The Cushetunk Settlement

THE DELAWARE COMPANY AND THE CUSHETUNK SETTLEMENT
By John Conway, Sullivan Co. Historian

In the early 1750s, North America was still mostly an uncivilized place, and while open warfare between the British and the French in their struggle to control the new continent was still a few years away, the growing tension between the two great powers and the unhappiness of the displaced Native American tribes made it a hostile place, as well.

While the upper Delaware valley was still a rugged frontier wilderness, western Connecticut was becoming overpopulated and farmland there was becoming scarce. Some of the Connecticut residents who were feeling squeezed out of their home colony began to form companies for the purpose of purchasing lands elsewhere. The Susquehanna Company, formed in 1754, was one such group, consisting of about 600 men from what would become the Nutmeg state. These men purchased from the Iroquois confederacy a large tract of land along the Susquehanna River, paying the Natives mostly with whiskey.

Another group, calling itself the Delaware Company, and led by hardy men named Skinner and Thomas and Tyler, purchased of the same Iroquois nations a tract of land adjacent to the Susquehanna purchase and running eastward to the Delaware River. By 1757, this group had formed a small settlement on the new property. The place became known as Cushetunk.

Within a few years, the Delaware Company was soliciting additional settlers through a prospectus that claimed they had established three separate communities, each extending ten miles along the Delaware River and eight miles westward. These new communities consisted of thirty cabins, three log houses, a grist mill and a saw mill. Because of the hostile nature of the frontier at the time, Cushetunk was surrounded by a stockade for protection, and looked every bit as much a fort as it did a peaceful community.

The protection of the fortification was largely unneeded until the uprising of the Delawares following the death of the elderly sachem and self-proclaimed king, Teedyuscong under mysterious circumstances in April of 1763. Avenging war parties under the command of Teedyuscong’s son, Captain Bull, swooped through the Wyoming Valley and into the Delaware Valley, attacking every settlement along the way. The riverfront community at Ten Mile River was destroyed, and the 22 or so inhabitants massacred. The warriors then made their way upriver to Cushetunk, at one time a revered place where their ancestors had held green-corn dances and dog festivals, and ballgames, and where, according to some legends, their sainted chieftain Tammanend, or Tammany, had spent much of his life.

The Delaware under Captain Bull had every intention of destroying Cushetunk and vanquishing those living there just as they had done downriver, but the stockade made their task a bit more difficult. The Cushetunk settlers caught sight of the marauders as they approached, and many were able to gather inside the blockhouse. Two of the men, Moses Thomas and Jedidiah Willis, were killed by the Delawares before they could enter the fortification, and that left only one man, Ezra Witter, in defense of the settlement. Fortunately for Witter, he had the assistance of a number of strong, capable women who managed to keep their heads as the war party gathered outside.

The women were armed with muskets and under Witter’s direction fired at the opportune time, killing one of the war party and intimidating the others by convincing them that the stockade was well defended. Witter’s deception proved fortuitous, and the raiding party left without further incident, taking their lone casualty with them.

The upper Delaware remained a hostile place for another few decades. One historian has described the area as it existed as late as 1779, when the Revolutionary War Battle of Minisink was fought just north of what is today Barryville, as “a howling wilderness.” “There was not a wilder, lonelier place on the whole frontier,” Isabel Thompson Kelsay writes in “Joseph Brant: Man of Two Worlds,” “a place where wolves gathered by night but men were seldom seen.” Still, the stockade that was Cushetunk was never put to the test again.