In The Wake of Ethnic Cleansing

The most haunting bit for me of The American Revolution documentary came in Episode 5, covering 1778 through 1780. In 1779 Washington sent a third of his army into western New York with the aim of destroying Iroquois settlements there. To quote from Washington’s orders to Major General John Sullivan (this was known as the Sullivan Expedition or the Sullivan Campaign): “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.” They destroyed 40 villages and drove 5,000 Iroquois west towards Fort Niagara controlled by the British.

I had known about the Sullivan Campaign previously but watching the episode I realized with angst that the aftermath of the campaign probably intersected with my family history. I looked up the details and my hunch was right. One line of my family goes back to 17th century New England; these ancestors migrated westward until around the 1820s they ended up in Lorain County, Ohio where they settled for a century-and-a-half. One of these westward hops was to the town of Locke, in Cayuga County, New York. Locke was founded in 1790, and in 1803 or thereabouts my ancestor Hosea Curtice (born 1739) moved to that town. Locke is a few kilometers east of Cayuga Lake; in September 1779 Sullivan’s soldiers destroyed the Cayuga villages on the east side of the lake. Lands in the Finger Lakes region were designated as bounty lands for New York’s soldiers in 1781, and the Locke township was named by 1790.