The battle had been going for hours. The ravine was chaos.
On August 6, 1777, in a narrow gorge near the village of Oriskany in what is now upstate New York, approximately 800 American militiamen and somewhere between 60 and 100 Oneida warriors had been ambushed. The ambush had been prepared carefully — Mohawk warriors and British-allied rangers had positioned themselves in the forest on both sides of the ravine, waited for the column to enter, and then closed the trap. Within minutes of the ambush’s opening, the fight became a desperate, close-range struggle in which men grappled hand to hand, firing at targets a few feet away.
Among the Oneida fighters that day was a woman named Tyonajanegen.
She had ridden into the battle with two pistols — one in each hand, by most accounts. She fought alongside her husband Han Yerry Tewahangarahken, the chief warrior of the Wolf Clan, and their son Cornelius. Han Yerry had his musket. Cornelius had his musket. Tyonajanegen had her pistols, and she used them.
Somewhere in the middle of the six-hour engagement, a musket ball struck Han Yerry through the wrist.
He was not done fighting. He could not be done fighting — the battle was still happening, on all sides, in the forest, in the ravine, in the desperate close-range firefight that was consuming everyone around them. He needed to keep shooting.
But a man with a through-and-through wrist wound cannot load a flintlock musket. It takes two hands to pour powder, to seat a ball, to ram the charge, to prime the pan. With one hand damaged, you can pull the trigger. You cannot load.
Tyonajanegen loaded for him.
Every time Han Yerry fired, she took his musket, ran the loading procedure that a well-trained soldier could complete in thirty seconds but that required every step in sequence, and handed it back to him ready to fire. She did this under fire. She did this while a battle raged around them. She did this — by the account of the battle that appeared in the Pennsylvania Journal and Weekly Advertiser on September 3, 1777 — for the duration of a fight that lasted six hours.
The newspaper account is brief but specific. It describes “a friendly Indian, with his wife and son, who distinguished themselves remarkably on the occasion. His son killed two, and his wife on horseback, fought by his side, with pistols during the whole action, which lasted six hours.”
A woman on horseback fighting with pistols for six hours in one of the bloodiest single engagements on American soil during the entire Revolution. It appeared in the newspaper eleven days after the battle. It is not legend or later tradition. It is a contemporary account.
Most Americans have never heard of her.
The Question the Newspaper Account Opens
The September 1777 newspaper account raises a question that the account itself doesn’t answer: who was this woman?
The article doesn’t name her. It calls her the wife of “a friendly Indian” — the “friendly Indian” being the Oneida warrior who would later be identified in historical sources as Han Yerry. The paper wasn’t trying to write her biography. It was reporting the battle, and the image of a woman on horseback fighting with pistols was dramatic enough to include.
But the identity preserved in later records, cross-referenced with the Oneida oral tradition and the documentation collected by historians studying the Battle of Oriskany, makes clear who the unnamed woman was: Tyonajanegen, whose name in Oneida translates roughly as “Two Kettles Together.”
That name is itself a piece of evidence about who she was. Names in Oneida culture were not arbitrary. They reflected something about the person — their character, their actions, their position in the community. “Two Kettles Together” is a name that evokes abundance, hospitality, the management of a household that fed guests and sustained relationships. It is the name of someone central to community life.
She was born around 1738. She married Han Yerry in the 1750s, when she was perhaps seventeen or eighteen and he was in his early thirties. They settled at Oriska — the Oneida village from which the battle would take its English name — and built a life that was, by the standards of the era, prosperous and established.
She would live until approximately 1822, dying at around eighty-four years old. She outlived her husband by decades, and in those later decades she watched the community she had fought for be destroyed, rebuilt, and rebuilt again in ways that the revolutionary era had made both possible and necessary.
This is the story of who she was and what she did — and why the battle she fought in, and the choice her people made to be there, looked so different from inside the Oneida world than it looked from the outside.
The Mohawk Valley Before the Fire
The Mohawk River Valley of upstate New York was, in the years before the Revolution, one of the most complex and interesting social landscapes in North America.
The valley itself was extraordinary country. The Mohawk River ran through it from east to west, draining the highlands of the Adirondack and Catskill ranges and providing a natural corridor through the Appalachian barrier that separated the eastern seaboard from the Great Lakes region. On either side of the river, the land was rich — fertile enough to support agriculture, forested enough to sustain hunting, and threaded with smaller waterways that made travel possible in multiple directions.
The Indigenous nations who had lived in this valley for generations had developed complex relationships with the landscape and with each other. The Mohawk, whose territory centered on the lower Mohawk Valley, were the easternmost of the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. The Oneida, whose territory lay to the west of the Mohawk, occupied a region that included the area around present-day Utica and Rome, centered on the communities of Kanonwalohale (the primary Oneida town) and Oriska.
Oriska — sometimes spelled Oriskany in English documents — was a specific Oneida community established along Oriskany Creek, a tributary of the Mohawk River. It was founded by Oneida people who had chosen to settle somewhat further east than the primary Oneida towns, closer to the zone of colonial settlement, and it would give its name to the battle that made Tyonajanegen’s story a piece of documented history.
By the 1750s and 1760s, the Mohawk Valley had become a mixed landscape of Indigenous communities and European-American settlements. Dutch and German immigrants had established farms throughout the valley. English settlers had followed. The fur trade had created sustained economic relationships between the Indigenous nations and the European traders. The colonial administrative framework of the British Empire had layered its institutions over a landscape that had been Haudenosaunee for generations.
Within this mixed world, the Oneida community at Oriska occupied a specific position. They were Haudenosaunee, part of the Confederacy, and they maintained the ceremonial, political, and kinship relationships that membership in that Confederacy entailed. But they were also in sustained contact with European-American settlers, merchants, and missionaries, and that contact had shaped their community in specific ways.
The most significant of those shaping forces was Christianity. In the decades before the Revolution, Oneida communities had been substantially influenced by Presbyterian missionary Samuel Kirkland, who had lived and worked among them since the 1760s. Kirkland learned the Oneida language, established relationships with Oneida leaders, and created a Christian presence in the Oneida communities that coexisted with traditional Haudenosaunee practice in complex ways.
Tyonajanegen and Han Yerry were among the Christianized Oneida. Their names in English documents — Han Yerry’s baptismal name, their children’s names (Jacob, Cornelius, Dolly) — reflect the integration of Christian practice into their lives. The family prospered on a farm that made Han Yerry one of the wealthiest Oneida of his time: livestock, agricultural land, the material possessions of a household that entertained guests on pewter plates and cooked in brass and copper kettles.
The kettles from which Tyonajanegen took her name were real objects. Two Kettles Together cooked meals in brass and copper kettles — a detail that appears in the historical sources about her life. The name and the kettles both point toward a woman who was a center of household life, who fed people, who maintained the relationships that a prosperous Oneida household sustained.
She was also someone who prepared for battle with two pistols.
Han Yerry and His Household
To understand Tyonajanegen’s position, you have to understand Han Yerry Tewahangarahken — whose name in English translates as “He Who Takes Up the Snow Shoe” — and what his role in the Oneida community represented.
Han Yerry was born around 1724, making him roughly fourteen years older than his wife. By the time the Revolution came, he was in his early fifties — a senior warrior, a man of established reputation, a figure of recognized authority within the Oneida community.
His position within the Wolf Clan gave him a specific institutional standing in Oneida governance. The Wolf Clan was one of the clans of the Oneida, and clan membership in the Haudenosaunee matrilineal system determined social identity, political standing, and the network of obligations and relationships that structured community life. As a chief warrior of the Wolf Clan, Han Yerry occupied a recognized leadership position in the military dimension of Oneida affairs.
The couple had settled at Oriska with their children — three sons named Jacob, Cornelius, and one more, along with a daughter named Dolly. The farm they had built was substantial by any standard of the era. Han Yerry had accumulated land and livestock that made him one of the most prosperous Oneida of his generation.
The prosperity of the household is relevant for understanding what the Revolution would cost them. A prosperous Oneida family at Oriska had specific, tangible things to lose: land, animals, buildings, the accumulated material wealth of decades of work. When pro-British Iroquois forces attacked Oriska after the Battle of Oriskany, they destroyed everything Han Yerry and Tyonajanegen had built.
The prosperity also tells us something about why Han Yerry and his family were the kind of Oneida who supported the American cause. Han Yerry had relationships with American settlers and officials, had engaged in the commercial and diplomatic world of the colonial frontier, had connections to Presbyterian missionaries and to the network of relationships that Kirkland had helped build. He was not a man who had been peripheral to the European-American world. He was embedded in it, even as he remained Oneida.
Tyonajanegen, in all of this, was not a passive figure. The sources consistently portray her as an active participant in the decisions and the actions of the household. Her children’s readiness to fight alongside their parents at Oriskany suggests that the family had discussed what was happening and had decided together how to respond.
Their elder sons, Jacob and Cornelius, were by the mid-1770s in their mid- to late teens. Both “favored the rebel cause,” according to the scholarship on the Oriska community. The family’s commitment to the American side was not simply Han Yerry’s decision carried out by the rest of the household. It was a family position.
The Confederacy at the Breaking Point
To understand the significance of the Battle of Oriskany, it is necessary to understand the Haudenosaunee Confederacy — specifically, what the Revolution was doing to it.
The Haudenosaunee Confederacy — also known as the Iroquois, or the Six Nations — was one of the most sophisticated political systems in the pre-European Americas. The Confederacy had been established, according to Haudenosaunee tradition, through the Great Law of Peace — the Gayanashagowa — which united the original five nations (Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca) and later the Tuscarora into a framework of shared governance and mutual obligation.
The Confederacy had endured for centuries through the principle of consensus: major decisions required the agreement of all nations, and the unanimous decision-making process prevented any single nation from imposing its will on the others. Wars between member nations were forbidden. The Grand Council of the Confederacy met at Onondaga, the central council fire, and addressed matters that affected all six nations together.
The American Revolution made this system impossible to sustain.
The revolution between the British and the American colonists presented the Haudenosaunee with a choice that their governance structure was not designed to resolve: which side to take in a war between two European-derived powers competing for the same territory. Each side had arguments for why the Haudenosaunee should support them. Each side had offers of alliance, of protection, of recognition. And the Haudenosaunee nations found themselves reaching different conclusions.
The Mohawk, most closely associated with the British through the longstanding alliance maintained by Sir William Johnson and through the specific Loyalist commitments of the Brant family, supported the British. The Seneca, Cayuga, and most of the Onondaga also supported the British, in part because the British had been the Confederacy’s principal treaty partner and in part because the British offered specific promises of protection for Indigenous territorial rights.
The Oneida and the Tuscarora chose the American side.
The reasons for the Oneida decision were specific and documented. Samuel Kirkland’s missionary relationships had built sustained ties between the Oneida leadership and the American colonial world. The Oneida had different experiences with the dynamics of colonial pressure than the Mohawk, who lived further east and whose relationship with the British administration had been shaped primarily by the Johnson family. Oneida leaders, including the principal sachem Shenendoah — also known as Skenandoa — made deliberate decisions that the American rebel cause offered a better future for Oneida sovereignty than the British alternative.
The result of these different choices was something the Confederacy had not experienced in its long history: Haudenosaunee fighting Haudenosaunee. The Battle of Oriskany, on August 6, 1777, was the specific moment when this possibility became reality. Mohawk warriors fought against Oneida warriors. The Great Law of Peace, which had forbidden war among the member nations for generations, could not survive what the Revolution had set in motion.
It was a civil war within the Confederacy, and its wounds would not heal within any period that the people who started it would live to see.
The Siege of Fort Schuyler
The Battle of Oriskany was not an isolated engagement. It was part of a specific strategic operation that the British had planned for the summer of 1777 — one of the three converging campaigns designed to separate New England from the rest of the colonies and end the Revolution.
Fort Schuyler — also known as Fort Stanwix, on the site of the modern city of Rome, New York — was the key to the western approach of this strategy. A British force under Lieutenant Colonel Barry St. Leger was moving east from Lake Ontario through the Mohawk Valley, intending to link up with General Burgoyne’s force coming south from Canada and General Howe’s force moving north from New York City. The plan, if all three columns reached their objectives, would have controlled the primary communications corridor of the northeastern colonies.
