Indian Hill Battlefield - PLAQUE
Tuscarora Township, Bradford County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
On September 29th, 1778 on the hill one mile south east of this marker in the most desperate engagement between Indians and white men in Bradford County, Colonel Thomas Hartley defeated the Indians. He left Fort Muncy September 21st. On the 27th burned Tioga Queen Esther's Town and reached Wyalusing at eleven o'clock on the night of September 28th. This campaign ended Indian incursions in Bradford County and prepared the way for the Sullivan Expedition. Hardby on the east of this marker, led the old Warrior Path and the Sullivan Trail.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
During the Revolutionary War, Pennsylvania's northern frontier was ravaged by raids from British-allied Native war parties. In September 1778 Colonel Thomas Hartley led an expedition up the Susquehanna, burning Tioga and Queen Esther's Town before fighting a sharp engagement near this spot on September 29. His campaign broke the momentum of raids in the region and cleared the way for the massive Sullivan Expedition the following year.
Why it matters
Hartley's march was a prelude to Washington's 1779 campaign against the Iroquois — a grim chapter showing that the Revolution was fought not only against Britain but across a bitterly contested Native frontier.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
By the autumn of 1778, the Revolution had come to Pennsylvania's northern frontier not as ranks of redcoats but as fire on the horizon. Along the winding branches of the Susquehanna, scattered settlements of farmers lived within reach of war parties allied with the British — and those settlers, in turn, carried the war back up the rivers. This was borderland fighting: no fixed front, no season of rest, only the constant fear of the raid that came at dawn.
The country around this marker was a corridor as much as a place. Foot trails older than any colony threaded these valleys, and the rivers themselves were the highways of the age. Whoever controlled the paths controlled the frontier, and in 1778 no one truly did. Both sides moved through the same forests, striking and withdrawing.
Into that landscape rode Colonel Thomas Hartley. The marker records the shape of his campaign plainly: a column that set out from Fort Muncy in late September, pushed north into contested ground, and forced a sharp fight on the hill a mile southeast of this spot. It was, in the words carved here, the most desperate engagement between Native fighters and settlers that this county would see.
People & events
Thomas Hartley was a lawyer and soldier from the Pennsylvania interior, the kind of man the Revolution repeatedly asked to trade a settled life for a hard command. In September 1778 his task was blunt: carry the war into the country from which the raids came, and break the pattern of attack before another winter of ambushes set in.
The marker lets you follow his march almost day by day. He left Fort Muncy on the 21st. By the 27th his troops had put the towns upriver to the torch. Late on the night of the 28th — a detail that tells you how hard these men were driving — the column reached Wyalusing. Then, on the 29th of September, the fighting came to a head on the hill above this marker, and Hartley's force prevailed.
What the inscription calls a desperate engagement was the whole frontier war compressed into a single hillside: men who knew this ground fighting men who also knew it, with the settlements behind them and no clean line between soldier and neighbor. Hartley won the day, and the marker credits that victory with ending the incursions that had haunted the county.
Its place in the American story
It is easy to picture the Revolution as a coastal drama — Boston, Philadelphia, the long duel with the British army. But the war also ran up every river valley into the interior, and there it was fought on very different terms. Hartley's expedition is a small, sharp reminder that American independence was contested across a wide and violent frontier, not only on the famous battlefields.
The marker points to what came next: this campaign, it says, prepared the way for the Sullivan Expedition. The following year, George Washington ordered a far larger movement through this same country. Hartley's autumn march was the smaller blow that came first — a local commander testing the ground that a national campaign would later cross.
That sequence matters. It shows how the Continental war effort reached deep into the borderlands, and how a colonel's expedition on a Pennsylvania hillside could become a rehearsal for a strategy directed from the top of the army. The story of the Revolution is incomplete without these frontier chapters, and it is incomplete, too, without acknowledging that this was a war fought across Native homelands with lasting cost to the peoples who lived here.
If you visit
Stand at the marker and give yourself a moment to read the land instead of just the plaque. The engagement it describes happened on the hill about a mile to the southeast — so let your eye travel that way and imagine a September morning in 1778, the woods far thicker then, the river closer to the center of everything.
The inscription mentions that the old Warrior Path and the Sullivan Trail ran hard by to the east. That is the detail worth carrying with you: you are standing beside a route that people traveled for generations before any of these events, and that armies followed afterward. The valley you're looking at was a highway long before it was a battlefield.
This is quiet, rural Bradford County today, and that quiet is part of the experience. There are no crowds here, no ticket booth — just a roadside plaque, a hill, and the meeting of past and present that a good historic marker is meant to spark. Fold it into a slow drive through the northern-tier river country, and let each valley remind you how much history moved along these waters.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Thomas Hartley
Related events
- · Hartley Expedition
- · Sullivan Expedition
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Indian Hill
Tuscarora Township, PA · est. 1947
The hill southeast of this marker saw sharp frontier fighting on September 29, 1778, when Colonel Thomas Hartley's soldiers from Fort Muncy clashed with Native warriors here. Two days earlier Hartley's raid had burned Queen Esther's town near present-day Athens, part of the brutal back-and-forth of Revolutionary warfare along the Susquehanna. These running fights pitted Pennsylvania militia against the Iroquois and their British allies in a contest for the northern borderlands.
Sullivan's March
Wyalusing Township, PA · est. 1947
In the summer of 1779, at the height of the Revolution, General John Sullivan led a Continental army up the Susquehanna Valley, camping near here on August 5-7 as it pushed north. The expedition, ordered by George Washington, aimed to break the power of the Iroquois nations allied with the British and to end the devastating raids along the frontier. Over the campaign Sullivan's troops burned dozens of Haudenosaunee towns and their harvests.
Sullivan Expedition Against the Iroquois Indians, 1779 - Wyalusing (PLAQUE)
Wyalusing Township, PA · est. 1929
Wyalusing had been the site of Friedenshütten, a Moravian mission town where Christian Delaware Indians lived before being pushed westward in the early 1770s. A few years later, in August 1779, General Sullivan's army made its fifth encampment here on the march from Wyoming toward Teaoga. The marker stands near the monument to that vanished Moravian Indian community.
Sullivan Expedition Against the Iroquois Indians, 1779 - Vanderlip's Farm (PLAQUE)
Meshoppen Township, PA · est. 1929
As General Sullivan's army pushed north against the Iroquois in August 1779, it made its fourth encampment on the fertile bottomland here, remembered locally as Black Walnut Flats. The soldiers rested on the nights of August 4 and 5 before continuing the march from Wyoming toward Teaoga. The campaign systematically destroyed the towns and food stores of the Six Nations across this valley.