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Introduction A Farmer’s Revolution The Wyoming Valley occupies a roughly twenty-mile stretch of the Susquehanna River between the mouths of Nanticoke Creek and the Lackawanna River. “Wyoming” is a corruption of the Delaware word Maughwauwam, which translates into “the large plains.” The name certainly described the wide, fertile flats that bordered each side of the Susquehanna before the land rose into the mountains that boxed in the valley. But this depicts Wyoming in only its strictest geographical sense. In the eighteenth century, people came to use the term to refer to a much larger area of hill and valley country covering Northeast Pennsylvania. By the nineteenth century, the meaning of the word Wyoming had changed in a far more telling way. By then, many Americans believed that it meant, not “the large plains,” but “a field of blood.” Considering the region’s turbulent history, it is no wonder that its name acquired such a sanguinary association.1 No event did more to link Wyoming with bloodshed than the battle that took place there on July 3, 1778. On that day about three hundred American militia led by Colonel Zebulon Butler confronted an invading force of more than seven hundred Indians and Loyalists in a desperate bid to save their homes from destruction. The battle was joined near the west bank of the Susquehanna late in the afternoon. The two sides exchanged fire for about half an hour before the invaders’ superior numbers tipped the contest in their favor. Indian warriors enveloped the Americans’ battle line and began to cut off their line of 1 1. Charles Miner, History of Wyoming (Philadelphia, 1845), xi, xv. retreat. Realizing their peril, the militia broke and fled. Some ran through the fields and woods; others attempted to make their escape by swimming the river. Many of the fugitives were chased down, killed, and scalped by their victorious foes. By the time the sun had set, the raiders had killed or captured more than half of the militiamen who faced them that day. In the days that followed , they drove Wyoming’s remaining inhabitants out of the valley, burned their homes, slaughtered their livestock, and destroyed their crops.2 The American press dubbed the battle the “Wyoming Massacre” and circulated stories of Indian savagery and Tory treachery. These tales spoke of Indians burning prisoners alive or of forming them in circles and splitting their heads open with tomahawks one by one. Some of the most lurid reports concerning this so-called massacre focused on brutalities perpetrated by Loyalists. The Pennsylvania Gazette related how Partial Terry, a Wyoming Valley resident who had joined the British and returned the valley as a Tory raider, “murdered his father, mother, brothers and sisters, stripped off their scalps, and cut off his father’s head.” Another account concerned the fate of Henry Pensell, one of the American militiamen who fought at Wyoming. After fleeing the battle- field, Henry came face to face with his Tory brother, John, whom he begged for his life. Showing no mercy, John called his sibling a “damned rebel,” shot him dead, and scalped him.3 Though the Battle of Wyoming and the exaggerated stories of murder and mutilation it generated certainly helped to darken the valley’s name, it was by no means the only time that the Wyoming Valley became the scene of violence. Those killed in the battle mingled their blood with Indians and colonists who had already died vying for possession of the region. In April 1763, the Delaware chief Teedyuscung perished in a fire that consumed Wyoming’s main Indian settlement and that was likely set by colonists who coveted the valley. Several months later, a Delaware war party took their revenge and “most cruelly butchered” a group of pioneers from Connecticut who had occupied the site of the destroyed Indian village.4 Dozens of people were killed and wounded and hundreds more violently dispossessed in the years preceding the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. This time, however, the combatants were not Indians and colonists but competing groups of settlers from Pennsylvania and Connecticut. 2 Wild Yankees 2. My description of the Battle of Wyoming is based on an account of the engagement included in Miner, History of Wyoming, 217–28. 3. Both of these stories of alleged Tory and Indian atrocities are taken from Miner, History of Wyoming, 225–26; and Gregory T. Knouff, The Soldiers’ Revolution: Pennsylvanians in Arms and the Forging of Early American Identity (University...

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