Fort Schuyler stood in St. Leger’s path. It was garrisoned by approximately 750 Continental Army soldiers under Colonel Peter Gansevoort, who had been working to improve the fort’s defenses in the weeks before St. Leger’s arrival. On August 2, 1777, the British force arrived outside Fort Schuyler and began a siege.
The garrison needed help. A relief force was needed.
The response came from Tryon County — the New York county that encompassed the Mohawk Valley west of the county seat of Johnstown. Brigadier General Nicholas Herkimer, the commander of the Tryon County militia, assembled a force to march to the fort’s relief. His force eventually numbered approximately 800 militiamen, a mix of experienced frontier fighters and ordinary farmers who had picked up their guns and joined the column.
And between 60 and 100 Oneida warriors, led by Han Yerry.
The Oneida presence in the column was not incidental. The Oneida had already been providing intelligence and support to the American forces in the region. They understood what was at stake — not only for the American cause but for their own communities, which were in the specific path of the British-allied forces that had been moving through the territory. The Mohawk warriors who were part of St. Leger’s force were Oneida neighbors and former Confederacy partners. If St. Leger’s campaign succeeded, the consequences for the pro-American Oneida would be immediate and devastating.
Han Yerry’s company of Oneida warriors joined the relief column. Tyonajanegen came with them.
Her presence in the column was not unusual for the specific context of Oneida military practice. Oneida women had accompanied their husbands on military expeditions in the traditional manner of the Haudenosaunee, and the particular character of frontier warfare — in which the distinction between military and civilian, between the combat zone and the home community, was often blurred — made women’s presence in military operations more common than European military convention would have supposed.
She came armed. The two pistols she is documented as carrying were not emergency weapons grabbed in a moment of crisis. She had them specifically for this engagement. She rode into battle prepared to fight.
The Ravine
The route from the main Tryon County assembly point to Fort Schuyler ran through the Mohawk Valley, and on the morning of August 6, 1777, Herkimer’s column was moving along this route when it entered the terrain that would determine everything.
Near the village of Oriskany — the village where Han Yerry and Tyonajanegen had their farm — the road passed through a narrow ravine where Oriskany Creek crossed beneath it. The ravine was a natural chokepoint: a defile in which a marching column would be compressed and vulnerable, with the high ground on both sides providing the defenders with commanding fields of fire.
The ambush had been prepared by a force that included Mohawk warriors, other pro-British Haudenosaunee fighters, and British-allied rangers and Loyalist colonial troops, commanded by Colonel John Butler. The specific numbers are uncertain — estimates of the ambushing force range widely — but the ambush was large enough and well-positioned enough to be devastating.
Herkimer’s column did not know what was waiting in the ravine.
At approximately ten in the morning, the head of the column entered the ravine. As the main body reached the dip where the creek crossed, the ambush was sprung. Fire opened from both sides of the ravine simultaneously. The rear guard was cut off, with British and Mohawk forces sealing the exit of the ravine while the main body was being struck from the flanks.
What followed was one of the most intense and sustained close-combat engagements of the entire Revolutionary War.
The initial volley from the ambushers was devastating. Men fell in the opening seconds. The column’s coherence immediately collapsed — there was no room to form a firing line, no clear field of fire, no obvious direction to advance or retreat. Individual soldiers and small groups had to respond to the chaos as best they could.
Herkimer was wounded in the initial fire, shot through the leg. According to accounts of the battle, he had his saddle brought under a tree, propped himself against it, and continued directing the fight while bleeding steadily. The image of Herkimer directing the battle while mortally wounded — he would die ten days later from complications of the wound — has become one of the iconic images of the Battle of Oriskany.
But while Herkimer directed the overall fight, the individual actions in that ravine are what determined whether anyone survived.
Six Hours Under Fire
The Battle of Oriskany lasted approximately six hours. This is the timeline confirmed by multiple accounts, including the newspaper report that described Tyonajanegen fighting “during the whole action, which lasted six hours.”
Six hours of sustained close-combat fighting in a narrow ravine is an ordeal of almost incomprehensible difficulty. The physical exhaustion alone would be extraordinary — loading, aiming, and firing a flintlock musket or pistol, even at a relatively slow pace, was demanding work. Under the specific conditions of Oriskany — the heat of an August day, the terrain of a steep ravine, the compressed space of the ambush site — six hours of fighting meant six hours of physical strain alongside six hours of mortal danger.
The tactical situation shifted during the battle. A summer thunderstorm broke over the ravine in the early afternoon, soaking the powder charges and temporarily stopping the firing on both sides as men scrambled to dry their powder and recharge their weapons. This pause gave the Americans time to reorganize into a more defensible formation — soldiers moved to position themselves behind trees rather than clustered in the exposed road — and when the fighting resumed after the storm passed, the character of the engagement had changed somewhat. It became more of a contest between individual fighters behind cover than a massed engagement in the open.
The Oneida warriors in the column played a specific and documented role in the battle’s conduct. Han Yerry’s company of Oneida fighters were experienced forest warriors who understood the specific tactics of this kind of engagement — the individual combat behind cover, the ability to move through the forest, the reading of terrain and threat that distinguished experienced frontier fighters from raw militiamen.
Han Yerry himself was noted for his calm amid the battle’s chaos. Contemporary accounts describe him as the ideal of calmness under fire — a quality that was particularly significant in a fight where panic was the primary danger. When the ambush first sprang, the instinct of every fighter in the ravine was to find cover, to understand the threat, to avoid being one of the first to die in the opening moments.
Han Yerry apparently projected a steadiness that helped anchor the Oneida fighters around him, and possibly the militiamen near them as well. His calm, his willingness to keep fighting while directing others, was the kind of leadership that battles require and that not everyone can provide.
He and Cornelius had their muskets. Tyonajanegen had her pistols.
At some point during the six hours, a musket ball struck Han Yerry through the wrist.
The wound was serious but not immediately incapacitating in the sense of making him unconscious or unable to move. He could still stand, still aim, still fire. What he could not do was reload.
Tyonajanegen reloaded for him.
The Mechanics of What She Did
What Tyonajanegen did when she took over loading for Han Yerry was physically specific and worth understanding in detail, because the detail reveals exactly what the action required.
A flintlock musket or rifle in 1777 was loaded through a process that required multiple distinct steps. The soldier first had to pour a measured charge of gunpowder from a cartridge or powder horn down the barrel. Then a lead ball — wrapped in a cloth patch if using a rifle, placed directly if using a smoothbore musket — was seated at the muzzle. Then a ramrod was drawn from its position under the barrel, used to push the ball and powder to the base of the barrel, and returned to its holder.
Then the pan — the small depression near the firing mechanism — had to be primed with a smaller charge of powder, the frizzen (a hinged steel plate over the pan) closed over it, and the weapon cocked. Only then was the weapon ready to fire.
Under ideal conditions, a well-trained soldier could complete this sequence in perhaps thirty seconds. Under battlefield conditions — hands trembling from exertion and adrenaline, the physical difficulty of powder handling in uncertain conditions, the need to keep some awareness of the immediate threat environment — the process took longer.
Doing this repeatedly, for an extended period, while under fire, while your husband fired the weapon you had just loaded, while the battle raged around you: this is what Tyonajanegen did.
The historical accounts do not specify how many times she reloaded the weapon. Over six hours of fighting, even if they were firing at a relatively slow pace — a shot every two or three minutes — the loading operation could have been performed dozens of times. The physical demands of performing that operation repeatedly, in the conditions of Oriskany in August 1777, were substantial.
She also had her own pistols to manage. The newspaper account describes her “on horseback, fought by his side, with pistols during the whole action.” The phrase “during the whole action” suggests she was involved from the beginning to the end of the engagement, not only during the period after Han Yerry’s wound.
The sequence as the sources reconstruct it: she came into the battle armed and fighting. At some point, Han Yerry was wounded. She transitioned to loading for him. The fighting continued.
This was not a single dramatic moment. It was sustained, repeated action under sustained, continued fire.
The 1777 Newspaper Account: Why It Matters
The article in the Pennsylvania Journal and Weekly Advertiser, published September 3, 1777 — eleven days after the battle — is the earliest surviving contemporary written record of Tyonajanegen’s role at Oriskany. Its significance in evaluating her story is substantial.
The existence of a newspaper account published within two weeks of the battle is evidence of a different category than later oral tradition or retrospective historical reconstruction. The reporter who wrote it — drawing on accounts from survivors of the battle who were in a position to report what they had witnessed — was describing something that had happened recently enough that the witnesses were still available and the events were still fresh.
The specific details in the account are worth noting: “His son killed two” — a specific claim about Cornelius’s performance in the battle that would have been verifiable by other participants. The description of the wife as “on horseback” — a specific physical detail that was distinctive enough to be noted specifically and that carries the ring of observed fact rather than general description. “Pistols” in the plural — not a musket, not a rifle, but two pistols, a specific and distinctive choice of armament that was noted precisely.
These specific details suggest the account was based on actual reporting from people who were there, not on a general description assembled from secondhand sources.
The account does not name Tyonajanegen. This is consistent with the era’s documentary practices — Indigenous women, even those who had performed documented actions in battle, were not typically named in colonial newspapers. The “friendly Indian” and his wife and son are identified by their relationship to each other and to the American side, not by their specific Oneida names.
The cross-referencing of this newspaper account with the oral traditions preserved within the Oneida community, and with the later historical scholarship that examined Oneida participation in the Revolution, allows historians to identify the unnamed woman with confidence. The combination of the specific details — wife of a chief warrior, present at Oriskany, fought with pistols, reloaded the wounded warrior’s weapon — matches the documented account of Han Yerry and Tyonajanegen.
The historical record is imperfect. It always is. But the specific combination of a contemporary newspaper account and a consistent oral tradition preserved in the community she was part of provides a foundation for her story that is more solid than many Revolutionary War accounts of individual fighters.
After the Battle: The Ride
When the firing stopped and the British and their allies withdrew from Oriskany — their force depleted by the fighting and by the news that a sortie from Fort Schuyler had raided and looted their camp during the battle — the survivors in the ravine faced the task of accounting for their casualties and communicating what had happened to the rest of the Mohawk Valley.
The American losses at Oriskany were severe. Casualty estimates vary significantly across different sources, but the battle killed and wounded a substantial fraction of Herkimer’s force. General Herkimer himself was mortally wounded. Many local leaders — officers and influential settlers who had brought their men into the column — were dead. The relief column had been stopped.
Tyonajanegen, after fighting all day, rode.
She had enough energy — after six hours of combat that had included her own fighting and the repeated physical labor of reloading for Han Yerry — to mount a horse and ride through the Mohawk Valley to bring news of the battle’s outcome to local rebels and Indians who needed to know what had happened.
The ride itself was a specific and purposeful action. The news that Herkimer’s column had been ambushed and broken would have immediate consequences for every settlement in the Mohawk Valley. People needed to know: to decide whether to stay or go, to prepare for potential further attacks, to coordinate with the Continental forces that would need to respond to the situation.
A rider carrying news of a battle was not simply a messenger in the simple sense. They were providing the information on which decisions of life and death would be made. Who to warn, what to tell them, how accurately to convey the situation — these were judgment calls, and the rider making them needed to understand the tactical and political situation well enough to communicate it usefully.
Tyonajanegen understood the situation. She had been in the battle. She knew what had happened, who had fallen, what the state of the American and Oneida forces was at the end of the engagement. She could convey the situation accurately because she had witnessed it firsthand.
She also needed to help prepare for the incoming wounded. The battle had produced casualties who would need care, and the settlements in the Mohawk Valley would need to ready themselves to receive and treat the men who had survived the fight but who were injured. The organized response to that need — coordinating the care of the wounded — was part of what her ride was meant to enable.
What Oriskany Cost the Oneida
The Battle of Oriskany was, in strictly tactical terms, something between a draw and an American defeat. The relief column was stopped — it did not reach Fort Schuyler. The British and their allies suffered significant casualties, but so did the Americans and the Oneida. The immediate military objective, relieving the siege, was not accomplished.
