Appalachian History Series – The Battle of Cattaraugus and the 1779 War in Western New York
The event often called the Battle of Cattaraugus sits in a difficult place in the Revolutionary War record. The name survives in local and later historical writing, but it is not one of the most standardized battle labels in the strongest scholarship on the 1779 campaign. The clearest contemporary evidence does show a Cattaraugus linked clash or emergency on September 1, 1779, when John Docksteder wrote from “Cataragaras” that “30 of our Indians were attacked” near Canawago and that he was going out with warriors to meet the enemy. That makes the episode real and important, even if it is better understood as part of a wider theater of fighting tied to Daniel Brodhead’s expedition and the larger Sullivan-Clinton campaign rather than as a universally recognized standalone battle in the modern sense.
Washington’s 1779 Strategy
To understand what happened around Cattaraugus, it helps to start with George Washington’s strategy in 1779. Washington ordered Major General John Sullivan to carry the war into Haudenosaunee country with the explicit aim of destroying settlements, ruining crops, and capturing prisoners. Modern public history institutions and documentary editions preserve the bluntness of those instructions. The campaign was meant not merely to defeat an opposing force in battle, but to break the food base, settlements, and military capacity of Native communities allied with Britain.
That larger campaign is usually remembered through the Battle of Newtown on August 29, 1779, near present day Elmira, New York. Newtown was the major named battle of the Sullivan expedition. After that fight, Sullivan’s army moved forward into the Seneca country, burning towns, destroying orchards, and wrecking cornfields on a massive scale. The National Park Service notes that by the end of the expedition more than forty villages had been destroyed, along with enormous stores of corn and produce.
The Shock of Newtown Reached the West
The British and Native response to Newtown helps explain why the Cattaraugus area suddenly became so tense. In his August 31 report from Shechquago, John Butler described the battle from the British side and explained both the weakness of his force and the difficulty of holding Native allies together after defeat. He admitted that his numbers were too small to meet Sullivan successfully, and later in that same reporting chain it becomes clear that many warriors dispersed back toward their own villages rather than staying concentrated in one resisting field force. That matters because it helps explain why western alarms along the Allegheny and Cattaraugus line could develop so quickly in the days immediately after Newtown.
In other words, the story at Cattaraugus was not unfolding in isolation. It was part of a rapidly widening crisis. Sullivan was smashing through Seneca country from the east. Native communities were trying to protect families, towns, and crops. British officers were pleading for reinforcements and boats for the sick and displaced. Under those conditions, a fight or running engagement west of the main Sullivan column was entirely plausible, and the surviving letters show exactly that kind of emergency.
Brodhead’s Expedition Up the Allegheny
At nearly the same time, Colonel Daniel Brodhead moved north from Fort Pitt on a separate but related expedition. Brodhead reported that he marched on August 11, 1779, with 605 rank and file. Near Conewango, his advance guard encountered Native men descending the river in canoes, leading to a skirmish in which he claimed several of the enemy were killed and wounded. He then moved on to abandoned towns, burned villages and corn, and later reported to Washington that the expedition had destroyed eleven villages, more than 160 houses, and a great quantity of corn.
This is one reason the later label Battle of Cattaraugus can be misleading if it is used too broadly. Brodhead’s expedition already contained at least one recognized fight on the Allegheny approach, often associated with Thompson’s Island or Buckaloons in later Pennsylvania memory. The Cattaraugus evidence points to another point of contact farther north and west in the same campaigning moment. What later memory seems to preserve is not a single neat battlefield in the modern park sense, but a chain of alarms, skirmishes, pursuits, and counter movements across the upper Allegheny and Cattaraugus corridor.
The September 1 Letter from Cataragaras
The strongest primary source for the Cattaraugus episode is Docksteder’s letter of September 1, 1779. Written from Cataragaras, it reported that a runner had arrived from the Ohio with news that thirty Native allies had been attacked by a large rebel force about four miles below Canawago. Docksteder added that three Senecas had been killed, that the number of Delaware casualties was not yet known, and that he himself was heading out with about forty warriors to meet the enemy. He also begged for assistance because the chiefs considered their condition distressed.
That letter is powerful because it captures the event at the moment of confusion. It does not read like legend or late county nostalgia. It reads like wartime reporting. It also places the crisis squarely in the Cattaraugus orbit through the period spelling Cataragaras. Even if we cannot reconstruct every movement with total certainty, the letter shows that there was an attack, there were deaths, and there was an immediate effort to gather resistance in that region.
Why Historians Treat the Name Carefully
The evidence is strongest when we say this: there was a Cattaraugus linked engagement or alarm in early September 1779, and it was directly connected to the devastation being carried out by Brodhead and to the wider collapse of resistance after Newtown. The evidence is weaker when we try to describe it as a neatly bounded formal battle with a universally accepted title, exact battlefield limits, and a fully agreed casualty list. The surviving documents simply do not give us that kind of tidy battlefield narrative.
