Stockbridge Militia - The Stockbridge Massacre

The Stockbridge Massacre

In August 1778, the Stockbridge Militia was stationed at an outpost in what is now Yonkers, New York. Their opposition came mainly from the Queen's Rangers, a unit descended from Rogers' Rangers, in which many Stockbridge had served during the French and Indian War.

On August 31, nearly forty Indians—including Abraham Nimham, his father Daniel, and twelve other Stockbridge natives—were killed in an ambush by the Rangers in the area of The Bronx that is now Van Cortlandt Park. Lieutenant colonel John Graves Simcoe led the British attack; although he was wounded along with several others, the skirmish was a decisive British victory. After the fighting, Hessian captain Johann Von Ewald sketched a Stockbridge warrior based on one of the dead who had been left behind. The picture is the only known contemporary depiction of a Revolutionary-era Stockbridge militiaman. Von Ewald described the Indian casualties after his examination:

Their costume was a shirt of coarse linen down to the knees, long trousers also of linen down to the feet, on which they wore shoes of deerskin, and the head was covered with a hat made of bast. Their weapons were a rifle or musket, a quiver with some twenty arrows, and a short battle-axe, which they know how to throw very skillfully. Through the nose and in the ears they wore rings, and on their heads only the hair of the crown remained standing in a circle the size of a dollar-piece, the remainder being shaved off bare. They pull out with pincers all the hairs of the beard, as well as those on all other parts of the body.

The bodies of the Indians were left on the battlefield. Soon after, local residents discovered the corpses being scavenged by dogs, and they buried them in a mass grave. By the 19th century the spirit of their sachem was said to haunt the land of "Indian Field".