Strategically, the battle had an unexpected consequence. The sortie from Fort Schuyler — launched during the battle while much of the besieging force was engaged at Oriskany — successfully raided the British and allied camp. The Mohawk warriors who were part of St. Leger’s force returned from the battle to find their camp looted, their belongings gone. This significantly damaged the morale of the Indigenous allies and contributed to St. Leger’s decision to abandon the siege of Fort Schuyler two weeks after the battle.
So in the larger strategic picture, the Battle of Oriskany — despite the American column’s failure to reach the fort — contributed to the relief of Fort Schuyler by damaging the morale and materiel of the besieging force. Fort Schuyler held. The Saratoga campaign’s western prong was blunted.
But for the Oneida community at Oriska, and for the Oneida nation more broadly, the battle had immediate and catastrophic consequences.
After Oriskany, a pro-British Iroquois war party attacked Oriska and destroyed the village. Everything Han Yerry and Tyonajanegen had built — their farmhouse, their livestock, their belongings accumulated over decades — was gone. The kettles that had given Tyonajanegen her name were presumably among the things destroyed. The prosperity they had worked to build was eliminated in a raid that took hours to accomplish what years had gone into creating.
The destruction of Oriska was not an isolated event. It was the beginning of a sustained campaign against pro-American Oneida communities that would continue throughout the war. The pro-British Haudenosaunee nations — motivated by their own legitimate grievances and their own strategic interests — targeted Oneida communities specifically because the Oneida had chosen the American side.
Kanonwalohale, the primary Oneida town, was burned. Other Oneida settlements were attacked and destroyed. Oneida families fled to the relative safety of the American settlements, living as refugees in their own homeland, dependent on the support of the American communities they had fought to protect.
The cost was enormous. The Oneida had chosen a side and paid for that choice in the most direct and devastating possible way.
The Saratoga Campaign: Continuing Service
The Battle of Oriskany was not the end of Han Yerry and Tyonajanegen’s service to the American cause. They continued.
The Saratoga campaign — the broader British strategic operation of which the Fort Schuyler siege and the Oriskany engagement were parts — reached its climax in October 1777 at the Battles of Saratoga, where Burgoyne’s main force was surrounded and forced to surrender. This was the pivotal American victory that brought France into the war as an ally.
Han Yerry and Tyonajanegen were part of the Oneida contingent that accompanied the American forces during the Saratoga campaign. The specific details of their roles in the later engagements of the campaign are less fully documented than the Oriskany account, but their presence is documented in the sources that track Oneida involvement in the campaign.
Han Yerry’s reputation from Oriskany — the cool, capable warrior who had fought effectively through a devastating ambush — made him a recognized and valued participant in subsequent American operations. He was, as one source notes, a “strong supporter of the Patriot cause” throughout the campaign, and his Oneida warriors provided the kind of forest fighting capability that the Continental Army consistently struggled to replicate with European-trained troops.
In 1779, Han Yerry was commissioned in the American Army as a captain — a formal recognition of his military service and his status as a military leader that went beyond his informal role as a Oneida war chief. The commission gave him an official place within the American military structure, though the specific terms of his service and the campaigns he participated in as a commissioned officer are not fully documented in surviving records.
Tyonajanegen’s continued presence during this period is documented alongside Han Yerry’s. She was not simply left at whatever settlement the family had relocated to after the destruction of Oriska. She was with her husband during the campaigns that followed. The exact nature of her role — whether as a combatant, as a logistical supporter, as a nurse and care provider for the wounded — is not detailed in the surviving sources with the same specificity as the Oriskany account.
What is documented is that she was there.
The 1781 Defense of Fort Timmerman
The last documented specific military action in which Tyonajanegen appears is the 1781 defense of Fort Timmerman — an engagement that demonstrates that her battlefield service was not a one-time event but part of a sustained pattern of involvement in the defense of the communities that had chosen the American side.
Fort Timmerman was one of the small frontier forts that dotted the Mohawk Valley — structures built to provide some protection for settlers in the event of raids by pro-British forces. By 1781, the war in the Mohawk Valley had been grinding on for four years, with repeated raids by pro-British Haudenosaunee and Loyalist forces causing devastation across the region.
The specific details of the Fort Timmerman defense are not extensively documented in surviving sources, but the account preserved in the historical record describes Tyonajanegen as part of a small group — Oneida fighters and local white women — who defended the fort against a raid. The specific composition of the defending group — a mixed force of Indigenous warriors and settler women — reflects the specific character of frontier defense in the later years of the Revolution, when the distinction between combatants and non-combatants was routinely collapsed by the nature of the conflict.
That Tyonajanegen was among the defenders, not among those defending themselves against violence but in an active defensive role, is consistent with everything else documented about her. She was not someone who passively waited for the war to resolve itself.
The Fort Timmerman account represents the end of the documented record of her wartime service. After 1781, the specific accounts of her military activities that survive in the historical record cease. The war itself was winding toward its conclusion — the British surrender at Yorktown came in October 1781, and although fighting in the frontier continued for some time afterward, the strategic situation had fundamentally changed.
What the documented record of her military service shows — from the Battle of Oriskany in August 1777 to the defense of Fort Timmerman in 1781 — is four years of active involvement in the Revolutionary War on the American side. Four years in which she fought, she supported fighters, she communicated critical information, and she contributed to the defense of the communities the Oneida had committed to protect.
The Haudenosaunee Civil War
To understand what the Oneida were doing and what it cost them, it is necessary to understand the full dimension of what the Revolution did to the Haudenosaunee Confederacy.
The Confederacy that had maintained peace among its member nations for generations was destroyed by the Revolution’s demand for alignment. The principle of the Great Law — that the nations would resolve their differences through council and consensus, that Haudenosaunee would not fight Haudenosaunee — could not survive the Revolution’s specific pressures.
The Mohawk and Seneca, fighting for the British, attacked Oneida communities. The Oneida and Tuscarora, fighting for the Americans, were attacked in turn. Warriors who had sat in the same councils, who shared clan relationships across national lines, who had grown up within the same cultural framework, now fought each other.
At Oriskany, Mohawk warriors were on one side and Oneida warriors on the other. Some of them knew each other. Some were related by clan ties that crossed national boundaries. Some had met at the Grand Council fire at Onondaga. Now they were trying to kill each other in a ravine in upstate New York.
The Sullivan-Clinton Campaign of 1779 — the American military operation authorized by George Washington specifically to destroy the ability of the pro-British Haudenosaunee to continue raiding — swept through Haudenosaunee territory with devastating effect. Approximately forty Haudenosaunee towns were burned. Food stores were destroyed. Orchards that had taken generations to mature were cut down.
The campaign was directed primarily at the Mohawk, Seneca, Cayuga, and Onondaga — the nations that had supported the British. But it also displaced populations, disrupted relationships, and further eroded the social and physical infrastructure of all the Haudenosaunee communities in its path.
For the Oneida, the cost was different but no less severe. Having chosen the American side, they faced the attacks of their former Confederacy partners rather than the American military. Their villages were burned not by the Sullivan-Clinton Campaign but by the Mohawk and Seneca warriors who viewed them as traitors. The same devastation that the Sullivan-Clinton Campaign inflicted on the pro-British nations was inflicted on the Oneida by pro-British warriors.
By the end of the Revolution, virtually all the Haudenosaunee nations — regardless of which side they had chosen — had been uprooted from their traditional communities and were living in diminished circumstances. The Confederacy had been broken in ways that centuries of European contact and pressure had not managed to break it.
The Betrayal of the Peace
The Treaty of Paris in 1783 ended the Revolutionary War between the United States and Britain. It did not mention the Haudenosaunee. It did not mention the Oneida. It did not mention the specific promises that had been made to the Indigenous nations that had fought on both sides.
The Oneida had chosen the American side based on specific understandings of what that choice would mean for their future. The arguments made to them — by Samuel Kirkland, by American officials, by the rhetoric of liberty and freedom that animated the Revolutionary cause — had promised, in general terms if not always in specific legal commitments, that choosing the American cause would protect Oneida interests.
The peace did not fulfill these promises.
American settlement pressure on Oneida land began almost immediately after the war ended. The same westward expansion that the Mohawk had feared from the American cause, and that had helped motivate the Mohawk’s choice of the British side, was now being directed at the Oneida — the people who had fought for the Americans.
New York State and federal authorities negotiated a series of agreements with the Oneida in the years after the Revolution that reduced their territory dramatically. The Oneida Land Claims case — a legal dispute that persisted for more than a century — documented the systematic reduction of Oneida territory through agreements that were later found to have violated federal law.
The Oneida who had burned their villages to fight for American independence found, in the years after independence was achieved, that their rights to their land were not substantially better protected than they would have been under any other arrangement. The promises implicit in the alliance were not fulfilled.
This is the specific context in which Tyonajanegen’s later life must be understood.
The Later Years and the End of the Record
Han Yerry died sometime prior to November 1794. The Oneida Indian Nation historical sources list his death as 1793; other sources suggest the date range extends to as late as 1794 based on documentary evidence of his existence before that date. The exact date is uncertain.
After Han Yerry’s death, Tyonajanegen continued to live. She had outlived her husband, outlived the war, outlived the village they had built together at Oriska. She was somewhere in her mid-to-late fifties when he died, still living in the diminished circumstances of the post-war Oneida community.
One account relates that she went blind before her death, which is placed at approximately 1822. If the 1822 date and the 1738 birth date are both approximately correct, she would have been approximately eighty-four years old at her death. She would have outlived her husband by almost thirty years — three decades of life after the most intense period of her documented historical presence.
What those thirty years looked like is not preserved in the documentary record. She was a widow, presumably living within the Oneida community wherever it had resettled after the war. She was, by the accounts that touch on her later life, a woman whose blindness had ended her capacity for the physical activities that had defined her most documented years.
The Daughters of the American Revolution, in recognizing her as a patriot ancestor, categorized her service as “Assisted Soldier at the Battle of Oriskany” — a description that, while technically accurate, significantly understates what she did. She did not merely assist. She fought. She rode. She defended. Over four years, she was an active participant in the military and defensive activities of the Oneida who had chosen the American cause.
Her disappearance from the documentary record after the war’s conclusion is partly a function of how that record was constructed. The activities that kept her visible during the war — fighting, riding, defending — were activities that intersected with the military and political events that colonial and American record-keepers documented. The ordinary life of an elderly Oneida widow in the post-war years was not something that the documentary machinery of the era was designed to preserve.
The Oneida community preserved her name and her story in oral tradition. The Oneida Indian Nation’s historical resources, drawing on that tradition, maintain her presence in the record of the Revolutionary War service that the nation provided to the American cause. The painting by military artist Don Troiani depicting the Battle of Oriskany includes her — Tyonajanegen and Han Yerry and a Loyalist opponent rendered in oil, a visual record of a moment that the contemporary newspaper captured in words.
Why Oneida Contributions Were Marginalized
The question of why Tyonajanegen’s story — and the broader story of Oneida participation in the Revolution — remained so little known for so long in mainstream American history is not a puzzle that requires complex explanation.
The history of the American Revolution has been told primarily by and for Americans who understood the Revolution as the founding story of their nation. In this narrative, the principal actors are the Founding Fathers and the Continental Army. The Oneida, and the Indigenous participants on both sides, were peripheral to the story that American history wanted to tell about itself.
This marginalization happened despite the fact that the Oneida were genuinely valuable allies whose participation contributed to real American military successes. The battle-worthiness of Han Yerry’s company at Oriskany was acknowledged by the participants in real time. The Pennsylvania Journal account recognized the “friendly Indian, with his wife and son” as having “distinguished themselves remarkably.” The American military commission given to Han Yerry in 1779 was an official acknowledgment of his service.
But the recognition was not durable. In the historical narrative that hardened in the nineteenth century — centered on the Founders, the Continental Army, and the political achievement of independence — the specific contributions of Indigenous allies did not fit naturally. The category of “American Revolutionary War hero” was constructed in ways that did not readily include Oneida women who loaded muskets under fire or Oneida warriors who provided the forest-fighting capability that the Continental Army lacked.
The specific term “Forgotten Allies” — the title of the Glatthaar and Martin book that brought the Oneida’s Revolutionary War role to wider scholarly attention — captures the dynamic precisely. The Oneida were not minor figures who happened to be present at the margins. They were allies whose contributions were real and significant. They were forgotten not because they were unimportant but because the historical memory that American culture constructed did not find a place for them.
