As 1781 opened, Colonel George Rogers Clark’s unbroken string of successes had greatly annoyed British officials and Sir Frederick Haldimand, the Governor General of the Province of Quebec, wanted Clark dealt with once and for all. Haldimand recruited Joseph Brant, a talented Mohawk from New York and the most successful partisan fighter during the war, to destroy Clark’s army. Although their primary objective was to destroy Clark’s army, the Indians following Brant had little desire to try their luck against Clark, and they soon shifted their focus to easier targets.

When the American Revolution began, most of western New York, especially the Mohawk River Valley and the Finger Lakes region, was the dominion of the Iroquois Confederacy, comprised of six allied Indian tribes. The Confederacy’s greatest strength had always been their ability to stay united, which ended at the outset of the American Revolution when the Confederacy splintered apart with some tribes supporting the British and others the Americans. For the next eight years, raids and counterraids devastated much of western New York, resulting in a significant decrease in both the Native and European population.