28

(BRANT`S RAID ON CHERRY VALLEY)

Currency:USD Category:Everything Else / Other Start Price:NA Estimated At:1,000.00 - 1,500.00 USD
(BRANT`S RAID ON CHERRY VALLEY)
An important manuscript document concerning the Cherry Valley massacre, 1p. 4to., [n.p., n.d. 1778], an "…Examination of Moabory Owen taken by Henry Wisner Esqr…", a member of Joseph Brant's raiding party in the early summer of 1778 which gives an important (and largely unheeded) warning of the Cherry Valley Massacre and the destruction of the German Flatts in the Fall of that year. The interviewer quotes Owen, in part: "….Saith he left Chemong the 8th. of July in Company with Hank Huff, John Huff, Nicholas Miller…[naming eleven others] and fourteen other Tories & about Sixty Indians & that Joseph Brandt had the Command of said Party & he heard the said Brant give Orders that they should not kill any Women or Children & if they knew any Person to be a Tory not to kill them and any that would deliver themselves up to take them Prisoners but any Persons running from them to kill them and he further saith that they threaten to destroy Katskill Settlement & that there is one old Seger which is at the Destruction of Pienpack & is now at Hillsburgh & has sixty Tories ready to join Brandt that a number of them are of Burgoyne's Men. He further saith that Twenty five hundred are to come from Canada to take Fort Stanwix...". Col. Ichabod Alden of the 7th Mass. Reg. was quartered in Cherry Valley for its protection, which was unfortunate for he was known as an inept commander and ignored much of the advance intelligence provided to him. It is also important to note that this piece of intelligence also gives Joseph Brandt an alibi for the Wyoming Valley Massacre for which many contemporaries blamed the Mohawk Chief. Brant was a hundred miles to the north at the time of the Pennsylvania raid, gathering his forces for raids on the Mohawk Valley. Extremely light toning, otherwise very good.