Tyonajanegen’s story is both part of this larger pattern and distinct within it. She was an Indigenous woman whose battlefield action was documented in contemporaneous journalism, who is identified by name in Oneida historical tradition, whose service extended over four years and multiple engagements. The documentation is there. The recognition has been slow in coming.
The Oriska Community and Its Connections
Understanding Tyonajanegen fully requires understanding the specific Oneida community of Oriska and its position within both Oneida society and the broader world of the Mohawk Valley.
Oriska was not the primary Oneida town — that was Kanonwalohale, further west. Oriska was a secondary community, established by Oneida families who had chosen to settle closer to the zone of European-American settlement in the Mohawk Valley. Its position — relatively close to the colonial frontier, with regular contact with Dutch, German, and English settlers — shaped the character of its community.
The families of Oriska had developed sustained relationships with the surrounding colonial communities over generations. They traded, they shared the same landscape, they navigated the same political and economic dynamics. When the Revolution came, the Oriska Oneida were people who knew the American settlers personally — not as an abstract “other” people but as neighbors, trading partners, and in some cases friends.
This context helps explain both why the Oriska Oneida committed to the American cause and how the destruction of their community registered as a specific and personal loss rather than simply a political or military setback. When pro-British forces burned Oriska after the battle, they burned the homes of people who had built relationships with the surrounding American communities over years.
Han Yerry and Tyonajanegen’s farm at Oriska was both an Oneida household and a place that was embedded in the commercial and social world of the Mohawk Valley. The pewter plates and the brass and copper kettles were markers of this embedding — household goods that reflected sustained engagement with the material culture of the colonial world while also being used in the specifically Oneida way of cooking and hospitality that had given Tyonajanegen her name.
The Names and What They Mean
The names attached to Tyonajanegen in the historical record illuminate the multiple worlds she moved through.
Her Oneida name — Tyonajanegen, “Two Kettles Together” — is the name that reflects her identity within her own cultural tradition. It evokes hospitality, abundance, the cooking and feeding that were central to her household role. It is the name through which her own community knew her.
Her English names are more complicated. She is referred to in some sources as Sarah Montour or Sarah Martin — anglicized names that reflect the Baptist or Christian identity that her community had adopted alongside their traditional Oneida practice. The Daughters of the American Revolution recognizes her as “Sarah Martin (Montour) Tyonajanegen” — an identification that tries to capture the multiple naming conventions that applied to her.
The surname “Montour” is particularly interesting. The Montour family was a notable mixed-heritage family in the colonial Mohawk Valley and Pennsylvania — French-Oneida people who had become significant figures in colonial diplomacy and trade. If Tyonajanegen’s Montour identity is accurate, it places her within a specific family network that had its own history of navigating between Indigenous and European-American worlds.
The multiplicity of names is itself evidence of the world she inhabited — a world in which a single person could be Tyonajanegen to her Oneida community, Sarah Martin to the Baptist missionary, and Sarah Montour to the descendants who would submit her name to the Daughters of the American Revolution two centuries later.
Each name captures something true. None of them captures everything.
Han Yerry’s Wolf Clan
The Wolf Clan was one of the three clans of the Oneida — the Wolf, Bear, and Turtle Clans being the specific three into which the Oneida were organized, within the larger Haudenosaunee framework of clan relationships that connected all six nations.
Han Yerry’s status as a chief warrior of the Wolf Clan gave him a specific institutional position within the Oneida’s governance and military structure. As with all Haudenosaunee clans, the Wolf Clan was matrilineal — membership descended through the mother, not the father. Han Yerry’s children were members of their mother’s clan.
This clan structure is relevant to understanding Tyonajanegen’s position in the household and community. As a woman whose household included the chief warrior of the Wolf Clan, she occupied a specific position within the Oneida’s social organization. The Wolf Clan’s political and military significance was partly embodied in the household she managed and the relationships she maintained.
The matrilineal structure of the clan also means that the household’s children — Jacob, Cornelius, Dolly, and the other siblings mentioned in some sources — were members of their mother’s clan. The specific clan identity of Tyonajanegen in some sources is not completely documented, but the principle of matrilineal descent places the children in their mother’s clan, giving Tyonajanegen’s lineage a specific structural importance in the next generation of the community.
When Cornelius fought at Oriskany alongside his parents, he was not simply helping out. He was a young Oneida warrior participating in the defense of his community — carrying a specific identity and a specific set of obligations that his clan membership and his family position had given him.
Fort Stanwix and the Garrison
The garrison at Fort Stanwix — the soldiers defending the fort that Herkimer’s column was trying to relieve when it was ambushed at Oriskany — played a specific role in the battle’s outcome, even though they were not present at the ambush site.
During the Battle of Oriskany, with the besieging force’s attention focused on the engagement in the ravine, Colonel Marinus Willett led a sortie from Fort Stanwix that raided the British and allied camp. The raid was militarily significant: it captured weapons, supplies, and personal belongings, including equipment belonging to the Mohawk warriors who were part of the besieging force.
The loss of personal property — particularly the personal possessions of the Mohawk warriors, which were looted along with the military supplies — contributed significantly to the breakdown of the British-Indigenous alliance that was besieging the fort. Mohawk warriors who had fought hard at Oriskany, who had suffered significant casualties in the ambush, returned to find their camp raided and their possessions gone. The combination of the casualties at Oriskany and the loss of personal property damaged morale severely.
This is one of the unexpected consequences of the Battle of Oriskany. The battle itself did not relieve the fort — Herkimer’s column was stopped before it reached Fort Stanwix. But the battle’s indirect effect — by pulling the besieging force away and enabling the sortie from the fort — contributed to the eventual British decision to abandon the siege.
St. Leger withdrew from Fort Stanwix on August 22, 1777, two weeks after Oriskany. The fort held.
The Oneida who fought at Oriskany, including Han Yerry and Tyonajanegen and Cornelius, were part of the chain of events that kept Fort Stanwix in American hands, which contributed to the Saratoga campaign’s eventual outcome.
Samuel Kirkland and the Oneida Decision
The role of Samuel Kirkland in the Oneida’s decision to support the American cause is one of the most significant and most carefully examined questions in the scholarship of Oneida Revolutionary War history.
Kirkland had lived among the Oneida since the 1760s. He had learned their language, built relationships with their leaders, and created a sustained presence in their communities that gave him influence unusual for any outsider. His Presbyterian mission was a genuine enterprise — he believed in what he was doing — but his political commitments to the American cause inevitably shaped how he engaged with the Oneida leaders who were trying to decide what to do about the Revolution.
The specific debate about how much of the Oneida decision was Kirkland’s influence and how much was the Oneida’s own independent assessment of their interests is not fully resolvable from the available evidence. What is clear is that the Oneida leaders who made the decision — including Shenendoah, the principal sachem — were not passive recipients of missionary influence. They were political actors who had their own analysis of the situation and their own sense of where the Oneida’s interests lay.
The Oneida’s pro-American position was not simply “Kirkland told them to support the Americans.” It was a political decision made by people who had sustained relationships with both the British and American sides, who had watched what happened to other Indigenous communities under different colonial arrangements, and who had reached their own conclusion about which path offered the best prospects for Oneida survival and autonomy.
The decision was wrong in one specific sense: it did not ultimately protect Oneida territorial integrity any better than the British alliance protected the Mohawk. Both the pro-American Oneida and the pro-British Mohawk lost their homelands as a result of the Revolution and its aftermath. But the decision was made in good faith, by people who were trying to navigate an impossible situation.
Tyonajanegen and Han Yerry were part of a community that had made this decision, and they acted on it with their bodies.
The Battle’s Geography: Oriskany Creek
The specific geography of the Battle of Oriskany is relevant to understanding what the fight was like and why it was so devastating to the American and Oneida forces that entered it.
Oriskany Creek flows northeast from the high ground of central New York to join the Mohawk River east of Rome. The creek’s course cut through terrain that was characterized by wooded slopes dropping to a narrow valley bottom. The road that Herkimer’s column was following crossed the creek at a point where the terrain naturally channeled movement — the road descended to the creek, crossed it, and ascended the other side, with the dip in the middle being both the most vulnerable point topographically and the point where the enemy could most effectively close the trap.
The specific ravine where the ambush was sprung has been described in multiple historical accounts. It was approximately six feet deep at some points, with the creek running through the bottom and the road crossing at a ford or simple bridge. The wooded slopes on either side provided cover for the ambushers and concealment for the approach that the Americans never detected.
When the ambush was sprung, the Americans in the dip of the ravine were caught in a killing ground — they could not see their attackers, they could not easily move toward cover, and the fire from both sides of the ravine was concentrated on a space that was too small for 800 men to maneuver in effectively.
The Oneida warriors, who were part of the column but who had the forest-fighting experience that the militiamen lacked, were somewhat better equipped to respond to the ambush’s initial chaos. Their instinct — to find cover immediately, to move to the flanks of the fire, to identify targets and respond — was more suited to the specific type of fighting that the ambush initiated.
Han Yerry’s company of Oneida fought through the ravine and onto the wooded slopes, responding to the ambush with the kind of individual forest fighting that the attacking forces had not anticipated would be available to the American column.
Tyonajanegen was there with them.
The Road to Oriskany: A Last Morning
The morning of August 6, 1777 — the morning of the battle — was a summer morning in upstate New York, with whatever the weather was before the afternoon thunderstorm that would pause the fighting partway through the engagement.
Herkimer’s column had been moving for several days, assembling from multiple locations across Tryon County and marching toward Fort Stanwix. The column’s composition was a specific reflection of the Mohawk Valley’s community structure: farmers who were also militiamen, prominent local figures who had brought their neighbors and tenants into the column, and the Oneida warriors whose presence added a specific kind of fighting capability.
Han Yerry’s company had been augmented by additional warriors who were joining as the column moved. Louis Cook — a Mohawk who had switched his allegiance to the American cause — was among the officers associated with the Oneida contingent. The specific organization of the Oneida within the column was consistent with the way Oneida warriors typically operated: as a coherent unit under recognized leadership, moving with the column but maintaining the flexibility to respond to the specific threats of forest warfare.
When the column began its final approach toward Fort Stanwix, the Oneida warriors were, by some accounts, positioned toward the rear of the column — the position that would face the closing of the ambush when the British and Mohawk forces sealed the ravine behind the main body.
The rear guard of Herkimer’s column took some of the heaviest casualties in the opening moments of the ambush, cut off from the main body and caught in a more exposed position. Some of the most brutal fighting of the battle happened at the rear of the column.
Where Tyonajanegen and Han Yerry were specifically positioned in the column on that morning is not documented with precision. What is documented is that when the battle started, they were in it.
The Six Hours: A Meditation on Duration
Six hours.
The Pennsylvania Journal account specifies it. Contemporary battle accounts confirm the duration. The Battle of Oriskany lasted approximately six hours, from the springing of the ambush in mid-morning to the eventual withdrawal of the attacking forces in the mid-afternoon.
Six hours is a long time to sustain any physical activity. Six hours of walking is a twenty-five-mile hike. Six hours of digging is a substantial excavation. Six hours of any kind of skilled physical labor leaves most people exhausted.
Six hours of close-combat battle — with the specific physical demands of loading and firing flintlock weapons, moving through rough terrain, managing the psychological strain of sustained mortal danger, and performing all of these activities in the heat of an August day — is a different category of physical ordeal.
The 1777 Pennsylvania Journal account describes Tyonajanegen as fighting “during the whole action, which lasted six hours.” This is not a claim that she was on the edges of the engagement throughout. The account describes her as actively fighting — “on horseback, fought by his side, with pistols” — for the duration.
The physical demands of that duration are part of what her story requires us to recognize. The women who served in the Revolutionary War — in various capacities, on both sides of the conflict — were not doing trivial work. The women who fought, who nursed, who cooked and carried and loaded and rode were performing physically demanding work under physically demanding conditions.
Tyonajanegen’s documented service at Oriskany was among the most physically demanding of any role in that battle. The repeated loading of a wounded warrior’s musket — the specific manual labor of the powder-and-ball sequence, performed again and again under fire — was physically grueling in a way that the newspaper account’s clinical description does not fully convey.
