Neighbors against neighbors
When word reached the settlements that Fort Stanwix was under siege, Brigadier General Nicholas Herkimer mustered roughly 800 Tryon County militiamen — mostly Palatine German farmers from the Valley — and marched west, joined by several dozen Oneida allies from the village of Oriska.1 Six miles short of the fort, where the military road dipped through a marshy ravine near Oriskany Creek, a force of Loyalists and Haudenosaunee fighters allied to the British was waiting.1
The ambush closed on the column in the ravine. Much of the fighting was at close quarters, tomahawk and bayonet, in August heat and a mid-battle thunderstorm. Many men on both sides were from the same valley — some from the same families. And because Oneida fighters stood with the militia while Mohawk and Seneca fighters stood with the British, Oriskany set nations of the Confederacy against each other on their own homeland.
A pyrrhic stand
Herkimer, shot below the knee early in the fight, had himself propped against a tree and kept directing the battle — the image on the battlefield's monument and half the town seals in the county.1 The militia held the ground until the ambushers withdrew, but at a staggering price: by Park Service estimates, militia losses may have run as high as 500 killed, wounded or captured of the roughly 800 engaged — it is regularly described as one of the bloodiest battles of the Revolution.13
The relief column never reached the fort. But the battle — and the sack of the besiegers' camps by the fort's garrison the same afternoon — helped unravel the siege within weeks. Herkimer was carried home down the Valley and died on August 16 from complications after his wounded leg was amputated.4 The Oneida paid too: Loyalist-allied fighters destroyed Oriska within days of the battle, and their main village of Kanonwalohale was burned in 1780.5