Native American contributions to the Revolutionary War have, for the most part, been overlooked by text books. Here is a piece that connects the dots from an Oneida chief named Shenandoah and a woman named Polly Cooper to George Washington's army and more.

1. Intro article to four-week series in The Journal & Republican: October 5, 2011
"SOONER SHOULD A FOND MOTHER FORGET HER ONLY SON THAN WE
SHALL FORGET YOU."
Major General Philip Schuyler
Continental Army
1777
Noble words from an officer and a gentleman. The follow-up, however, left a
great deal to be desired.
General Phillip Schuyler, a native New Yorker, member of the Continental
Congress and a commander of American revolutionary war forces, was praising the
invaluable aid and assistance provided by Native Americans of the Oneida tribe to
George Washington’s struggling army during its darkest hour, the winter of 1777, when
he spoke the words, above.
The American revolution was in dire straights. Washington and his rag-tag force
of 12,000 men, weary from a string of defeats at the hands of the British, had taken
refuge in Valley Forge, PA.
Deep snow, freezing temperatures and a near total lack of supplies during those
months proved nearly as deadly to the Americans as British musket balls.
Without the aid provided by the Oneida Nation that winter, Washington’s army
might never have lived to triumph in the Battle of Monmouth, let alone march south to
victory at Yorktown and independence.
It was during that long ago winter that an Oneida chief named Shenandoah and an
Oneida woman named Polly Cooper reportedly undertook an historic and heroic trek.
They and a small band of Oneida warriors walked the entire 300-plus miles from this
very area of northern New York to deliver life saving sustenance to Washington’s
suffering forces at Valley Forge. That trek is now immortalized in a towering 19-foot
high bronze statue of General Washington, Shenandoah and Cooper at the Smithsonian
Institution in Washington, D.C.,
In gratitude for this and other sacrifices made by the Oneida during the struggle
for independence, the newly minted government of the United States of America set aside
six million acres for their Native American allies in 1788.
In just over 100 years, however, that grant had been whittled away to a fraction of
its original size. Today, all that remains of that six million acre tract is little more than a
small hobby farm: a mere 32 acres.
Apparently, we have shorter memories than General Schuyler anticipated.
The roots of this story, however, go much deeper than the winter of 1777.
It is a story that boasts an amazing cast of characters, a complex and sophisticated
democratic government that predates our own by hundreds of years and is rich in intrigue
and heroism in both war and peace.
In about 1200 A.D., feudal law and the “divine right of kings” ruled in Europe
and the bloody era of the Crusades was just beginning. Here in northern New York,
however, the birth of that complex and sophisticated form of government was taking
place on land European mapmakers would later label, “impassable and uninhabited.”

2. Uninhabited? Not quite.
Five separate Indian tribes hunted, fished, grew crops and even learned to tap
maple trees right here in northern New York. Those five tribes, the Oneida, the Seneca,
the Mohawk, the Onondaga and the Cayuga formed the nucleus of what would become
known at the Iroquois Confederacy: the oldest living participatory democracy in the
world. They would be joined in the mid-1700s by the Tuscarora tribe to form the Six
Nations and continue a democratic way of life that is far older than the American
constitution.
This was a culture with an oral rather than written tradition, so there are varying
descriptions of specific events, but the preponderance of evidence is that the
“Haudenosaunee” people, or “people of the longhouse” as the Iroquois called themselves,
managed to overcome centuries of infighting and bloody raiding parties to unite and
bring peace to what is now northern New York.
According to Haudenosaunee legend, a holy man known as Dekanawida, the
‘Great Iroquois Peacemaker’ and his disciple, Hiawatha, (who would be the inspiration
for Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic poem), led these tribes to create a peaceful and
cooperative society that would exist for another 500 years.
It is true that the rough terrain and cold winters in what we now call Lewis and
Jefferson Counties prevented the Oneidas and the other Haudenosaunee people from
establishing many permanent settlements here. Instead, they built camp-like structures on
the Tug Hill Plateau, along the banks of the Black River and in the neighboring woods.
Winters were spent further south in their longhouse villages. Those longhouses
were wood-framed, bark-covered structures of between 50 and 100 feet in length in
which extended families waited out the coldest weather in conditions at least as
comfortable as any European of the day.
As was the case in nearly every instance since Columbus, contact with Europeans,
(in this case, the French and later, the British), brought at least as much harm to the native
people of the Americas as it did good.
The metal knives, axes, hoes and kettles that the early French explorers brought as
trade goods were clearly superior to the native implements made of stone, bone, shell or
wood. Woven cloth, likewise, was quickly adopted to replace the animal skins that had
traditionally been used to make clothing.
Nonetheless, with a sinister guile that would have delighted Machiavelli, the
Europeans quickly set out to form and then break and then re-form a whole host of
treaties and alliances with the indigenous people. Pitting one tribe against another for the
sake of beaver pelts and other valued goods became commonplace. And deadly.
The introduction of firearms alone led to an estimated 1,600 to 2,000
Haudenosaunee deaths from gunshot wounds in the decade of the 1690s and the number
went up each decade from there.
Even deadlier was the introduction of European diseases such as smallpox,
measles and influenza.
The French and Indian War from 1754 to 1763 brought still more death to the
Haudenosaunee as England and France battled it out for control of North America.
While the Iroquois Confederacy was officially neutral in this conflict, many
members of the Mohawk tribe sided with the British while large numbers of Seneca
warriors fought for the French. In both cases it was less a matter of preferring one

3. European nation over another than it was the hope of driving at least one of the foreign
invaders out of their traditional homelands.
In the coming weeks, we will be looking in greater detail at the lives and events of
the first northern New Yorkers and we invite you to come along for the ride back in time.