She did it for six hours.
After which she got on a horse and rode.
The Daughters of the American Revolution and the Recognition
The Daughters of the American Revolution — the organization that recognizes individuals who provided service to the American cause during the Revolutionary War — has formally recognized Tyonajanegen as a patriot ancestor.
The recognition is significant in the specific context of how patriot service is typically defined and recognized. The DAR is a genealogical organization that requires documented proof of patriot service in order to qualify someone as an ancestor whose descendants can join. The documentation requirements are specific and the evidentiary standards, while not academic, are meaningful.
Tyonajanegen’s recognition as a DAR patriot ancestor — with service described as “Assisted Soldier at the Battle of Oriskany” — represents a formal acknowledgment that she is part of the documented record of American Revolutionary War service. It is also a recognition that descendants of Indigenous patriots can and should be included in the patriot recognition structure.
The specific description “Assisted Soldier” is, as noted, an understatement of what she actually did. But the recognition itself is real, and it exists because the documentation of her service — the newspaper account, the Oneida historical tradition, the scholarship that has examined Oneida participation in the Revolution — is sufficient to meet the organization’s evidentiary requirements.
The recognition also represents a connection between the contemporary descendants of Tyonajanegen and the broader American civic tradition of honoring Revolutionary War service. Her descendants, if they can document their lineage, can join the Daughters of the American Revolution as the descendants of a documented patriot.
The Don Troiani Painting
The military artist Don Troiani — whose historically researched paintings of military subjects are among the most carefully documented visual records of American military history — created a painting depicting the Battle of Oriskany that specifically includes Tyonajanegen.
The painting depicts “American ally Oneida warrior Yanyery” — Han Yerry — “his wife Two Kettles,” and “a Kings Royal Regiment loyalist” engaged in close combat. The inclusion of Tyonajanegen in the painting, identified specifically by name and role, represents a visual acknowledgment of her documented presence in the battle.
Troiani’s paintings are notable for their research-based accuracy — he is known for careful historical documentation of uniforms, equipment, and the specific details of historical engagements. The inclusion of Tyonajanegen is not artistic license. It is an acknowledgment that the historical record places her in the battle alongside her husband.
The painting creates a visual presence for a woman who has no authenticated portrait — whose face is not preserved in any contemporary artwork. The visualization is necessarily reconstructed, not documentary. But the act of including her in a painting specifically about the Battle of Oriskany is a form of recognition that helps keep her story visible in a visual culture that tends to remember what it can see.
The Continued Service After the Battle
The Oneida communities, including the survivors of Oriskany and the families that had been displaced by the subsequent raids on their villages, continued to provide service to the American cause after the battle.
The road from Oriskany to Saratoga was not only a physical journey but a political and military commitment. The Oneida who had chosen to fight at Oriskany were making a statement about whose side they were on that could not be easily walked back. Having fought against the Mohawk in the ravine near their own village, they were committed to the American cause in a way that made continued service both a practical necessity and a continuation of the choice they had already made.
Han Yerry’s company of Oneida warriors continued to serve through the Saratoga campaign. The contribution was not simply symbolic — the specific forest-fighting capabilities that the Oneida brought to the campaign were capabilities that the Continental Army consistently lacked and consistently valued.
After the Saratoga campaign, Han Yerry and Tyonajanegen appear in connection with continued military activities in the Mohawk Valley region. The 1779 commission that made Han Yerry a captain in the American Army was an acknowledgment of four years of sustained service that had begun well before Oriskany.
The Fort Timmerman action in 1781 represents the last documented specific engagement in which Tyonajanegen appears as an active participant. By that point, the war was in its fifth year, the Oneida communities had been devastated by raids and displacement, and the end of the conflict was approaching — though not yet arrived.
The documented service that Tyonajanegen provided between 1777 and 1781 spans some of the most difficult years in Oneida history, and it was provided without the recognition that would have attended the service of a white colonial woman performing equivalent actions.
Why the Story Survived
The story of Tyonajanegen survived because the Oneida community chose to preserve it.
The oral tradition of the Oneida Indian Nation maintained the account of Han Yerry and Two Kettles Together and their son Cornelius at the Battle of Oriskany across generations. The name “Two Kettles Together” — specific, evocative, attached to a specific documented incident — was the kind of name and the kind of story that communities preserve because it matters to them.
The Oneida Indian Nation’s own historical resources — the official historical documentation maintained by the nation — include Tyonajanegen among the key figures of the Revolutionary War period. Her story is presented not as a curiosity or a minor footnote but as a documented account of service that is part of the nation’s history.
The combination of the 1777 newspaper account and the Oneida oral tradition created a foundation for the story that historical scholarship could engage with. When Glatthaar and Martin wrote Forgotten Allies: The Oneida Indians and the American Revolution — the scholarly work that brought systematic attention to Oneida Revolutionary War service — they drew on both the documentary evidence and the tradition preserved in the Oneida community.
The story also survived because it is specific and vivid. A woman on horseback with two pistols, loading her wounded husband’s musket while a battle raged around her, then riding to bring news of the outcome: this is not a vague account of general service. It has the specificity of eyewitness testimony — the kind of detail that a writer includes because they are trying to describe something that actually happened.
The newspaper account does not name her. The oral tradition does. Together, they preserve the story of a woman whose contribution to the Battle of Oriskany was documented in 1777 and has been maintained in the community’s memory ever since.
What the Revolution Looked Like From Oriska
The final piece of the story is the most important perspective shift: what did the American Revolution look like from inside the Oneida community at Oriska?
From the standard American historical perspective, the Revolution is the founding story of a new nation — the Declaration of Independence, the Continental Army, the Founding Fathers, the political principles of liberty and self-governance that the Revolution was fought to establish. This is a genuine and important story.
From inside Oriska in the summer of 1777, the Revolution looked very different.
It looked like a war between two European-derived powers competing for territory that was Haudenosaunee territory — territory that the Oneida had lived on for generations and that both the British and the Americans were ultimately going to reshape regardless of which side won. The rhetoric of liberty and freedom that animated the American cause was the rhetoric of people fighting for their own freedom from British rule — not the freedom of the Indigenous nations whose land was the prize.
From Oriska, the Revolution looked like the choice between two different risks, neither of them good. The British had been the Confederacy’s treaty partner through the Covenant Chain, but the British had also allowed sustained colonial encroachment on Haudenosaunee territory for generations. The Americans were fighting for independence, but the same settlers who were fighting for independence were the people whose westward pressure on Indigenous territory was the most immediate threat to Oneida survival.
Shenendoah and the Oneida leadership who made the decision to support the Americans made a genuine political calculation, not a naive or coerced one. They weighed the options available to them and chose the one they thought offered the best prospects for Oneida survival.
Han Yerry and Tyonajanegen acted on that choice with their bodies — carrying it from the councils where it was made into the ravine near their own village where it was expressed as fire.
The cost was everything they had built. The farm. The house. The kettles. The community of Oriska itself.
The benefit — what they had fought for — was supposed to be the protection and recognition of Oneida interests in the new American republic. It did not fully materialize.
This is the honest ending to the story. Tyonajanegen fought at Oriskany with two pistols and loaded her husband’s weapon under fire for six hours. She rode afterward to bring news to the valley. She continued serving through the Saratoga campaign and the 1781 defense of Fort Timmerman. She outlived her husband by almost thirty years and went blind before she died in approximately 1822 at approximately eighty-four years old.
The community she fought for — the Oneida who had committed to the American cause — was displaced from its homeland in the decades after the war, as American settlement pressure rendered the promises of the alliance moot.
What she did was extraordinary. What she was owed was never fully delivered.
The story of Tyonajanegen is the story of the American Revolution told from a perspective that most Americans never learn: the perspective of the people who chose the American side and discovered, in the years after the victory, that choosing the American side had not protected them from the relentless pressure of American expansion.
She deserves to be known. Not as a footnote, not as an unnamed “wife” in a newspaper account, but as Tyonajanegen — Two Kettles Together — the Oneida woman who rode into the Battle of Oriskany armed with two pistols and did not leave until six hours later, after which she got on a horse and kept working.
She was there. She fought. She served.
Now you know her name.
— EXTENDED SECTIONS —
The Oneida and Samuel Kirkland: A Complex Relationship
The relationship between the Oneida and the Presbyterian missionary Samuel Kirkland is one of the most thoroughly examined questions in the scholarship of Oneida Revolutionary War history, and it is worth examining carefully because it illuminates how the Oneida decision to support the Americans was both genuinely their own and shaped by the specific relationships they had developed.
Kirkland arrived in Oneida country in the 1760s and remained for decades. He learned the Oneida language thoroughly — well enough to preach in it, to conduct ceremonies in it, to engage with Oneida leaders on their own linguistic terms. This linguistic competence was not merely practical. It was a form of respect that Oneida people recognized and that established Kirkland’s credibility in ways that missionaries who worked through interpreters typically did not achieve.
The religious dimension of his work was genuine. The Oneida who converted to Christianity under Kirkland’s ministry were not passive recipients of missionary pressure. They were people who had engaged with the specific content of Christian theology and found in it something that made sense to them — something that could coexist with or supplement the Haudenosaunee spiritual traditions they had grown up in.
But Kirkland was also a committed American patriot, and his political commitments were not separate from his religious work. In the years leading up to the Revolution, he actively advocated for the American cause in his conversations with Oneida leaders. He was a friend of American officials and a correspondent of American political and military figures. His network connected the Oneida community to the American colonial political world in ways that no other relationship did.
The question of whether this constituted undue influence over the Oneida’s political decision — whether Kirkland’s advocacy for the American cause shaped the Oneida’s choice in ways that subverted their autonomy — is debated in the scholarly literature. The counter-argument is that the Oneida leaders were sophisticated political actors who had their own analysis of the situation and who made their own decision based on that analysis. Kirkland’s advocacy was one input among many.
What is clear is that the Kirkland relationship gave the Oneida a specific connection to the American side that the other Haudenosaunee nations did not have, and that this connection was one of the factors that shaped the Oneida’s different trajectory through the Revolution.
Han Yerry and Tyonajanegen, as Christianized Oneida at Oriska, were people for whom Kirkland’s presence in their community was not simply an external political pressure. Their baptismal names, their children’s English names, their integration of Christian practice into their lives — these reflect a genuine engagement with the religious and cultural dimensions of what Kirkland represented, separate from the political question of which side to take in the Revolution.
The Wolf Clan in Haudenosaunee Society
The Wolf Clan held a specific position within the Haudenosaunee political and spiritual framework that is worth understanding for the light it sheds on Han Yerry’s role and on Tyonajanegen’s position within the Oneida community.
In the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, the clans were the basic units of social organization, and their specific arrangements of political authority and ceremonial function were codified in the Great Law. Within the Oneida, the three clans — Wolf, Bear, and Turtle — each had specific political functions in the Grand Council and in local governance.
The Wolf Clan was associated with certain categories of chieftainship in the Haudenosaunee system, though the specific details of how the wolf clans of different nations interacted within the broader Confederacy framework involved complex relationships that varied by nation and by historical period.
Han Yerry’s position as a chief warrior of the Wolf Clan placed him in a recognized military leadership role within the Oneida’s clan-based governance. His authority was not simply personal charisma or accumulated military reputation — it was institutional, embedded in the specific political structure of the Wolf Clan’s role in the Oneida governance system.
For Tyonajanegen, as the wife of the Wolf Clan’s chief warrior, her position within the community had a specific character determined by both her husband’s institutional role and her own clan membership and family standing. The matrilineal structure of Haudenosaunee society meant that her own lineage and clan position were significant — her children’s clan membership descended from her, not from Han Yerry.
The specific clan identity of Tyonajanegen in the historical sources is not consistently documented, which makes it difficult to assess the full dimension of her institutional standing within the Oneida community. What is documented is her role in the household and in the military actions that the historical record preserves.
The Pennsylvania Journal Account: Full Context
The Pennsylvania Journal and Weekly Advertiser was one of the principal colonial newspapers of the Revolutionary era, published in Philadelphia and widely distributed throughout the colonies. Its September 3, 1777 issue included a report on the Battle of Oriskany that was among the earliest published accounts of the engagement.