Later writers tried to fill in that gap. Eber L. Russell’s 1930 article, “The Lost Story of the Brodhead Expedition,” is especially important because it attempts to connect Brodhead’s official report, Docksteder’s letter, local memory, and Seneca tradition around Bucktooth Run and nearby ground. Russell argued that Brodhead may have encountered more determined opposition than his own triumphant report admitted. That article is valuable and deserves attention, but it works partly by combining documentary evidence with oral and local tradition. For that reason it is best used carefully, alongside the September 1779 letters rather than in place of them.
Why the Event Matters
The importance of the Battle of Cattaraugus, or whatever name one prefers for the episode, lies in what it reveals about the war in western New York. This was not a conflict made only of one great battle and one victorious march. It was a war of pursued families, burned towns, shattered food stores, hurried messages, and desperate attempts to gather resistance before another community was lost. The Cattaraugus evidence shows Native and British allied leaders trying to react in real time to a military disaster that was widening across the region.
It also matters because it reminds us that campaign history looks different depending on which sources survive. Brodhead could report destroyed villages and no losses. Docksteder could report dead Senecas and a rushed effort to meet the enemy. Mary Jemison’s later recollections preserved the devastation from the Indigenous side as a story of homes, food, animals, and fruit trees reduced to ruin. Put together, those voices show that the history of Cattaraugus in 1779 is not just about whether a battlefield got the right name. It is about how a region experienced one of the most destructive campaigns of the Revolutionary era.
Sources & Further Reading
Butler, John, John Docksteder, Walter Butler, Mason Bolton, and others. “New Sources on the Sullivan-Clinton Campaign in 1779 IX (Continued).” Quarterly Journal of the New York State Historical Association 10, no. 4 (1929): 265–317. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43565512
Washington, George. “George Washington to John Sullivan, May 31, 1779.” George Washington Papers, Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/resource/mgw3b.009/?sp=29&st=text
Brodhead, Daniel. “To George Washington from Colonel Daniel Brodhead, 16 September 1779.” Founders Online, National Archives. https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-22-02-0360
Washington, George. The Papers of George Washington: Revolutionary War Series, Volume 22, 1 August–21 October 1779. Edited by Benjamin L. Huggins. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013. https://washingtonpapers.org/editions/letterpress/revolutionary-war-series/volume-22-1-aug-21-oct-1779/
Cook, Frederick, ed. Journals of the Military Expedition of Major General John Sullivan against the Six Nations of Indians in 1779; with Records of Centennial Celebrations. Albany: State of New York, 1887. https://archive.org/details/cu31924095654384
Davis, Andrew McFarland. Sullivan’s Expedition against the Indians of New York: A Letter from Andrew McFarland Davis to Justin Winsor, Corresponding Secretary Massachusetts Historical Society; with the Journal of William McKendry. Cambridge, MA: John Wilson and Son, 1886. https://archive.org/details/cu31924095649327
Beatty, Erkuries. Journal of Lieut. Erkuries Beatty in the Expedition against the Six Nations under Gen. Sullivan. Harrisburg, 1890. https://www.loc.gov/item/19007619
Seaver, James E. A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison, Who Was Taken by the Indians, in the Year 1755, When Only About Twelve Years of Age, and Has Continued to Reside amongst Them to the Present Time. Canandaigua, NY, 1824. https://archive.org/details/narrativeoflifeo00seav
Russell, Eber L. “The Lost Story of the Brodhead Expedition.” Quarterly Journal of the New York State Historical Association 11, no. 3 (1930): 252–263. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43564530
Brady, William Young. “Brodhead’s Trail up the Allegheny, 1779.” Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine 37 (1954). https://journals.psu.edu/wph/article/download/2452/2285/2299
Fischer, Joseph R. A Well-Executed Failure: The Sullivan Campaign against the Iroquois, July-September 1779. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997. https://uscpress.com/A-Well-Executed-Failure
Graymont, Barbara. The Iroquois in the American Revolution. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1975. https://press.syr.edu/supressbooks/1894/iroquois-in-the-american-revolution-the/
Calloway, Colin G. The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/american-revolution-in-indian-country/E852E3183BD1D69D9CB2946FE63B7B3A
Taylor, Alan. The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006. https://openlibrary.org/books/OL3422194M/The_divided_ground
Mintz, Max M. Seeds of Empire: The American Revolutionary Conquest of the Iroquois. New York: New York University Press, 1999. https://nyupress.org/9780814756232/seeds-of-empire/
Koehler, Rhiannon. “Hostile Nations: Quantifying the Destruction of the Sullivan-Clinton Genocide of 1779.” American Indian Quarterly 42, no. 4 (2018): 427–453. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5250/amerindiquar.42.4.0427
National Park Service. “The Clinton-Sullivan Campaign of 1779.” U.S. National Park Service. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/the-clinton-sullivan-campaign-of-1779.htm
Author Note: I like stories like this because they show how messy the Revolutionary War record can be on the frontier, where a single clash can survive in letters, memory, and later tradition under different names. Cattaraugus also matters because it opens onto the larger destruction of Haudenosaunee towns in 1779, which is the real historical weight behind the story.