This marker identifies a junction on the Great Iroquois Trail used by Continental troops during the Sullivan-Clinton campaign of 1779. The expedition was ordered by George Washington after years of frontier warfare in New York and Pennsylvania. British-allied Haudenosaunee warriors and Loyalist rangers had attacked settlements, while Patriot forces had also raided Indigenous communities. Washington directed Major General John Sullivan to carry a large army into the Haudenosaunee homelands, destroy towns and food supplies, and reduce the ability of Britain’s allies to continue the war.

Sullivan’s main army and Brigadier General James Clinton’s force joined before advancing through the Finger Lakes region. On August 29, they defeated a combined force of Loyalists and Haudenosaunee warriors at Newtown. The army then moved systematically through Seneca and Cayuga country, burning houses, fields, orchards, and stored corn. The campaign produced relatively few large battles, but its destruction was extensive and deliberately aimed at the food base required for winter survival.

On September 21, 1779, Lieutenant Colonel William Butler led about 600 men along this trail toward the principal Cayuga settlement often called Cayuga Castle, near Great Gully. Colonel Peter Gansevoort had accompanied Butler from the foot of Seneca Lake with roughly 100 New York troops. At this junction, where the trail turned east, Gansevoort’s detachment separated and continued toward the Mohawk Valley and Albany. Butler’s men proceeded against Cayuga settlements, destroying homes and crops as part of the wider operation.

Gansevoort was already celebrated for commanding Fort Stanwix during its successful defense in 1777. His movement here was less dramatic but illustrates the complex coordination of detachments across unfamiliar terrain. Indigenous trails provided the expedition’s essential routes. Continental officers depended on guides, scouts, captured information, and established Haudenosaunee pathways even as they attacked the communities that had created and maintained those networks.

The campaign’s consequences were severe. Thousands of Haudenosaunee people fled toward British protection at Fort Niagara. The destruction of food stores contributed to hunger, disease, and suffering during the winter of 1779–1780. The expedition did not end frontier warfare, and many displaced warriors continued fighting. Its legacy remains contested because it combined a strategic American effort to suppress raids with a campaign of widespread destruction against Indigenous towns and subsistence resources.

The marker, erected in 1929, commemorates Continental troop movements but uses an older memorial language that can obscure those human consequences. Nothing in the modern roadside appearance conveys the scale of displacement associated with the campaign. Read in full context, this junction records both Gansevoort’s and Butler’s routes and the invasion of Cayuga country. It is a place where an ancient Indigenous travel corridor became an instrument of Continental warfare and where the American Revolution brought lasting devastation to Haudenosaunee communities.