The account was published eleven days after the battle, which was a relatively quick turnaround given the communication distances of the era. The report was based on accounts from participants and eyewitnesses — people who had been in the column and who had traveled to Philadelphia or whose accounts had been transmitted to the paper’s editors.
The specific passage about Tyonajanegen reads: “… a friendly Indian, with his wife and son, who distinguished themselves remarkably on the occasion. His son killed two, and his wife on horseback, fought by his side, with pistols during the whole action, which lasted six hours.”
The phrase “distinguished themselves remarkably on the occasion” is significant. The reporter is not simply noting that the “friendly Indian” and his family were present. The phrase indicates that their performance in the battle was notable enough to be specifically singled out as remarkable — to rise above the general level of the engagement to the specific attention of someone who was reporting on the battle.
The specific claim that “his son killed two” is a verifiable type of claim — it refers to something that other participants in the battle could confirm or deny. Its inclusion in the newspaper report suggests that the reporter was drawing on specific testimony from people who had observed the Cornelius’s performance.
The description of the wife as “on horseback, fought by his side, with pistols during the whole action” is similarly specific: the horseback detail, the pistols (in the plural), the duration (“during the whole action”). These are not generic claims about a woman’s presence. They are specific claims about specific things she did in a specific way over a specific duration.
The newspaper account is the contemporary written anchor for Tyonajanegen’s story. Everything else — the identification of the unnamed woman as Tyonajanegen, the specific details of Han Yerry’s wound and her subsequent loading for him, the ride after the battle — comes from sources that are less contemporary but that are consistent with the newspaper account.
The Saratoga Context and the Larger Campaign
The Battle of Oriskany occurred within a specific strategic context that shaped its significance and its consequences in ways that require understanding the Saratoga campaign as a whole.
The British strategy for 1777 was a three-column offensive designed to control the Hudson-Champlain corridor and separate New England from the rest of the colonies. Burgoyne was to come south from Canada through Lake Champlain. St. Leger was to move east through the Mohawk Valley. Howe was to move north from New York City.
If all three columns had succeeded in their objectives, they would have controlled the primary communication corridor of the northeastern colonies and potentially produced a decisive political result — the isolation of New England, the demonstration of British military control over the most populous and economically significant part of the colonies, the discouragement of French involvement.
None of the three columns achieved their objectives.
Howe moved south to attack Philadelphia rather than north toward Albany, abandoning the coordinated campaign’s strategic logic for a different objective. Burgoyne’s column, advancing slowly through difficult terrain with inadequate supplies and with the American militia consistently attacking its flanks, was eventually surrounded and forced to surrender at Saratoga in October 1777. St. Leger’s siege of Fort Stanwix was abandoned after Oriskany and the subsequent sortie damaged his force’s cohesion.
The defeat of Burgoyne at Saratoga is generally identified as the turning point of the Revolutionary War — the victory that convinced France to formally enter the war as an American ally, dramatically changing the strategic balance. The British strategy of 1777, which had come closer to success than many Americans were taught, failed comprehensively.
The Oneida contribution to this outcome was specific. The Oneida warriors at Oriskany were part of the force that helped stop St. Leger’s column from advancing to join Burgoyne. The damage done to St. Leger’s Indigenous allies at Oriskany and by the Fort Stanwix sortie contributed to his withdrawal. The Oneida who accompanied the American forces during the Saratoga campaign itself provided intelligence and fighting capability that was part of the broader American effort.
Tyonajanegen and Han Yerry were part of this chain of contribution.
The Last Years of the 18th Century
After the Revolution ended, the Oneida confronted the specific challenge of rebuilding community life in circumstances that the war had dramatically changed.
The post-war period was one of significant political complexity for the Oneida. The new American republic had treaties with various Indigenous nations, but the enforcement of Indigenous rights in those treaties was uneven, and the pressure from American settlers and land speculators was sustained and often irresistible.
For Han Yerry and Tyonajanegen specifically, the post-war years were the years of Han Yerry’s captaincy in the American Army (formalized in 1779) and whatever formal recognition attended their wartime service. The specific terms of their post-war situation — whether they received land grants, what formal recognition their service produced, how they navigated the changing political landscape of the Oneida in the 1780s and 1790s — are not fully documented in the available sources.
Han Yerry died sometime before November 1794, with the Oneida historical sources giving a date of 1793. His death was noted in documents that establish the outer boundary of his life, but the specific circumstances of his death and the character of his final years are not preserved in detail.
Tyonajanegen outlived him by almost thirty years. She was approximately fifty-five or fifty-six when he died, and she lived until approximately 1822 — nearly three more decades of life after the man with whom she had shared the Battle of Oriskany and the years of service that followed.
The documentary record of her life in those final decades is sparse. She appears in the historical record primarily through the accounts of her Revolutionary War service and through the documents that establish her identity for genealogical purposes. The ordinary texture of those last decades — what she did, where she lived, who she spent time with, how she navigated the changing circumstances of the Oneida community in the early nineteenth century — is not preserved in the sources that survive.
One account says she went blind before she died. The specific cause of her blindness, the circumstances of her later years, the people who cared for her in old age — these are all unknown.
She died approximately 1822. She was approximately eighty-four years old.
The Daughters Who Remember
The Daughters of the American Revolution is a genealogical society whose membership requires documented descent from someone who provided service to the American cause during the Revolution. Its recognition of Tyonajanegen as a DAR patriot ancestor is significant for what it says about the documentary foundation of her story.
The DAR’s recognition process requires evidence of service — not simply family tradition, but documented evidence that the ancestor actually performed service of the kind claimed. The standard for recognition is “preponderance of evidence” — sufficient evidence to make the claim more likely true than not.
For Tyonajanegen, the combination of the 1777 Pennsylvania Journal account, the consistent Oneida oral tradition, and the scholarship that has examined Oneida participation in the Revolution constitutes preponderance of evidence. The DAR recognized her service as “Assisted Soldier at the Battle of Oriskany” — a description that captures a portion of what she did.
The recognition matters for the descendants who claim her as a patriot ancestor. It is a formal acknowledgment, by one of the principal organizations that commemorates Revolutionary War service, that Tyonajanegen’s service to the American cause was real and documented.
The descendants who can trace their lineage to Two Kettles Together and Han Yerry — and there are living descendants, given that she had four children who survived to adulthood — carry a specific heritage of Revolutionary War service that is now formally recognized.
Why This Story Matters in 2024
The story of Tyonajanegen — Two Kettles Together — matters in the current moment for several specific reasons that go beyond historical completeness.
It matters because it corrects the standard picture of who fought in the American Revolution. The standard picture centers on white male Continental Army soldiers and militiamen. The actual picture includes Oneida warriors and their wives who rode into battle armed with pistols, who loaded their wounded husbands’ weapons under fire, who rode afterward to spread the news, and who continued serving through four years of sustained conflict.
It matters because it demonstrates that the American Revolution was not a simple story of Americans versus British. It was a complex conflict that involved Indigenous nations making their own assessments of their interests and choosing sides based on those assessments — and paying the costs of those choices regardless of which side won.
It matters because the cost the Oneida paid for choosing the American side — the burned villages, the destroyed community of Oriska, the displacement from their homeland in the post-war decades — is part of the American story. The country that Tyonajanegen fought to help found did not fully honor the obligations that the alliance created. That failure is part of the history.
It matters because Tyonajanegen was recognized in the 1777 newspaper — the first acknowledgment is contemporary, not retrospective — and because that recognition was then buried under the accumulated weight of a historical tradition that did not look for women like her.
The newspaper saw her. The community remembered her. The scholarship has recovered her. The historical memory is being updated.
She Was Here, She Was There, She Fought
The final accounting of what Tyonajanegen did is specific and documented.
She married Han Yerry in the 1750s and built a life at Oriska that was, by the standards of the era, prosperous and established. She cooked in brass and copper kettles and served guests on pewter plates.
She came into the Battle of Oriskany on August 6, 1777, armed with two pistols. She fought alongside her husband and their son Cornelius. She fought from horseback. She fought for six hours.
When a musket ball struck Han Yerry through the wrist, she took over the loading of his musket — performing the multi-step process of pouring powder, seating ball, ramming, priming, and cocking, and then handing the loaded weapon back to her husband — repeatedly, while the battle continued around them.
After the battle, she rode to bring news of the outcome to local rebels and Indians in the Mohawk Valley, and to help prepare for the incoming wounded.
She accompanied her husband during the Saratoga campaign later in 1777.
She participated in the defense of Fort Timmerman in 1781, as part of a small group of Oneida fighters and local women defending against a raid.
She outlived her husband by almost thirty years and died around 1822 at approximately eighty-four years old.
The Pennsylvania Journal saw her in 1777 and called her remarkable. The Oneida community remembered her across generations and preserved her name. The scholarship of the last several decades has recovered her story and placed it in its proper context within the history of the Revolutionary War.
Now her name — Tyonajanegen, Two Kettles Together — is part of the record that this article is adding to.
She was there. She fought. She served. She paid the price.
She deserves to be known.
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— ADDITIONAL EXTENDED SECTIONS —
The Oriskany Battlefield: What It Looked Like Then and Now
The site of the Battle of Oriskany is now a New York State Historic Site, preserved and interpreted for visitors who want to understand what happened there on August 6, 1777.
The physical landscape of the battlefield has changed significantly in the two and a half centuries since the engagement. The forest that covered the slopes of the ravine in 1777 has been cleared and regrown in the patterns of agricultural use and subsequent reforestation that have characterized the region. The road that Herkimer’s column was traveling is now a modern highway. The specific creek crossing where the ambush was sprung has been altered by generations of land use.
But the essential topography remains. The ravine is still there — the dip in the terrain where Oriskany Creek crosses, the slopes on either side, the natural chokepoint that made the location so effective for an ambush. A visitor to the battlefield can stand at the site of the engagement and understand, in the specific physical terms of the terrain, why the ambush was so devastating.
The battlefield site includes interpretive markers and monuments that document the engagement. The principal monument at the site memorializes the American and Oneida who fought and died there. The Oneida contribution is specifically acknowledged in the site’s interpretation.
The National Park Service, which has provided resources on the Oneida’s participation in the Revolution as part of its management of the Fort Stanwix National Monument, has specifically documented Tyonajanegen’s role at Oriskany. The NPS materials describe her as preparing two pistols and joining her husband and other Oneidas, firing her pistols until Han Yerry was wounded, and then reloading his weapon each time he fired. The NPS documentation represents the formal acknowledgment by the federal government’s historical preservation and interpretation agency that her role at Oriskany is documented and historically significant.
The monument that stands at the Oriskany battlefield does not specifically name her. The broader acknowledgment of her role in the battle has come through the Oneida Nation’s own historical resources, through academic scholarship, through the DAR recognition, and through the NPS materials — but the physical monument at the battlefield that could most directly preserve her name for visitors has not, as of the writing of this account, done so.
This gap between the documented historical significance of her role and the specific physical commemoration at the battlefield site is itself a small illustration of the broader pattern: the recognition is coming, but it is coming gradually and incompletely.
Han Yerry’s Reputation and His Family
Han Yerry Tewahangarahken — “He Who Takes Up the Snow Shoe” — was recognized during his lifetime and afterward as one of the outstanding Oneida warriors of the Revolutionary era. The specific accounts of his performance at Oriskany — his calm under fire, his continued fighting after being wounded — are preserved in the historical sources with a specificity that indicates he was someone whose reputation was actively maintained and discussed.
The claim in one source that “Han Yerry killed nine men” at Oriskany is one of the more dramatic specific claims in the historical record about the battle. Nine is a large number — it would represent a remarkable individual performance even by the standards of the most intense close-range fighting of the Revolutionary War. The number should be treated with the appropriate caution that attends any claim about individual performance in historical battles, where the fog of war and the retrospective inflation of reputation are both real factors.
What is more reliably documented is Han Yerry’s leadership role — his ability to organize and direct Oneida fighters during the battle, his calm under fire, and his continued fighting even after being wounded. These are the qualities that the historical sources consistently emphasize, and they are qualities that can be inferred from the behavior of the unit under his command rather than being dependent on any single person’s claim about individual kills.
