One Hundred Fiftieth Anniversary of the Sullivan-Clinton Campaign: Historical Programs and Dedication of Marks along Route of March

61 pp. Pageants: Genesee Country, Leicester, September 14, 1929; Finger Lakes Area, Geneva, September 21, 1929; Newtown Battlefield Area, Elmira, September 28, 1929. The 1779 Sullivan Expedition—also known as the Sullivan-Clinton Expedition and Sullivan Campaign—was a military campaign ordered by George Washington during the American Revolutionary War. The Continental Army carried out a scorched-earth campaign, in what is now western New York state, against Loyalists and the four Nations of the Iroquois (also known as the Haudenosaunee) which had sided with the British. The campaign drove 5,000 Iroquois to Canada seeking British protection, and depopulated the area for post-war settlement. The campaign began in June and ended in October in response to the 1778 attacks by the Iroquois on Wyoming and Cherry Valley. It was conducted chiefly in the lands of the Iroquois Confederacy (also known as the Longhouse Confederacy) and was aimed at "taking the war home to the enemy to break their morale".[citation needed] The expedition was largely successful in that goal as it destroyed more than 40 Iroquois villages and their stores of winter crops, breaking the power of the Six Nations in New York all the way to the Great Lakes.[notes 1] The campaign caused 5,000 Iroquois to flee to Canada seeking the protection of the British. Today this area is the heartland of Upstate New York. With the military power of the Iroquois vanquished,[notes 2] the events also opened up the vast Ohio Country, the Great Lakes regions,[notes 3] Western Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Kentucky to post-war settlements.[notes 4] Rhiannon Koehler describes the expedition as a genocidal campaign and argues that it was an attempt to annihilate the Iroquois.--Wikipedia