292 TRANSACTIONS OF THE CANADIAN INSTITUTE. [VOL. IV, 



of the principal officers of the rangers and Indian department, must have 

 operated as a powerful motive to induce him to exercise all possible 

 restraint upon the Indians, and his instructions were most direct and 

 explicit upon that point. 



Owing to the lamentable slaughter attending it, General Haldimand 

 expressed but a qualified approval of the expedition, while he warmly- 

 commended the conduct of its leader. In a letter to Colonel Butler of 

 the 25th December, 1778, he said: — "I have received Captain Butler's 

 relation of the operations at Cherry Valley, the success of which would 

 have afforded the greatest satisfaction if his endeavours to prevent the 

 excesses to which the Indians in their fury are so apt to run, had proved 

 effectual. It is, however, very much to his credit that he gave proofs of 

 his disapprobation of such proceedings, and I hope that you, and every 

 officer serving with the savages, will never cease your exhortations till 

 \ou shall at length convince them that such indiscriminate vengeance 

 even upon the cruel and treacherous enemy they are engaged against, 

 is as useless and disreputable as it is contrary to the disposition and 

 maxims of the king in whose cause they are fighting." 



In March, 1779, Captain Butler was again despatched to Quebec with 

 the pay-lists and accounts of his regiment. It was during this journey 

 that he made the notes which have been already read. On the loth of 

 May he touched at Carleton Island on his return. Ten days later he 

 was again at Fort Niagara. When he arrived, his father, with the main 

 body of his corps was a hundred miles away in the heart of the Indian 

 country, and Col. Bolton, having been informed that an expedition 

 was preparing at Fort Pitt against Detroit, directed him to proceed at 

 once to the latter place with twenty-five rangers in the hope of rousing 

 the western Indians for its defence. Later information changed his 

 route in the direction of Venango and Presque Isle for the purpose of 

 alarming the garrison of Fort Pitt. He appears to have spent the month 

 of June among the Indians of the Ohio or in hovering on the western 

 frontier of Pennsylvania, but before the middle of July he rejoined his 

 father at Canadasaga. When he arrived there he found that many of 

 the Indians were absolutely starving, and the rangers were living on 

 scanty supplies of salt provisions brought painfully by batteaux and 

 pack-horses from Niagara. At length, when his men were suffering 

 " everything that hunger and disease could inflict," and being reluctantly 

 driven to the conclusion that if they remained there any longer they 

 must soon become totally unfit for duty. Colonel Butler instructed his 

 son to take command and march to the Falls of the Genesee while he 

 remained alone among the Indians and undertook the diflicult task of 