His 1779 commission as a captain in the American Army was a specific formal recognition of his military service — a recognition that placed him within the formal structure of the Continental military in a way that acknowledged both his fighting capability and his political standing within the Oneida community.
The family that Han Yerry and Tyonajanegen had built — Jacob and Cornelius and Dolly and the other children — were the people who would carry their parents’ legacy forward after the war. Cornelius, who fought alongside his parents at Oriskany when he was in his mid-to-late teens, was the child whose specific performance was noted in the newspaper account (“his son killed two”). His role in the battle was the kind of action that would establish a young man’s reputation in Oneida warrior culture.
The descendants of Han Yerry and Tyonajanegen have been identified in genealogical research and in the DAR recognition process, which requires documentation of lineage. The specific line of descent from the couple has been traced, establishing the connection between the contemporary descendants and the documented Revolutionary War service of their ancestors.
The Battle’s Aftermath: Weeks of Uncertainty
The weeks following the Battle of Oriskany were a period of sustained uncertainty and danger in the Mohawk Valley.
The battle had not relieved Fort Stanwix — but the garrison was still holding out. St. Leger’s besieging force had suffered significant casualties and had experienced the morale-damaging raid on their camp. The situation at the fort was still unclear to people in the Mohawk Valley who were trying to understand what had happened and what would happen next.
Tyonajanegen’s ride after the battle was part of the information-sharing that this period required. People throughout the valley needed to know the battle’s outcome — not only the immediate tactical result but the broader implications for the region’s safety and the American military’s capacity to respond.
The intelligence that riders like Tyonajanegen carried in the days after Oriskany was the basis on which settlements decided whether to remain or flee, on which militia officers decided how to organize their forces, and on which the Continental Army’s response to the situation was shaped.
The American forces that eventually responded to Fort Stanwix’s situation — General Benedict Arnold was sent with a relief force that approached in mid-August — arrived to find that St. Leger’s force had already abandoned the siege. The siege ended August 22, 1777, without the final military confrontation that had seemed imminent after Oriskany.
But between the battle on August 6 and the siege’s end on August 22, sixteen days passed in which the people of the Mohawk Valley did not know what was going to happen next. Those sixteen days were spent in the specific kind of anxious alertness that wartime frontier communities had to maintain — watching, listening, sharing information, preparing as best they could for whatever came.
Tyonajanegen’s ride, and the subsequent warning and preparation activities that the NPS materials mention, were part of the community response to this period of uncertainty.
The Native American Contributions to Saratoga
The Saratoga campaign — of which the Fort Stanwix siege and the Battle of Oriskany were components — is most often discussed in terms of Burgoyne’s main army and the American forces under Gates and Arnold that eventually surrounded and forced it to surrender.
The Indigenous contributions to the campaign’s outcome are less often discussed but were real and significant.
On the British side, the Indigenous warriors who had been St. Leger’s allies — primarily Mohawk, along with Cayuga, Seneca, and others — played a significant role in the initial effectiveness of the campaign, providing the scouting, forest fighting, and knowledge of terrain that the British regular forces lacked. The ambush at Oriskany was organized and executed largely by Indigenous fighters operating under their own tactical understanding of how to fight in the specific terrain.
On the American side, the Oneida warriors under Han Yerry and other leaders provided the same general capabilities — scouting, forest fighting, terrain knowledge — in service of the Continental and militia forces. The Oneida contribution at Oriskany specifically, though it did not achieve the tactical objective of relieving the fort, contributed to the broader strategic outcome through its damage to the British-allied Indigenous force’s morale and materiel.
The conventional historical narrative of Saratoga tends to focus on the conventional military elements — the artillery battles, the massed infantry engagements, the formal surrender at Saratoga. The contribution of Indigenous fighters on both sides is often treated as peripheral.
It was not peripheral. The Saratoga campaign was fought in terrain where Indigenous military capabilities were highly relevant, and the outcome at the specific tactical points — including the Fort Stanwix siege that was such an important part of the campaign’s western dimension — was significantly shaped by how Indigenous forces performed.
Tyonajanegen, Han Yerry, and Cornelius were part of the Indigenous contribution to the American side of this campaign.
The Haudenosaunee After the Revolution: A Fractured World
The post-Revolutionary period for the Haudenosaunee was one of the most difficult in their long history. The Confederacy that had endured for centuries was now effectively broken, and the various nations were dealing with the consequences of their choices in conditions of diminished power and stability.
The Mohawk who had supported the British were the most immediately displaced — they left the United States almost entirely, relocating to Canada under the leadership of Joseph Brant and settling at the Grand River in what is now Ontario. The Six Nations of the Grand River became the primary Mohawk community in the post-war period.
The Oneida and Tuscarora, who had supported the Americans, remained in the United States but found their territorial position increasingly precarious. New York State pursued a series of agreements with the Oneida that the federal government later found to have violated the Trade and Intercourse Act of 1790 — an act specifically designed to protect Indigenous land rights. The pattern of illegal land sales that reduced Oneida territory in the post-war decades is one of the more thoroughly documented examples of the systematic violation of Indigenous rights that characterized the early American republic’s relationship with the nations within its borders.
The Oneida Land Claim that eventually reached federal court was the legal consequence of this history. The settlement of that claim — which resulted in significant monetary compensation and some land restoration — represented, centuries later, a partial acknowledgment of the wrongs done to the people who had chosen to fight for the American cause.
Tyonajanegen and Han Yerry did not live to see any of this resolved. They lived through the initial decades of the post-war period, watching the Oneida community’s territorial position deteriorate even as the republic they had helped establish grew and expanded.
The Oral Tradition of the Oneida
The specific mechanisms through which the Oneida preserved the memory of Tyonajanegen and Han Yerry across generations — before the academic scholarship of the twentieth century and the DAR recognition provided external documentation — reflect the ways that Indigenous communities maintained their histories when the dominant society was not doing so.
Oral tradition is not simply storytelling in the casual sense. In Indigenous cultures that relied on it as the primary medium of historical transmission, oral tradition was a systematic practice with specific techniques for accuracy and specific social accountability for accuracy. Stories that mattered to the community were told in specific contexts, with specific protocols for transmission, and with the social weight of the community’s identity invested in their accurate preservation.
The name “Two Kettles Together” — with its specific details of the brass and copper kettles and the pewter plates — is the kind of specific detail that oral tradition preserves because it is both distinctive and meaningful. The name is not a generic warrior name. It is a household name, connected to the specific material culture of a specific household, that captures something essential about the woman it belonged to.
The account of Oriskany — the two pistols, the wounded husband, the loading of the weapon — is similarly specific. These are not generic stories of courage. They are specific claims about specific actions in a specific place on a specific day. The specificity is evidence of the account’s foundation in actual events, even though the transmission mechanism was oral rather than written.
When the Oneida Indian Nation presents Tyonajanegen in its historical resources, it is drawing on this oral tradition alongside the written sources that have been collected and cross-referenced by academic historians. The combination produces a picture of her life and her actions that is more complete than either tradition alone could provide.
The Weapons She Carried: What Two Pistols Actually Meant
The specific detail that Tyonajanegen rode into the Battle of Oriskany armed with two pistols is worth examining in terms of what those weapons actually were and what their use in battle required.
In 1777, a pistol was a flintlock single-shot weapon — similar in operation to the muskets and rifles that the other fighters carried, but smaller, shorter, and designed to be fired with one hand. The flintlock mechanism used a piece of flint striking a steel plate to create a spark that ignited the powder charge and fired the ball.
Pistols in this era were significantly less accurate than muskets or rifles. The shorter barrel meant less time for the powder charge to accelerate the ball, producing lower velocity. The single-handed use made aiming less stable. The effective range at which a pistol could be reliably aimed and expected to hit a human target was measured in tens of feet, not hundreds.
In the specific context of the Battle of Oriskany — close-range, close-quarters fighting in a narrow ravine, with targets often only feet away — pistols were entirely appropriate weapons. The battle’s close-range character was exactly the kind of fighting where the pistol’s short range was not a significant disadvantage. At the distances at which many of the engagements at Oriskany were fought, a pistol was as effective as a musket.
Carrying two pistols meant having two loaded shots available before reloading was necessary. Given the time required to reload a flintlock (which was similar whether it was a musket or a pistol), having two shots ready at the start of an engagement was a meaningful tactical advantage.
After her initial pistols were discharged, Tyonajanegen’s continued ability to contribute to the fight depended on reloading — and once Han Yerry was wounded, her reloading task expanded from her own weapons to his musket as well. The specific mechanical demands of managing multiple weapons under fire is part of what makes the newspaper account’s description of her actions so vivid.
What the 18th Century Thought of Women in Battle
The Pennsylvania Journal’s description of Tyonajanegen — describing her actions at Oriskany as “remarkable” — occurs within a specific historical context of how eighteenth-century American society thought about women in combat.
The standard assumption of the era was that warfare was a male domain. European military theory and practice, which shaped the framework within which colonial American military culture operated, was predicated on the exclusive participation of men in combat. Women’s roles in warfare were expected to be supportive — nursing, providing food and equipment, managing the households that sustained the community behind the lines.
The specific exceptions to this norm — women who disguised themselves as men to serve in armies, women who fought in defense of besieged positions, women who performed specific support functions directly adjacent to combat — were noted as exceptions precisely because they were exceptions to the expected pattern.
Tyonajanegen’s presence at Oriskany was not a disguised exception. She did not dress as a man or pretend to be someone she was not. She rode into battle as herself — as a woman, armed with two pistols, on horseback, fighting alongside her husband and son. Her presence was visible enough that a newspaper correspondent specifically noted it eleven days after the battle.
The fact that the newspaper described her actions as “remarkable” suggests that what she did was unusual enough to be noteworthy even to observers who knew that Indigenous women sometimes participated in Haudenosaunee military activities. The phrase “remarkable” implies that the observer was genuinely surprised or impressed — that the account represented something above and beyond what the reporter expected.
This context matters because it places Tyonajanegen’s actions within the framework of how they were actually perceived at the time, not in a retrospectively constructed framework. The 1777 newspaper found her remarkable. The historical tradition that followed largely forgot her.
The Oneida Indian Nation Today
The Oneida Indian Nation — the federally recognized tribal nation that is the direct successor to the Oneida who fought at Oriskany — maintains an active presence in central New York and a robust engagement with the history of the Revolutionary War era.
The nation’s historical resources specifically include accounts of Han Yerry, Tyonajanegen, and the broader Oneida role in the American Revolution. The Oneida Indian Nation website includes Tyonajanegen among the “Key Figures in Oneida History: The American Revolution,” describing her with the specific details of her battle actions and her continued service.
The phrase “America’s First Allies” — used by the Oneida Indian Nation in its own presentation of its Revolutionary War history — captures the argument that the Oneida’s choice to support the American cause was a genuine alliance relationship that deserves recognition alongside the more famous French alliance.
The French alliance, announced in 1778 after the American victory at Saratoga, is consistently recognized in American historical education as the pivotal external development that changed the war’s strategic dynamic. The Oneida alliance — which predated the French alliance, which included Indigenous fighters who participated in the engagements that made Saratoga possible — is less consistently recognized.
The Oneida Indian Nation has maintained a sustained effort to bring the Revolutionary War service of the Oneida to broader American attention. The investment in historical resources, the engagement with the American Revolution Museum at Philadelphia (whose acknowledgment of the Forgotten Allies scholarship is specifically noted in the museum’s own materials), and the active presentation of Oneida history in the nation’s official communications all reflect this effort.
Tyonajanegen and Han Yerry are central to how the Oneida Indian Nation presents its Revolutionary War history to the broader public. They are not peripheral figures in the nation’s own account of this period. They are the examples of what Oneida service in the Revolution looked like in its most concrete human terms.
The Forgotten Allies Scholarship
The academic work that most comprehensively examined the Oneida’s role in the American Revolution is Forgotten Allies: The Oneida Indians and the American Revolution by Joseph T. Glatthaar and James Kirby Martin, published in 2006.
The book drew on both the documentary record of the Revolutionary War era and the Oneida oral tradition to reconstruct the story of Oneida participation in the Revolution with a level of detail that had not previously been available in a single scholarly work.
