Battle of Wilton (New York)

In 1690 the French, at the command of Count Frontenac launched an attack in the Mohawk Valley which culminated in the burning of Schenectady, New York, killing and capturing a number of inhabitants.

In sixteen days they reached the Mohawk, led by a guide captured in the Schenectady Massacre, Jan Baptiste Van Eps.

The Mohawks had been caught off-guard and the French captured Caughnawaga and Canajoharie without a fight, and Tionondogue after a surprise attack that killed about 20 or 30 and took 300 captives.

[3] The French forces, under the command of Nicholas de Mantet, retreated north up a major trail that stretched from the Quebec to the Mohawk valley.

[3] The French "marched two days, when they were hailed from a distance by Mohawk scouts, who told them that the English were on their track, but that peace had been declared in Europe and that the pursuers did not mean to fight but to parley.

Trees were hewn down and a fort made, after the Iroquois fashion, by encircling the camp with a high and dense abatis of trunks and branches.

A group of Indians "squatted about a fire, invited Schuyler to share their broth but his appetite was spoiled when he saw a human hand ladled out of the kettle.

Happily for them, a large sheet of it had become wedged at a turn of the river and formed a temporary bridge, by which they crossed and then pushed on to Lake George."

On the trek north they suffered greatly from hunger: "They boiled moccasins for food, and scraped away the snow to find hickory and beech nuts.

They "were so decimated that the survivors of the Turtle, Bear and Wolf clans now all united and, in the summer of 1693, built a stockaded tribal town, called Og-sa-da-ga, at present Tribes Hill, Montgomery County.