Battle of Wyoming

The Wyoming Valley Massacre — as it became known in Patriot propaganda — was one of the most devastating attacks on a civilian settlement during the Revolutionary War. The prosperous Wyoming Valley in northeastern Pennsylvania had been stripped of most of its men who had gone to serve in the Continental Army, leaving it defended primarily by local militia and older men.

British Lieutenant Colonel John Butler commanded about 1,100 men — roughly 400 Loyalists of Butler's Rangers and 700 Seneca and Cayuga warriors under Joseph Brant. The valley defenders could muster only about 300 militia. The battle on July 3 was brief and catastrophic: the militia was lured from its defensive position at Forty Fort by a provocation, then hit in the flanks by Brant's warriors as the main Loyalist force engaged frontally. The American line crumbled.

The killing that followed was extreme. Hundreds of settlers and militiamen were killed, their homes and crops burned, and livestock slaughtered. Survivors fled through the wilderness in what was called the 'Wyoming Massacre,' many dying of exhaustion and exposure before reaching safety. The atrocities at Wyoming, combined with the Cherry Valley massacre that fall, convinced Washington and Congress that the Iroquois threat had to be permanently eliminated. The result was the Sullivan-Clinton Campaign of 1779, which destroyed the Iroquois homeland and broke the Confederacy's military power forever.