Chapter 7 of the book — “Defending the Oneida Homeland” — specifically addresses the Battle of Oriskany and the roles of Han Yerry and Tyonajanegen. The book describes their marriage in the 1750s, their prosperous farm at Oriska, the family’s commitment to the rebel cause, and the specific events of the battle.
The passage describing Tyonajanegen’s role is one of the most direct descriptions of her actions in the scholarly literature: “All three fired at the enemy, Han Yerry and Cornelius employing muskets and Two Kettles Together using two pistols. When a musket ball struck Han Yerry in the wrist, Two Kettles Together took over the duty of loading for him while the chief continued to shoot.”
The book went on to describe her post-battle ride: “After fighting all day, Two Kettles Together still possessed enough energy to jump on a horse and ride full tilt to notify local Indians and rebels of the battle’s outcome.”
Forgotten Allies is the primary academic source through which Tyonajanegen’s story has been transmitted to the broader scholarly community and, through the museum and educational materials that draw on it, to the broader public.
The American Revolution Museum at Philadelphia — one of the most significant public museums focused on the Revolutionary era — specifically lists Forgotten Allies as a staff favorite that “inspired the conversation recreated in our Oneida Indian Nation Theater and the film People of the Standing Stone.” The museum’s engagement with the Oneida story, including the specific presentation of Han Yerry and Tyonajanegen as “perspectives from a powerful couple: Revolutionary War veterans,” represents one of the most significant acknowledgments of their story in a major public historical institution.
The Inscription That Should Be Read
There is a plaque at the Oriskany Battlefield Historic Site that, according to the Oneida Indian Nation’s historical resources, contains an error: it states that Han Yerry died at the battle, when in fact it was his brother Han Yost Thahoswagwat who was wounded there (not Han Yerry, who survived and continued to serve for years after).
The error in the plaque is a small but telling example of the kind of documentary imprecision that has characterized the historical record of the Oneida’s Revolutionary War service. The people responsible for the plaque knew enough about the battle to include the Oneida warriors in the commemoration, but not enough about the specific individuals to distinguish between brothers with similar names.
Getting the names right matters. Getting the facts right matters. Han Yerry survived Oriskany — he was wounded in the wrist, continued to fight, received a military commission in 1779, and lived until approximately 1793. His brother Han Yost was also present and also distinguished himself, and the confusion between them in some accounts reflects the difficulty of preserving accurate information about Indigenous participants in the Revolutionary War when the documentary record was never designed to accommodate them fully.
The plaque stands at the battlefield where Tyonajanegen fought. It contains an error about the family she was part of. The correction of that error — like the broader recovery of her story — is part of the ongoing project of getting the history right.
Her Legacy in the Current Moment
The legacy of Tyonajanegen in the current moment is being actively shaped by the combination of academic scholarship, Indigenous community historical work, and the broader cultural reconsideration of whose stories constitute American history.
The specific elements that make her story compelling for a contemporary audience are also the elements that make it important: she was there, she was documented, she did extraordinary things, and she was forgotten. The path from forgotten to remembered runs through the specific work of recovery that historians, tribal nations, and historical institutions have been doing for decades.
Her story matters for students of the Revolutionary War who want to understand the full range of who participated in that conflict. It matters for students of women’s history who want to understand the full range of what women did during the Revolutionary era. It matters for anyone who wants to understand what the Revolution looked like from inside the Oneida community — a perspective fundamentally different from the standard American narrative.
The Don Troiani painting, the Oneida Indian Nation’s historical resources, the DAR recognition, the American Revolution Museum’s engagement with Forgotten Allies, the NPS documentation at Fort Stanwix — each of these represents a piece of the ongoing recovery.
This article is another piece.
She was an Oneida woman born around 1738. She married Han Yerry Tewahangarahken and built a prosperous household at Oriska. She cooked in brass and copper kettles and served guests on pewter plates. She rode into the Battle of Oriskany on August 6, 1777, armed with two pistols. She fought for six hours. When her husband was wounded, she loaded his weapon for him so he could continue fighting. After the battle, she rode to bring news to the valley. She continued serving through the Saratoga campaign and into 1781.
She outlived her husband by almost thirty years. She went blind before she died around 1822 at approximately eighty-four years old.
The Pennsylvania Journal found her remarkable in 1777. The Oneida community remembered her across generations. The scholarship has recovered her story.
Now you know her name: Tyonajanegen. Two Kettles Together.
She was there, and she was remarkable.
— COMPLETE FINAL END —
— FINAL SECTION —
The Revolution She Fought For and the Peace That Didn’t Keep Its Promises
The American Revolution that Tyonajanegen and the Oneida fought in was fought with specific expectations about what the outcome would mean for their community. Those expectations were not naïve. They were grounded in the specific logic of the political situation as the Oneida leadership understood it.
The Oneida had been observing the relationship between the British colonial administration and the Indigenous nations of the Northeast for decades. They had watched what happened when colonial expansion went unchecked, and they had seen the British administration — imperfectly, inconsistently, but sometimes effectively — act as a constraint on the most extreme forms of settler expansion. The Proclamation of 1763, which had tried to limit colonial settlement west of the Appalachians, was an example of the British administration’s sometimes-protective function. The Treaty of Fort Stanwix in 1768, negotiated by William Johnson and intended to protect Haudenosaunee hunting territory in the Ohio Valley, was another.
The American rebel movement was, from one perspective, a movement of exactly the settlers whose westward pressure was the most direct threat to Haudenosaunee territorial interests. The same colonists who wanted freedom from British rule were the colonists whose farms were pressing westward into Haudenosaunee country.
Yet the Oneida chose the American side. Shenendoah and the other leaders who made this decision had reasons. They had relationships with specific American officials and missionaries who they trusted. They had their own analysis of what the American cause promised versus what the British alliance actually delivered. They made a judgment.
The judgment was that American victory would produce a republic that recognized Oneida contributions and protected Oneida interests.
The protection was incomplete. The recognition was delayed. The land losses in the post-war decades were real and documented and legally questionable in ways that took more than a century to address through the courts.
This is not to say that choosing the British side would have produced better outcomes — the Mohawk who chose the British side also lost their homeland in New York, forced to relocate to Canada after the British ceded the territory. The Revolution’s outcome was bad for Indigenous territorial rights regardless of which side won, because American expansion was going to happen regardless.
But the specific cost to the Oneida — who fought for the winning side and still lost their land — is the particular betrayal that makes the story of Tyonajanegen and her community both more compelling and more painful than a simple story of heroism would be.
She fought for a country that did not fully honor the sacrifice. She loaded her husband’s weapon under fire in a ravine in central New York, and she did it because she believed in the cause she was fighting for, and because her community had decided that this was the right side to be on.
The full reckoning with what that meant — what the Oneida were owed and what they received — is still ongoing, two and a half centuries later.
Her story is part of that reckoning.
The Battle in the Broader War
The Battle of Oriskany on August 6, 1777, is one of the most significant and least known major engagements of the Revolutionary War. Its significance is disproportionate to its place in the standard American historical narrative.
The battle was part of the British Saratoga campaign of 1777 — the strategic operation that came closest to ending the Revolution in Britain’s favor. The campaign involved three converging columns whose combined success would have separated New England from the rest of the colonies and potentially produced a war-ending British victory. The campaign’s failure — culminating in Burgoyne’s surrender at Saratoga in October 1777 — was the turning point that brought France into the war and changed the strategic balance permanently.
The Fort Stanwix siege and the Battle of Oriskany were the westernmost component of this campaign, and their outcome contributed to the campaign’s failure. The battle did not achieve the American tactical objective of relieving the fort, but it damaged the British-allied Indigenous force badly enough to contribute to St. Leger’s eventual withdrawal.
Oriskany is also significant as the battle where Haudenosaunee first fought Haudenosaunee — where the Revolution’s demand for alignment shattered the Confederacy’s great principle of internal peace. The battle that Tyonajanegen fought was a battle where people who had shared the same political framework, who had sat in the same councils, who were connected by clan relationships across national lines, killed each other.
This dimension of the battle — its status as the moment when the Haudenosaunee civil war became real — is as important as the tactical outcome. The political and cultural damage done to the Confederacy at Oriskany outlasted the Revolution by generations.
Tyonajanegen’s story is located at the intersection of all these significances: the tactical engagement that helped blunt the Saratoga campaign, the moment when Haudenosaunee fought Haudenosaunee, the specific personal action of a woman who loaded her husband’s weapon under fire. All of these dimensions are real. All of them are part of the story.
The Name That Carries the Story
Two Kettles Together.
The name — the translation of Tyonajanegen — is both specific and evocative. Kettles were central to the household she managed. Kettles made of brass and copper were valuable objects in the material culture of the Mohawk Valley in the eighteenth century, markers of a household prosperous enough to own them. The pewter plates she served guests on, the multiple kettles she cooked in — these are the material traces of a real household, a real life, a real woman who fed people and managed a home and then rode into battle with two pistols.
The name carries the story forward across generations. When Oneida people say “Two Kettles Together,” they are invoking not just a name but the specific person and the specific actions that the name is connected to. The name is a memory device — a way of keeping the story available across the oral transmission that preserved it.
Names in Haudenosaunee culture are not simply labels. They carry relationships, history, and identity. The name Tyonajanegen — Two Kettles Together — connects the woman who bore it to the material culture of her household, to the hospitality that was central to Oneida social life, and to the specific individual whose kettles and plates and household management were the context within which she also prepared two pistols and rode to battle.
This is the fullness of who she was. Not only a warrior. Not only a wife and mother. Not only a rider who carried news. But a woman whose name connected all of these things — the kettles and the pistols, the pewter plates and the wounded husband’s musket, the prosperous farm and the burned village, the six hours of battle and the ride afterward.
Two Kettles Together.
Tyonajanegen.
She was there.
— END —
She was born approximately 1738. She died approximately 1822. In between, she married Han Yerry Tewahangarahken and built a household at Oriska that was the kind of household that prosperous Oneida families built in the mid-eighteenth century — large farm, livestock, brass and copper kettles, pewter plates, a home that served guests and sustained relationships. She was Tyonajanegen. Two Kettles Together. She rode into the Battle of Oriskany on August 6, 1777, with two pistols. She fought for six hours. When a musket ball struck her husband through the wrist, she took over loading his weapon and did it again and again, under fire, so he could keep shooting. After the battle she rode to bring news to the valley. She continued to serve through the Saratoga campaign and into 1781. She outlived her husband by almost thirty years. She went blind before she died. A newspaper in Philadelphia wrote about her eleven days after the battle and called what she did remarkable. The Oneida community remembered her name and her story across generations. The scholarship recovered her. She belongs in the story of the American Revolution. Not as a footnote. Not as an unnamed wife in an old newspaper account. As Tyonajanegen — Two Kettles Together — the Oneida woman who fought at one of the bloodiest engagements of the Revolutionary War and did not stop until the fighting was over. She was there. She was remarkable. She is remembered. Now you know her name.
The Oneida Indian Nation’s recognition of Tyonajanegen as a key figure in its Revolutionary War history, the NPS documentation of her role at Fort Stanwix, the DAR’s formal recognition of her patriot service, the Don Troiani painting that includes her as a named figure in the Battle of Oriskany, the Glatthaar and Martin scholarly account in Forgotten Allies, the American Revolution Museum’s engagement with that scholarship — all of these are the accumulation of recognition that her story has been building toward. The standard American historical narrative of the Revolutionary War has not yet fully absorbed the Oneida story, or her story within it. But the materials exist. The documentation is there. The recognition is growing. The revolution she fought in — the revolution that produced the country most Americans celebrate on the Fourth of July — looked very different from inside the Oneida community at Oriska than it looks from the conventional American perspective. It looked like a war that was going to reshape their world regardless of who won, and a choice between two imperfect options about how to position their community relative to the reshaping. They chose to fight for the Americans. They fought at Oriskany and at Saratoga and at Fort Timmerman. They paid with burned villages and lost territory and the fracturing of the Confederacy that had sustained them for generations. Tyonajanegen was part of all of this — the fighting and the losses and the imperfect peace that followed. Her story is American history. It deserves to be known as such.