A forgotten campaign. A fabricated legend. A land that refuses to forget. The Torture Tree uncovers the true story of the 1779 Sullivan-Clinton Expedition—America’s largest military assault against Indigenous people—and the century of mythmaking that followed.

In the summer of 1779, General George Washington ordered the “total destruction” of Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) towns across New York. More than forty communities were burned. Thousands of acres of crops were destroyed. Families fled into a brutal winter that claimed countless lives. Yet in the generations that followed, this devastation was rewritten into a tale of frontier heroism—culminating in the 1927 dedication of a “torture tree” that marked an atrocity which never happened on that spot.

This book tells two intertwined stories:

• The campaign itself—the councils, rumours, marches, ambushes, and scorched-earth destruction that reshaped the Northeast.

• The memory that replaced it—the monuments, pageants, patriotic societies, and invented legends that turned victims into villains and violence into virtue.

Drawing on Haudenosaunee oral histories, military journals, archaeological evidence, and the politics of memory, The Torture Tree reveals how the past is not simply inherited—it is constructed, curated, and contested.

For listeners of Indigenous history, American memory studies, and narrative nonfiction, this is a story of survival, erasure, and the land that remembers what monuments try to forget.