Clearing Iroquoia recovers the hard truths and enduring importance of the American invasion and dispossession of the Haudenosaunee homeland. Behind the beauty of the Finger Lakes farmlands today, lies a great historical tragedy for Native peoples driven by the American Revolution and ruthless land speculators.

Alan Taylor, author of 'The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution'

This book offers a fresh perspective on the Sullivan-Clinton campaign, emphasizing its place in the broader history of American settler colonialism. Centering the theme of Haudenosaunee dispossession, Bowman and Zembo ground their findings in careful readings of an extensive array of primary sources to demonstrate how the campaign’s objectives extended beyond retaliation for prior acts of Haudenosaunee aggression and was instead an outright extirpation of Haudenosaunee people from their ancestral homelands.

Jon W. Parmenter, Cornell University

A gripping retelling of the Sullivan Campaign of 1779 that places Haudenosaunee voices and the manipulations of New York elite at the center of the story. This book offers a fascinating new look at how hunger for Native American land shaped the Revolutionary War in New York and beyond.

A. Lynn Smith, Lafayette College

Bowman and Zembo have produced a readable and innovative account of the motivations for Revolutionary-era American invasions of the Haudenosaunee homelands. They usefully describe Dunmore’s War and the Cherokee War to show precedent for the methods and aims of the 1779 Van Schaick and Sullivan Expeditions. Further, they make the case that the underlying concern of the American invaders was not to punish enemies or protect the frontier, but to ensure that American settlers?New Yorkers in particular?gained control of the land of the Six Nations. The authors amply document that Haudenosaunee land was at the center of New York’s aspirations, both before and after the invasions of 1779.

Kurt Jordan, Cornell University