About halfway between old Fort Schuyler, or Utica, and Fort Stanwix, which is now Rome, is the village of Oriskany. A mile or two west of this small town, in a field south of the Mohawk river, stands a monument raised in memory of a fierce battle fought on that slope in the year following the Declaration of Independence. On the pedestal are four tablets in bronze, one of which shows a wounded general sitting on the ground in the woods, with his hand raised, giving orders to his men. The time was 1777, the strife was the battle of Oriskany, and the brave and suffering general was Nicholas Herkimer.

On another of the tablets is this inscription:

Here was fought
The battle of Oriskany
On the 6th day of August, 1777.
Here British invasion was checked and thwarted.
Here General Nicholas Herkimer,
Intrepid leader of the American forces,
Though mortally wounded kept his command of the fight
Till the enemy had fled.
The life blood of more than
Two hundred patriot heroes
Made this battle ground
Sacred forever.

After the battle Herkimer was carried down the valley to his home, where a few days later he died. On the field he had calmly lighted his pipe and smoked it as he gave his orders, refusing to be carried to a safe place and saying, “I will face the enemy.” If the battle has its monument, so the hero that won it has his, and the traveler on the New York Central Railway can see both, but thirty miles apart, the one at Oriskany, the other a short distance down the valley from Little Falls.

Herkimer was not a trained soldier, but a plain farmer of the valley. His letters and military orders show us that he could spell as poorly as any of his neighbors, and that is saying a good deal. His army was made up of these same simple neighbors, who, though they did not know much about soldierly marching, were good shots and hard hitters, fighting not for pay but to save their liberty and to protect their homes from the cruel savages.

The names of many of these men are on the battle monument,—names such as Groot, Petrie, Dunckel, Klock, Kraus, Sammons, Schnell, Van Horn, and Zimmerman. We do not need to be told that these were not men of English blood; indeed, many of them belonged to those same Dutch families which we saw settling in the Hudson and Mohawk valleys. And some, like the last one, were not Dutch but German, and their ancestors came not from Holland but from a land farther up the Rhine. They had been driven out by the persecutions of one of the French kings and had come to America. They had had a hard time, suffering much from taskmasters, from poverty, and from the savages, until finally they had gone farther west in the Mohawk valley and had received good lands lying eastward from Utica. There they became comfortable and prosperous. They answered promptly the brave Herkimer’s call to arms, and many of them gave their lives for home and country at Oriskany.

We must now tell the other side of the story and see who the invaders were and where they came from. In Revolutionary days nearly all the people of New York were in its two great valleys. One could go up the Hudson from New York, pass Albany and Fort Edward, and, without finding high ground, enter the valley of lake Champlain and go down to Montreal on the St. Lawrence. Here, then, was an easy valley road from the sea at New York into Canada. Coming either way, one could turn off to the west at Fort Orange or Albany and go up the Mohawk and down to Oswego on lake Ontario. In these two valleys were all the farms, the towns, and of course the forts. There were forts at Oswego and where Rome, Utica, and Albany are; at Fort Edward, Fort Ann, Ticonderoga, and many other places, making a chain of defenses in these valleys. West of the Hudson and south of the Mohawk were the high, rough woods of the Catskills; while west of lake Champlain and north of the Mohawk were the rugged Adirondacks, without roads or clearings. And because the roads, the homes, and the forts were in the valleys, we shall almost always find the armies and the fighting there.

This will help us to understand the plan which the British made in 1777, by which they felt sure of crushing the rebellion. The year before they had to leave Boston and had come around to New York. New York was not so large as Philadelphia then, but it was an important place, for it was the key to the Hudson valley. The British generals decided to send one army up the Hudson to destroy the forts and beat back the colonists. This army was under General Howe. Another army, commanded by General Burgoyne, was to come from the St. Lawrence up lake Champlain and through the woods by Fort Edward to Albany. Burgoyne was a brave officer, but he was conceited, and he felt too sure that he could do his part easily. He was confident that when he marched through the country many colonists would run to place themselves under the English flag. In a few weeks he learned that these backwoods Americans were quite ready to meet and give battle to the combined forces of the British regulars, the hired German soldiers, and the Indians with whom they were in league.

There was yet a third division in this campaign. A British force under General St. Leger had come up the St. Lawrence and lake Ontario to Oswego. St. Leger also had with him many Indians, and these were commanded by Joseph Brant, a famous chief, who had had much to do with white men and who was well educated. This third army was to go east, over the Oneida Carrying Place and down the Mohawk to Albany. By this pretty plan three armies, one from the south under Howe, one from the north under Burgoyne, and one from the west under St. Leger, were to meet in Albany. They would put British soldiers in every fort on the way, capture and disarm the rebels, and have all New York under their feet. More than this, they would thus shut off New England from Pennsylvania and Virginia, cutting the unruly colonies into two parts so that they could not help each other.

But the scheme, brilliant as it was, would not work. None of the British armies reached Albany. Howe did not, perhaps because he did not try. Burgoyne and St. Leger did not, because they could not: there was altogether too much in the way. We shall now see how this happened.

