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Consequences of mistaken identity painful for soldier

In September 1779, a Susquehanna River settler who had spent a year as an Indian captive made an error in judgement that nearly cost him his life.

As Luke Swetland attempted to escape from the Iroquois Indians in western New York, he fell in with a group of soldiers that he thought were British loyalists, but they actually were American riflemen out in front of the main army. In turn, the soldiers mistook Swetland for a Tory and began to beat him.

Born and raised in Connecticut, Swetland emigrated to the Susquehanna River’s North Branch Valley in the 1760s. During the American Revolution, he enlisted in the Continental Army and fought in the Battles of Brandywine and Germantown in 1777.

Swetland spent part of the winter of 1777-78 at Valley Forge, but left the army’s winter camp in early 1778 and returned to the Wyoming Valley to help in defending it against raids by Indians and Tories. In August 1778, he was captured along the North Branch by Iroquois warriors who took him to the Finger Lakes Region. For a year, Swetland lived with a native family in a village along Seneca Lake.

In late August 1779, news spread among the Indians that an American army had come up the Susquehanna to invade the Iroquois country. The Indians fled toward a British post, Fort Niagara, on Lake Ontario, “and I set out with the Indians and went one day’s journey with them.”

The night of Sept. 2, “we encamped in the woods,” Swetland said later. “I judge there was 60 Indians and 12 Tories and British soldiers.”

The captive decided to escape: “I waited until about the middle of the night. All were still I took what I had prepared to carry and set out and crept off till I had got beyond all their guards, and then traveled as fast as I could all the rest of the night.”

Swetland headed toward an abandoned Indian town along a route that he thought the American army might take. Three days later, he saw several soldiers inside a cabin in this town and “went to the door to see who they were.” A sergeant stood in the doorway, and two riflemen were inside. They were dressed in hunting frocks and round felt hats. They belonged to the American advance, but Swetland incorrectly identified them as British rangers.

The sergeant, suspecting that Swetland might be a Tory, began to interrogate him, demanding to know why he had come to the house. “He took hold of me and began to strip me, and said, ‘Will you go with me?'” Swetland said later. “I told him yes. He stripped me naked – all but an old pair of stockings – and struck me with his rifle rod, and said with an oath, ‘You plundered this shirt.'”

Swetland denied this, and explained that an Indian woman had made it for him. But the sergeant continued beating him with his ramrod.

At one point, Swetland “asked them if the rebels were near?”

“D*** you,” the sergeant said. “Do you call us rebels?”

“I said, ‘No, I mean the army that is coming.’ He struck me again.”

The sergeant and the other soldiers ordered Swetland to accompany them as they headed off. “They bid me go along into the town, driving me before them, running and whipping me all the way. When we came into the town, near 20 of their party came running to us swearing, saying, ‘Why don’t you kill the Tory?’

In horror, Swetland realized his mistake, but his luck changed in a flash. Just then the American army came up, and soldiers who had known him prior to his abduction by the Indian war party rescued him from the men in the rifle company.

Maj. Gen. John Sullivan, who led the American expedition, subsequently had Swetland guide the army through Iroquois territory that he had learned during his captivity.

Swetland returned to the Susquehanna Valley after the Revolution ended. He also wrote a memoir on which this article is based.

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John L. Moore is an author and storyteller based in Northumberland, Pa. The working title of his next book is “Tories, Terror, and Tea.” He welcomes email from readers at tomahawks1756@gmail.com.

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