about the village, both those from the area and those who migrated from elsewhere. [1]
Following the 1768 Treaty of Fort Stanwix, Mohawks were forced north and west and a number settled in Onaquaga, just west of the treaty line. They were prosperous, had some cattle and poultry, gardens, and fruit trees. Many of the inhabitants were Christians. By the time of the American Revolution, representatives from all of the Six Nations, a group of Algonquian-speaking Lenape people, and also a number of Loyalists lived in Onaquaga, a total population of about 400. [2] : p.234
In 1778 during the Revolution, Joseph Brant used Onaquaga as a base for raids on New York and Pennsylvania frontier communities. Captain Jacob (Scott) of the Saponi (Catawba) helped Brant try to hold back the community from participating in the Cherry Valley Massacre. [3] In retaliation the Americans organized a raid commanded by Lieutenant Colonel William Butler. Faced with superior forces the inhabitants abandoned the town, which was then burned by the Americans.
Historian Francis Whiting Halsey, who spelled the name of the village Oghwaga, included this footnote in his 1901 work The Old New York Frontier:
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Thayendanegea or Joseph Brant was a Mohawk military and political leader, based in present-day New York and, later, Brantford, in what is today Ontario, who was closely associated with Great Britain during and after the American Revolution. Perhaps the best known Native American of his generation, he met many of the most significant American and British people of the age, including both United States President George Washington and King George III of Great Britain.
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The Battle of Cobleskill was an American Revolutionary War raid on the frontier settlement of Cobleskill, New York on May 30, 1778. The battle took place in what is now the hamlet of Warnerville, New York, near the modern Cobleskill-Richmondville High School. The raid marked the beginning of a phase in which Loyalists and Iroquois, encouraged and supplied by British authorities in the Province of Quebec, attacked and destroyed numerous villages on what was then the western frontier of New York and Pennsylvania.
The Northwestern Confederacy, or Northwestern Indian Confederacy, was a loose confederacy of Native Americans in the Great Lakes region of the United States created after the American Revolutionary War. Formally, the confederacy referred to itself as the United Indian Nations, at their Confederate Council. It was known infrequently as the Miami Confederacy since many contemporaneous federal officials overestimated the influence and numerical strength of the Miami tribes based on the size of their principal city, Kekionga.
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The Raid on Unadilla and Onaquaga was a military operation by Continental Army forces and New York militia against the Iroquois towns of Unadilla and Onaquaga in what is now upstate New York. In early October 1778, more than 250 men under the command of Lieutenant Colonel William Butler of the 4th Pennsylvania Regiment descended on the two hastily abandoned towns and destroyed them, razing most of the buildings and taking or destroying provisions, including the inhabitants' winter stores.
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