George Washington's campaign of terror August 20, 2002 By Dave Tobin Staff writer She comes to Great Gully to grieve, to heal, to remember her side of the Revolutionary War. On a recent August morning, Bernadette ''Birdie'' Hill, a Cayuga Indian clan mother, revisited Great Gully to reflect on the Sullivan-Clinton campaign - one of the Revolutionary War's later military excursions - and how it led to the virtual annihilation of her nation. Great Gully won't be cited in any Revolutionary War tomes. No battles were fought there. Soldiers of the Sullivan-Clinton campaign found only evacuated houses and villages spread along the lush, peaceful ravine that cuts through a ridge toward Cayuga Lake. They promptly torched them, as well as the hundreds of acres of corn and squash growing nearby. It was all in a day's work for the scorched-earth terror campaign through Iroquois country, ordered by George Washington. Great Gully is a verdant, dramatic ravine cut by the west-running Great Gully Creek. The creek winds some four miles as it drops over limestone ledges to the lake, creating pools and falls and widening to more than 100 feet. In places, the heavily forested ravine walls rise nearly 300 feet. When she was a child living on the Tonawanda Seneca Reservation, Great Gully held near-mythic power for Hill. It was the last place, she was told, that the Cayugas called their own. It was a place where they lived peacefully amid great abundance. Clear waters teemed with fish, the sky was black with birds, the hillsides green with apple and peach orchards, fields of corn, potatoes, pumpkins, squash, turnips and onions. ''Our nation was a great nation, a great agricultural nation,'' said Hill, a member of the Heron clan. ''There were thousands of us. Now there's around 500 of us in Western New York.'' Hill is 58 and arthritic, but visits Great Gully as often as she can, using a walking stick to help negotiate the nearly dry, pitted limestone streambed, finding sustenance in the serenity of the surroundings. ''If I stand here long enough, I can hear the laughter and the children,'' she said. ''I can hear the singing and the dancing. I can even feel the sense that our ancestors are all around. It's really comforting. It feeds me.'' She sits, dangling her legs off a rock ledge over a pool, as the sounds of birds and trickling water fill the air. ''I run through all kinds of emotions here,'' she said. ''I have felt the terror of our people. I have felt the loss of the children, our ancestors, the elders who weren't able-bodied enough to escape. All the senseless destruction.'' Cayuga Castle, the Cayuga Indians' capital, was alongside Great Gully ravine. Cayuga houses were scattered in clusters along the ravine's length, and also to the south, near what is now Aurora. All that changed in September 1779, when troops of Gen. John Sullivan's army marched through on a mission to terrorize and destroy the Iroquois. Today, the Cayugas are the only Iroquois nation without a reservation, and the land around Great Gully is land they would like back. Much of it is privately owned by individuals; 107 acres are owned by The Nature Conservancy. The Cayugas sued to recover 64,000 acres taken from them in illegal treaties, but in a trial two years ago, they weren't given any. They were eventually awarded $247.9 million by a federal judge, an amount that is being appealed. In 1779, the Sullivan-Clinton campaign was the Army's first Indian expedition. Roughly 4,000 soldiers under the command of Sullivan and Brig. Gen. James Clinton set out north and west from settlements in New Jersey and Pennsylvania to punish the Iroquois nations that sided with the British. In two months, they destroyed some 40 towns and villages, burned hundreds of houses, torched 160,000 acres of corn, and girdled the bark on thousands of fruit trees. The soldiers encountered virtually no resistance. Their campaign left most Iroquois without shelter or provisions, much to the satisfaction of Gen. Washington, who had issued this command to Sullivan in May 1779: ''The immediate objects are the total destruction and devastation of their settlements and the capture of as many prisoners of every age and sex as possible. It will be essential to ruin their crops now in the ground and prevent their planting more. ... Our future security will be in their inability to injure us, the distance to which they are driven, and in the terror with which the severity of the chastisement they receive will inspire on them.'' By the time of the Revolutionary War, Iroquois nations had been wooed and betrayed several times over by British, French and American colonists, all of whom, at various times, had pledged to protect Indian land from encroaching settlers. The wealthy British essentially bought their alliance with the Cayugas, Senecas, Onondagas and Mohawks - the Oneidas fought with the patriots - by providing guns, ammunition, beads and cookware in exchange for their help in fighting the Continental Army. The British assured their Iroquois allies they would protect native hunting and fishing interests. Throughout 1778, the British and Iroquois raided Colonial settlements in eastern New York and Pennsylvania, arousing Washington's frustration and wrath. The Sullivan campaign was his response. Sullivan's army was split into four battalions that spread out through the Finger Lakes. From Geneva, a battalion of 400 soldiers under the command of Col. William Butler was sent around the northeastern shore of Cayuga Lake. The first Cayuga houses that Butler's battalion encountered were at Great Gully. The Cayugas had already fled. Thomas Grant, a surveyor accompanying Butler's expedition, noted in his journal that the houses at Cayuga Castle were ''very large, square, log houses. I think the building superior to any (we) yet have seen.'' Soldiers, short on provisions, killed the Cayugas' cattle and plundered their gardens, before burning 42 houses and the nation's cornfields. From Great Gully, the troops marched to Peachtown, or Chonondote - now Aurora. It took troops about two days to reduce 14 houses to ash and girdle more than 1,500 peach and apple trees. In his journal, Sgt. Maj. George Grant observed the Elysian quality of the landscape: ''The land excellent, the timber large, the country level and well-watered.'' Cornfields, he wrote, stretched for two to three miles. When Sullivan's terror campaign ended, some 3,000 Iroquois refugees fled, walking to British-controlled Fort Niagara, about 120 miles west. That winter, hunger, as well as scurvy and other diseases, took their toll on the refugees in the crowded fort. Land surveyed on the Sullivan campaign eventually became the military tract New York used to pay its veterans after the Revolution. One hundred years after Sullivan's campaign, centennial celebrations were held around New York. The biggest was in Elmira, where Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, whose own scorched-earth march to Atlanta had demoralized the Confederates in the Civil War, spoke to Sullivan's tactics. ''Whenever men raise up their hand to oppose this great advancing tide of civilization, they must be swept aside,'' Sherman said. As for the civilization of the Cayugas, they had their own language, religion and customs. They were skilled farmers who traded their produce far across Iroquois territory. Nearly all that disappeared after Sullivan's campaign. Hill and other Iroquois leaders have been trying to persuade state officials to erect roadside plaques about Iroquois history. They want them placed alongside the 70-year-old markers celebrating Sullivan's march. Hill said she feels that telling both sides of the Revolutionary War story is important for healing, for ending the animosity that still exists toward the Cayugas and their desire to return to their homeland. About three-quarters of a mile upstream from Route 90, a wide stone ledge spans Great Gully Creek, rising about 20 feet. In spring, the ledge is a wall of water that has carved a 20-foot-deep hollow beneath the limestone table. On this dry August day, a thin column of water slides over the lip. Hill walks under the damp roof of the cave, under the dripping ledge, and reaches a hand into the falling water. That's as wet as she will get today. ''Sometimes I stand right under here,'' she said. ''And I let it wash my tears away.'' © 2002 The Post-Standard. Used with permission.