It was April of 1777, and America’s War for Independence, which had started almost exactly two years before with the fighting at Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts, had long since reached the upper Delaware River valley.

While the war raged all around it, there was not open warfare in the upper Delaware, and no actual battles, save for the Battle of Minisink in July of 1779, took place there. But the divided loyalties among the settlers, and the enmity that developed as a result, did lead to periodic atrocities perpetrated by both sides.

By 1777, most of the settlers who remained in the Cushetunk settlement, on both sides of the Delaware River, were Tories, loyal to the British government, almost all of the Patriots having sought the safety of greater numbers in other areas, either in Orange County or in Connecticut. Among the Tories who remained in Cushetunk was a man named Bryant Kane, who lived with his family on the New York side of the Delaware River near present day Cochecton. Among his neighbors was the magistrate Robert Land, who lived with his family directly across the river.

Like his neighbor and fellow Tory, Land, Bryant Kane learned that Patriot scouts from Orange County, under the guidance of former Cushetunk resident Bezaleel Tyler, were looking for him, and fearing that he would be arrested or killed, he disappeared, seeking refuge among one of the Iroquois tribes who were likewise aligned with the British.

“Before leaving, Kane employed a man named Flowers to stay with his family and attend to his business,” James Eldridge Quinlan wrote in his “History of Sullivan County” published in 1873. “He hoped no harm would befall his wife and little children, as the scouts had not been known to injure the helpless and harmless, and it was hardly supposed the savages would disturb the families of their friends.”

But Kane had seriously miscalculated, and one night in April of 1777 his family was murdered, although to this day there is disagreement about who the perpetrators were.

Many accounts blame the atrocity— and the burning to the ground of Robert Land’s home that very same night— on a group of Mohawks. Other accounts say it was more likely Seneca. However, both those Native American tribes were allied with the British throughout the war, so it doesn’t make sense they would exact such a price from a Loyalist family.

Some have explained the paradox by citing the possibility that Bryant Kane’s wife had Patriot leanings, and had thus become suspect to the British and their allies. That conjecture does not address the fact that the Land home was visited that same night.

For his part, Kane apparently did not blame the Mohawks or Senecas, as he was almost certainly among the Loyalists who accompanied Joseph Brant on his raids on Pienpack in October 1778 and Minisink in July 1779, and at the Battle of Minisink, where Cushetunk residents fought on both sides.

There are still other versions of the incident that lay the blame on members of the Oneida nation, who were the only Iroquois tribe fighting on the side of the Americans, and who, according to Quinlan’s account, “performed their bloody work at night, and disappeared before morning.”

Those versions do not attempt to address the fact that there is little mention in contemporary accounts of bands of Oneidas visiting this part of New York State.

The logical conclusion that the fate perpetrated upon the Kane family would have no doubt befallen the Lands, as well— like Bryant Kane, Robert Land had also left the settlement, leaving his family alone— lends credence to yet another theory. This account of the incidents places the blame on a group of Patriot scouts, led by former Cushetunk resident Bezaleel Tyler III, who were known to disguise themselves as Native Americans when perpetrating their atrocities.

Tyler had an ongoing conflict with Robert Land, and eventually arrested him and testified at his court martial. And he and the scouts under his command were known to commit murder in the name of independence, claiming the lives of suspected Loyalists named Handy and Payne in separate incidents without so much as an interrogation. It is not a stretch, therefore, to think they would have killed the Kanes and attempted to kill the Lands.

While the deaths of Handy and Payne—two men who might well have been Tories, although Tyler and his men did not wait for any evidence of that-- did not sink to the level of killing women and children, they were so sudden and cold-blooded that even some of Tyler’s scouts were appalled by them.

It has been said that the Revolutionary War was America’s first civil war, and nowhere was that more evident than in the upper Delaware River valley, where there are many other incidents that illustrate the enmity that pitted neighbor against neighbor in the Cushetunk settlement.

John Conway is the Sullivan County Historian and President of The Delaware Company. Email him at jconway52@hotmail.com, and be sure to read more about the Revolutionary War’s impact on this region in the Democrat’s special section today.