Dan Myers says the Battle of Minisink is very personal to him.

His fourth great-grandfather, also named Daniel Myers, fought in the battle on the desolate Barryville hilltop on July 22, 1779 and survived. But that Daniel Myers’ brother-in-law, Jeremiah Van Auken, was not so fortunate. The lame schoolmaster in Minisink was one of the first men murdered by Joseph Brant and his men when they raided the settlement on July 20, 1779.

Myers has other connections to the Battle and its aftermath, as well. And tomorrow (Saturday, July 20) he will tell of some of them in his keynote address at the annual commemoration of the Battle of Minisink at the Battleground Park. The event gets underway at 4 p.m. and typically takes about an hour.

Brant and his band of Tories, Mohawks, and Seneca were raiding the settlements on the New York frontier under orders from the British in order to disrupt the supply of food to George Washington’s Army, demoralize the settlers, occupy the militia, and to carry off enough provisions to feed themselves through the upcoming winter.

The raid on Minisink was particularly destructive.

It was about mid-day on July 20, 1779, when the marauders swept into the small Mamakating valley settlement as settlers were going about their daily chores-- farming, cutting timber, milling grain-- and carefree children played quietly among the small homes.

The shrill war whoop of Brant’s party abruptly shattered the serenity of the afternoon and they soon had several buildings, including the church and a grist mill, in flames, as they began to kill and plunder with impunity.

“After destroying twenty-one dwellings and barns, together with the old Mahackamack church and a grist-mill, and killing an unknown number of patriots, the enemy disappeared, loaded with spoil,” James Eldridge Quinlan wrote in his “History of Sullivan County” almost one hundred years later.

Brant had hoped to attack before daybreak, but had been late in reaching the settlement, and many of the cattle he had hoped to procure from the farms had dispersed into the woods and could not be rounded up.

“We have burnt all the settlement called Minisink, one fort excepted, round which we lay before about an hour, and had one man killed and one wounded,” he wrote later. “We destroyed several small stockaded forts, and took four scalps and three prisoners, but did not in the least injure women or children. The reason that we could not take more of them was owing to the many forts about the place, into which they were always ready to run like ground hogs.”

A handful of settlers, unable to make their way to the safety of the block houses, fled instead to Goshen, where they were able to alert Colonel Benjamin Tusten, leader of the local militia, of the raid. Tusten, a physician, immediately issued orders that all officers under his command were to gather the following day at the store house of Major Decker (in present day Port Jervis) with as many men as they could enlist.

The militia, made up of farmers and merchants and clerks and what Quinlan later described as “some of the principal gentlemen of the county,” was soon on the trail of the marauding band under Brant’s command. The traveling was slow and torturous, the terrain nearly impassable in places. Still, the militia pressed on, determined to recapture the plunder and exact a toll on the enemy that would cause them to think twice before embarking on any future raids.

“The excited militia men took up their line of march, and followed the old Cochecton trail seventeen miles, when they encamped at Skinner’s mill, near Haggai’s Pond [present day Loch Ada], about three miles from the mouth of Halfway Brook,” Quinlan recounted. “This day’s march must have nearly exhausted the little army. How many men of Orange and Sullivan, in these effeminate days, can endure such a tramp, encumbered with guns and knapsacks?”

Despite the rigors of the pursuit, the militia was in high spirits, according to historian Isabel Thompson Kelsay, in her book, “Joseph Brant: Man of Two Worlds.” They were full of contempt for the Native Americans they were chasing, and were confident Brant’s men would abandon their loot and run when confronted.

“On July 22, two days after the raid, the two parties were close enough together to be aware of each other’s presence,” Kelsay writes. “They had come about twenty-seven tangled, rock-strewn miles. On the right a mountain rose darkly and on the left was the rippling Delaware. In the distance loomed the far-ranging Catskills. There was not a wilder, lonelier place on the whole frontier, a place where the wolves gathered by night, but men are seldom seen.”

 That was the backdrop for what was to be one of the deadliest battles of the Revolutionary War, fought between the rocks and trees on a hilltop outside present day Barryville. Brant possessed the more experienced contingent, and hours of fighting, first with rifles, and then hand to hand, left the Colonials routed. Brant and his force, smaller by just three men, resumed their journey to the Susquehanna Valley.

These destructive raids on the frontier settlements convinced George Washington that something had to be done, and he dispatched General John Sullivan with explicit instructions to put an end to them. Sullivan, and a force of about 3,000 men, showed the Native Americans no mercy, driving them into Canada. Joseph Brant never again attempted a raid on the Delaware region.

John Conway is the Sullivan County Historian, Email him at jconway52@hotmail.com. He will serve as the Master of Ceremonies for the annual commemoration of the Battle of Minisink, at 4 p.m. tomorrow at Minisink Battleground Park, 58 County Road 168 in Barryville The ceremony is free and open to the public.