St. Leger brought into the Mohawk valley from Oswego an army of seventeen hundred men. Some were British, some were Hessians or hired German soldiers, and the rest were Indians under Joseph Brant. They thought that it would not be much trouble to take Fort Stanwix and then go down the valley, burning and killing as they went, until they should meet the other armies of the king at Albany. But the colonists sent more soldiers to defend the fort, and Colonel Peter Gansevoort, who was in command, had under him nearly a thousand men. Just before the British came in sight a stock of provisions, brought on several boats up the river, had been safely delivered within the defenses. This was early in August, and only about seven weeks before Congress had adopted the style of American flag which we know so well. There was no flag at Fort Stanwix, so the garrison set about making one. They cut up shirts to make the white. The blue came from a cloak captured not long before in a battle, on the Hudson, by Colonel Marinus Willett, one of the bravest commanders within the fort. The red is said to have been taken from a petticoat. Certain it is that a patriot flag was made, and some think that it was the first American flag ever raised over a fortification.

While the British were besieging Fort Stanwix, General Herkimer had called out the men of the valley, bidding all between the ages of sixteen and sixty make ready for battle. The boys and old men were to do their best to care for the families and to defend their homes. Eight hundred men gathered under Herkimer and marched to help the garrison of the fort. Hearing of this, part of the British army, including the Indians, came down the valley to head off Herkimer. They met at Oriskany. The farmer soldiers were hurrying up the valley without due watching for sudden attack, while the enemy placed themselves in ambush around a low field which was wooded and swampy. Through this field the road ran, and when Herkimer’s men were well down into it the Indians opened a hot fire, which threw the patriots into disorder. They soon rallied and fought fiercely for five hours, until two hundred of them had lost their lives. Early in the battle Herkimer was shot, but he forgot his pain when he saw his men victorious. Much of the fighting was of the Indian sort, from behind trees, for the Dutchmen well knew the ways of the savages. They saw that when one man fired from behind a tree an Indian would rush forward to tomahawk him before he could load his gun for another shot. So they were ordered to stand by twos and take turns in firing. Thus when the Indian ran forward with his tomahawk he would receive a bullet from the other man’s gun.

Under John Johnson, the son of Sir William Johnson, were many Tories from the valley. They and the patriots often recognized each other as former neighbors, and then the fight was more stubborn than ever, for the soldiers of freedom were bitterly angry to find old friends in arms against them. During the battle a terrific thunder-shower came up, and both sides stopped fighting, having enough to do to keep their powder and guns dry. The dark storm passed and the strife went on again. At length the Indians grew tired and ran, leaving the field to Herkimer and his little army. The importance of a conflict is not always in proportion to the size of the armies engaged, and in what it did for freedom Oriskany takes high place among the battles of modern times.

The enemy went back to the siege of Fort Stanwix, and soon a new force of patriots under Benedict Arnold was sent up the valley to relieve the fort. It was during this march that an ignorant but cunning fellow named Han Yost Schuyler was caught, tried, and condemned to die as a spy. Because his friends pleaded for his life Arnold finally told him that he might live if he would go up to Fort Stanwix and make the Indians and British believe that a great army was marching against them. Meanwhile the man’s brother was held as a hostage, to be punished if the promise was not fulfilled. Han Yost did his part so well that St. Leger, taking fright, left the fort in great haste and his expedition was entirely broken up. Why he did not have a gay march down to Albany is now quite plain.

A few days after the battle of Oriskany a number of men drove some cattle to Fort Stanwix as food for the soldiers. Several women went with them on horseback to visit their husbands, who belonged to the garrison. At the ford of the river, now the Genesee street crossing in Utica, a big Dutchman, who did not wish to get wet, leaped uninvited upon a horse behind one of the women. The horse did not like the double load, and made great sport by throwing the Dutchman into the middle of the stream, while he carried his mistress over in safety.

General Burgoyne came nearer Albany than did St. Leger. Indeed he went to Albany, but not until he had lost his army. He had promptly captured Ticonderoga on lake Champlain, and this success gave him high hopes and sent rejoicing throughout Great Britain; but the patriots, by felling trees and cutting away bridges, hindered his southward march in every way. He sent a thousand of his German soldiers across to Bennington, among the Green mountains, to capture stores which he knew were there. But General Stark was there also, with a little army from New Hampshire and Massachusetts, and the thousand Hessians did not go back to help Burgoyne. He had left another thousand to guard Ticonderoga, and so he was two thousand short. All this time the patriot army was growing, for the men of the Hudson valley were maddened when they saw the bloodthirsty Indians marching with the English, and, to Burgoyne’s surprise, they had no mind to fight for the king. Howe did not come, St. Leger did not come, and the provisions were getting short. These could only come along the road from the north, and the colonists were already marching in behind Burgoyne’s army to cut his line of communications. He knew that he must fight or starve. He chose to fight. The battle was fought on Bemis Heights, a range of hills west of the Hudson, a short distance north of the little village of Stillwater. The British general, after his defeat, withdrew a few miles northward and surrendered his army near the present town of Schuylerville. A tall monument marks the place. This was the battle of Saratoga, fought in old Saratoga, which is several miles from the famous resort of that name.

So it was that up and down these beautiful valleys went armies and scouting bands, as well as peaceful emigrants with their oxen, their stages, and their small freight boats. One cannot go far along the Hudson or the Mohawk without finding the site of an Indian village, the foundations of an old fort, the homestead of a Revolutionary hero, or an ancient place of worship. When we see the great railways and swift trains, the bundles of telegraph wires, the noisy cities and great mills of to-day, we can remember Philip Schuyler, Sir William Johnson, Marinus Willett, Peter Gansevoort, and Nicholas Herkimer. There were no nobler patriots, even in Virginia and Massachusetts, than these men of the Mohawk valley.