Sullivan Expedition

Sullivan Expedition
Part of American Revolutionary War
Route of the Armies marker near Chemung, New York
Date June 18 – October 3, 1779 Location Upstate New York and Northeastern Pennsylvania Result American victory
Belligerents
Iroquois Confederacy  Great Britain	United States
Commanders and leaders
Sayenqueraghta Cornplanter Joseph Brant Little Beard John Butler	John Sullivan James Clinton Edward Hand Enoch Poor William Maxwell Daniel Brodhead
Strength
~1,000 Indigenous 200–250 Butler's Rangers	~4,500
Casualties and losses
3 Rangers dead, 2 captured, 3 wounded ~200 Indigenous dead	40 dead
~5,000 Indigenous refugees; several hundred Indigenous deaths from starvation, exposure and disease

The 1779 Sullivan Expedition (also known as the Sullivan-Clinton Expedition, the Sullivan Campaign, and the Sullivan-Clinton Campaign) was a United States military campaign during the American Revolutionary War, lasting from June to October 1779, against the four British-allied nations of the Iroquois (also known as the Haudenosaunee). The campaign was ordered by George Washington in response to Iroquois and Loyalist attacks on the Wyoming Valley, and the Cherry Valley. The campaign had the aim of "the total destruction and devastation of their settlements."^[1] The Continental Army carried out a scorched-earth campaign in the territory of the Iroquois Confederacy in what is now central New York.

The expedition was largely successful, with 40 Iroquois villages razed and their crops and food stores destroyed. The campaign drove just over 5,000 Iroquois to Fort Niagara seeking British protection, and depopulated the area for post-war settlement. Some scholars argue that it was an attempt to annihilate the Iroquois and describe the campaign as a genocide although this term is disputed. Today this area is the heartland of Upstate New York, with thirty-five monoliths marking the path of Sullivan's troops and the locations of the Iroquois villages they razed dotting the region, having been erected by the New York State Education Department in 1929 to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the expedition.^[2]