Episode 32: The Sullivan Expedition

The Sullivan Expedition of 1779 was a major Continental Army campaign ordered by George Washington to destroy British‑allied Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) settlements in New York, resulting in over 40 villages razed and the displacement of more than 5,000 people. The campaign crippled the Iroquois Confederacy’s military capacity and depopulated central New York, opening the region to post‑war American settlement.

The Sullivan Expedition’s in modern terms was a genocide and an act of ethnic cleansing that became the model for American removals of Native People as the nation expanded westward. On Vashon, the Sullivan Expedition echoes are seen in the 1854 removal of the sx̌ʷəbabš or Swift Water People and the 1942 exile and imprisonment of Vashon’s Japanese Americans.