Battle of Cobleskill

On May 30, 1778, forces struck the frontier outpost of Cobleskill, New York, in an assault now remembered as the Battle of Cobleskill. The fighting unfolded near what is today the hamlet of Warnerville, New York, close to the present site of Cobleskill-Richmondville High School. This assault opened a period during which Loyalists and Haudenosaunee fighters, backed and equipped by British officials in the Province of Quebec, laid waste to numerous communities along the western edges of New York and Pennsylvania.

The attack unfolded when a small Haudenosaunee detachment moved into Cobleskill, luring the town's defenders into an ambush laid by a far larger combined force of Haudenosaunee warriors and Loyalists under Joseph Brant's leadership. Brant's men killed several of the regulars and militia present, scattered the rest, and then burned much of the settlement to the ground. Several months afterward, Lieutenant Colonel William Butler led regulars and militia in a reprisal for the destruction Brant had brought to Cobleskill and neighboring settlements, wiping out two Haudenosaunee villages situated along the Susquehanna River. The following year, during the Sullivan Expedition, Continental Army troops went on to destroy forty Haudenosaunee villages altogether.

Background

After Saratoga's battles ended in defeat for British Lieutenant General John Burgoyne's push to seize command of the Hudson River valley, fighting along New York's frontier took on the character of irregular warfare rather than conventional campaigns. From their positions in the Province of Quebec, British officials armed and supplied both Loyalist fighters and Native American partisans. Through the harsh months of winter spanning 1777 into 1778, Mohawk leader Joseph Brant joined forces in planning with Seneca war chief Sayenqueraghta, the two devising strategies to strike at vulnerable settlements scattered across New York and Pennsylvania.

Brant set up operational headquarters at Onaquaga in February of 1778, near what would later become Windsor, New York. His campaign got underway that May, by which point he had gathered somewhere between two hundred and three hundred fighters, a combination of Haudenosaunee warriors and Loyalist recruits. Securing food supplies for his own men and for Major John Butler's forces stood among his key goals, since Butler was preparing his own strike against the Wyoming Valley.

Cobleskill in this period was home to roughly twenty families, their farms strung out along the banks of Cobleskill Creek. The community fell within the broader Schoharie region, an area that supplied considerable food stores to sustain the Patriot cause. For protection, the settlement relied chiefly on a modest militia force commanded by Captain Christian Brown. As word spread in the spring of 1778 that Haudenosaunee raiders might be approaching, militia leaders requested reinforcements. In response, Continental Army Colonel Ichabod Alden dispatched thirty to forty soldiers drawn from his 7th Massachusetts Regiment, placing Captain William Patrick in charge of this detachment sent to bolster the local defenders.

Battle

On the morning of May 30, Brant set an ambush aimed at those defending Cobleskill. A handful of his warriors moved forward first, meant to draw the defenders out. Near the settlement's southern edge, Captain Patrick's regulars along with militia from the area caught sight of them. Captain Brown cautioned that this could be a ruse, but Patrick disregarded the warning and pushed forward as the warriors fell back, drawing his men into a running fight. The chase carried on for about a mile before Brant revealed his true strength, and Patrick's company found itself overwhelmed by the larger force waiting for them. The fighting claimed the lives of Patrick and his second-in-command, along with roughly half of the men under their command. Brown gathered what remained of the force and managed a fighting retreat toward the settlement. Five men sought shelter inside George Warner's house, but the attackers set it ablaze, and none of the five survived. By the end of the clash, 22 regulars and militia lay dead, eight more were wounded, and five had been taken prisoner. When the bodies of Patrick and several others were recovered, they showed signs of horrific mutilation. A claim circulated after the war that Brant's warriors had lost 25 men, though Canadian historian Gavin Watt has dismissed this figure as "highly dubious."

Aftermath

As the fighting unfolded, Cobleskill residents abandoned their homes and fled to safety. Before pulling out, Brant and his followers set fire to ten dwellings along with the barns and sheds that went with them. Horses and cattle too numerous to take along were slaughtered rather than left behind.

Lieutenant Jonathan Maynard, a captured officer of the 7th Massachusetts, would later say that Brant had spared him personally. Maynard recounted that Brant's warriors were on the verge of torturing and burning their prisoners when Brant spotted Masonic markings inked onto Maynard's arms. This discovery led Brant to halt the killings, and Maynard and the other captives were marched first to Fort Niagara and afterward to Montreal. He gained his freedom through a prisoner exchange in December 1780. This story appears in William Denslow's 10,000 Famous Freemasons, alongside accounts of five other Masons whose lives were similarly preserved by Brant during the conflict.

Brant kept building his ranks of Loyalist and Indigenous fighters while continuing raids on settlements throughout the Mohawk and Schoharie valleys. Governor George Clinton of New York, who already had plans forming against Onaquaga, expanded them further once Cobleskill was attacked and Brant struck German Flatts that September. By October 1778, a combined force of Continental soldiers and militia had wiped out both Onaquaga and Unadilla, the latter another Indigenous settlement allied with Brant and Butler. The following month brought the Cherry Valley massacre, carried out partly under Brant's command.

Cobleskill families left destitute by the assault were awarded £200 as compensation. Meanwhile, residents of smaller nearby settlements began relocating to more heavily defended places such as Cherry Valley, where fort construction started following the raid, and Schenectady. These events, combined with subsequent actions by Brant and Butler, pushed the Continental Congress toward authorizing a large scale Continental Army campaign against Haudenosaunee lands. Generals John Sullivan and James Clinton led this 1779 expedition, which methodically leveled the villages of Haudenosaunee nations siding with the British, though it accomplished little in bringing the frontier conflict to an end.