Battle of Devil's Hole

Near Niagara Gorge, in what is now New York state, British troops from the 80th Regiment of Light Armed Foot clashed with roughly 300 Seneca warriors on September 14, 1763. This clash, which unfolded during Pontiac's Rebellion (1763-1766), came to be called the Devil's Hole Massacre among the Anglo-Americans, though it is also known as the Battle of Devil's Hole. By the time the surviving British soldiers withdrew, 81 of their comrades lay dead and another 8 had suffered wounds at the hands of the Seneca fighters.

Background

Tensions over the Niagara portage stretched back to 1757, when Seneca living near Niagara Falls voiced grievances to French authorities about losing their grip on the long carrying route along the river. French traders had been attempting to widen it for wagon use, and the Seneca deeply resented outsiders seizing their ancestral grounds and pushing them out of a trade they had long controlled.

Control of the region near the Great Lakes passed to the British once the Seven Years' War ended. John Stedman then reworked the old carrying path so oxen and wagons could pass through it, bringing in hired crews and guards to move goods along the route. This displaced the roughly 300 Seneca men who had once earned their living as porters on what they regarded as their own portage.

Frustration simmered among numerous Native nations throughout the Great Lakes region, many of whom sought to drive out settlers before further land was taken from them. This unrest erupted into Pontiac's Rebellion starting in 1763, during which multiple tribes across the Great Lakes and Northwest joined forces in a broad intertribal alliance meant to push back against British authority there. Within the New York colony, Sir William Johnson, serving as Superintendent of Indian Affairs, had for years pushed for equitable treatment of Native peoples, though his efforts met with only limited success. As he put it, the colonists as a whole were poorly suited to keeping peace with Native people, since they scorned in times of calm those they dreaded facing in conflict.

Battle

The ambush unfolded on September 14, 1763, when a force of Seneca warriors, numbering somewhere between 300 and 500, fell upon a supply convoy making its way from Fort Schlosser toward Fort Niagara. The attack came as the wagons passed through Devil's Hole, a stretch of ground notorious for its rugged terrain. Along part of that route, the path cut through dense forest flanked by steep ravines, and it was there that the warriors struck.

Porter Master John Stedman, who led the escort and the teamsters, had no warning of what was coming. The animals pulling the wagons panicked, stampeding or plunging into the ravine below, dragging drivers and carts with them. With the Seneca closing in for hand to hand combat, firearms proved of little use in the chaos. Of the twenty-four men present, only three, Stedman among them, managed to flee back to Fort Schlosser and raise the alarm.

Not far away, at Lewiston, soldiers from the British 80th Regiment of Light Armed Foot had made camp after coming from Fort Gray. Two of the regiment's companies, under the command of George Campbell and William Fraser, learned of the attack and hurried toward the scene, hoping to save the convoy.

The Seneca had taken position on a brush covered rise overlooking the trail, and from there they set upon the approaching soldiers roughly a mile short of the wagons. As the British troops attempted to fall back, the warriors swung around to sever their retreat toward the fort. What followed was described as the deaths of more than eighty soldiers. By the time the remaining men pulled away, 81 had died and another 8 lay wounded, though some accounts hold that the whole relief force perished. This clash became known among the colonists as "The Devil's Hole Massacre." A Seneca warrior named Dekanandi later gave Sir William Johnson a different account, claiming that 309 warriors had taken part in the assault and that they suffered only a single man wounded in return.

Aftermath

Not long after the second engagement, troops sent from Fort Schlosser and led by Major John Wilkins reached the scene, only to pull back to the fort out of concern that another assault might follow. By the time they made their way back several days on, they discovered that the fallen had been ritually scalped, their remains cast down into the ravine.

Word soon reached Johnson that a Seneca chief called Farmer's Brother, commanding a sizable force allied with Pontiac, had orchestrated the assault. Historians generally agree in viewing this fight as part of the wider uprising.

Ironically, the Seneca's effective strikes produced the opposite of what they intended: rather than pushing the British out of Niagara, the victories prompted them to strengthen their hold there. In time, Sir William Johnson compelled the Seneca to hand over territory in the region, a mile-wide band running along both sides of the Niagara River between Lake Ontario and Lake Erie, known afterward as the Mile Reserve, along with the islands situated above Niagara Falls. This severed their long-standing command of the river and its portage, a route that had served them both for travel and as a means of sustenance through food and water.

For years afterward, the Seneca pressed to reclaim authority over the riverbanks. Meanwhile, white settlement of the area remained sparse until after the American Revolutionary War had ended. Once that settlement took hold, it pushed the majority of the Haudenosaunee, having sided with the British, into Canada.