Theirs is a story of martyrs or fools; a mission of necessity, or of fear and vengeance during the Revolutionary War.
Whatever the narrative that is told, the events surrounding the deaths of Lt. Thomas Boyd and Sgt. Michael Parker in what is now Livingston County left a lasting scar on this region. The two men, both thought to be in their 20s at the time, remain the area’s closest connection to the insurrection.
"For better or worse, we do have this connection," Livingston County historian Holly Watson said of what she describes as "a thorny subject, difficult to talk about and, you know, not the fondest memory for many."
This weekend, as America celebrates 250 years since declaring its independence, much will be made of the sacrifices of those who fought for freedom.
But history can mix with folklore, and the stories aren’t always true. Such is the case of Boyd and Parker, the ambush of their scouting party and what came after.
“They were idiots,” said SUNY-Geneso history professor Michael Oberg.
Not that simple
Boyd and Parker’s grave markers in Rochester’s historic Mount Hope Cemetery are simple bronze plates mounted on stones. A park in Livingston County is named in their honor. And a historical marker laid by the Livingston County Historical Society in 1927 recounts that the pair “marked with their blood the western limit the state of New York of the great struggle for American freedom.”
“They were part of the Sullivan-Clinton Expedition in 1779 ... to basically clean out the Indian towns,” explained Dennis Carr, Mount Hope’s senior tour guide.
During the war, British, loyalists and their Iroquois allies led a series of raids across the frontier — killing hundreds of men, women, and children. A particularly brutal attack in Pennsylvania spurred a counter-offensive that burned the villages and crops of the Cayuga and Seneca people from northern Pennsylvania across upstate New York.
The expedition ordered by Gen. George Washington numbered several thousand men, and marked the largest offensive of the war.
“Depending on what historian talks about this, some call it a genocide,” Carr said. “Some call it some sort of a necessary action to preserve what had become one of the breadbaskets of the of the new country.
“I don't know that it's that simple.”
Boyd and Parker were part of a scouting party dispatched to locate British camps and Seneca villages. The group was discovered southwest of what is now the town of Geneseo. Many were chased down and killed. Boyd and Parker were among those captured and eventually killed as well.
They became "martyrs to the cause of white settlement and white expansion,” Oberg said.
But historical records and first-hand accounts from the time are clear: “They weren't very good at doing what they were doing.”
The scouting party somehow grew from an initial six to more than two dozen men, who walked past the British troops and then were spotted by the Senecas.
“They picked a fight,” Oberg continued. “They didn't know (who) they were fighting with and got wiped out pretty quickly. They met the fate of people who attacked Haudenosaunee towns. There was nothing special about their treatment at all.”
'Difficult and grisly details'
Livingston County historian Holly Watson picks up the story from there.
“So they were brought to Little Beards Town (today’s village of Cuylerville in the town of Leicester) … and all accounts, the primary sources that we have, do tell of some difficult and grisly details of torture,” she said.
In Livingston County, there are markers referring to a torture tree — a massive bur oak in the Boyd & Parker Memorial Park and Groveland Ambuscade. The tree is symbolic but almost surely not historic, Watson said, undercutting tales of the men being forced to walk around the tree and disembowel themselves.
The soldiers who found the men’s bodies made no mention of such a fate, she said. And there was no reference of a “torture tree” until 1927, she said, in the planning for the park when it appears officials chose the most stately tree and gave it a name.
“There was violence on all sides during those years, retaliatory raids on both sides as well,” she said of the Revolutionary War era. “But as far as who was writing down the story, there was continued fear and animosity toward Native Americans, and so it kind of feels to me that exaggerations could happen due to trying to make the enemy seem absolutely as bad as possible.
“In any case — however that happened — the torture tree became the central part of that story really only about 100 years ago.”
And it punctuated the roughly 300 historical markers stretching across upstate New York and Northern Pennsylvania tracing the Sullivan-Clinton Expedition.
“As far as the trajectory of Western New York,” Watson said, “it kind of opened the door to what happened later, if you will.”
Some of the historical signposts refer to “hostile Indian Nations,” while others falsely claim the offensive “extended the boundaries of the United States, revealed the fertile country of the Genesee and resulted in its early pioneer settlement.”
“It's still a healing process over the many different traumatic events in history” said J. Conrad Seneca, who today is president of the Seneca Nation of Indians. “It's still something that's discussed and talked about within our nations.”
The campaign is recounted as something that cannot happen again, when other perceived affronts threaten the territory.
But it’s a history that Seneca said he thinks is important for every New Yorker to understand, “because a lot of the history has been basically kind of clouded or misrepresented.”
Setting the record straight
The rest of the story is that Sullivan’s soldiers burned Little Beards Town then pulled back, ending the campaign. And Seneca reoccupied the Genesee Valley soon after.
“The Sullivan-Clinton campaign was not a conquest,” Oberg said. “It was a devastating raid.”
But as the United States and New York emerged from the war, both were broke, and needed a way to pay debts to soldiers. The indigenous lands were the solution, and were acquired through a series of what Oberg described as fraudulent treaties and illegal land purchases.
“And, you know, I think that needs to be part of the story,” he said. “It’s fundamental to the rise of New York state. No indigenous dispossession, no paying debts to soldiers. No indigenous dispossession, no Erie Canal. No Erie Canal, you don’t get the Empire State. The whole sequence is contingent on dispossessing Haudenosaunee people, and that was seen as so important to the state that no holds were barred.”
There is an effort to append the historical markers, working with Indigenous nations to add context. The push is months in the making but characterized as still in its early stages, according to the state Department of Education, which issued a statement that it was looking at “determining how best to interpret the markers, including those related to the Sullivan-Clinton Campaign.”
As for Boyd and Parker, they and others in the scouting party initially were buried where they fell, in Livingston County. More than a half-century later, though, their remains were unearthed, to be laid to rest in Mt. Hope, a brand-new cemetery in Rochester.
Until a large thunderstorm interrupted the ceremonies.
“Then what happens is a little bit unclear,” Watson said, “but it seems that no one really got around to it for a while.”
Not for another 60 years, and Watson said there were accounts of bones being “scattered around a little bit” — raising questions of whether those gravestones mark a memory, rather than a final burial.
