Live at Stack's, my newest So-Called Dollar.

keets · October 14, 2020 12:29PM

So I have been following the current auction at Stack's and the lot I was most interested in finally came up. To be honest, I hadn't anticipated winning but participation seems low, so I was successful.

The lot in question is HK-120, a Bronze medal commemorating the Battle of Wyoming on July 3rd, 1778 at Wyoming, Pennsylvania during which some 300 American Patriots and Loyalist were killed by members of the Iroquois Tribe under the command of British General John Burgoyne.
--- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Wyoming

During a one-week swing through Pennsylvania and New York a few years ago, my GF and I managed a stop at the Battle site. The monument pictured on the reverse of the medal is quite striking yet out of place, located on what is little more than a vacant lot along a busy State Road. I did get a few pictures.

To the medal, it comes in several different planchet types:
HK-120 Bronzed Copper. 36mm. 324 struck.
HK-120a Silver. 200 struck.
HK-120b Brass.
HK-120c Gilt Copper. 152 struck.
HK-120d Gold. 7 struck.
HK-121 White Metal. 1014 struck.

The White Metal is most common followed by the Copper, while the four types, Silver/Brass/Gilt Copper/Gold, tend not to be offered very often. Both of the common types tend to have minor, distracting problems, chiefly in the reverse fields alongside the monument. This medal seems devoid of anything like that. Though it does have a few scattered black spots visible in the over-saturated Stack's images, those aren't really visible under normal lighting such as the pictures shown at the NGC cert page.

Stack's images.

NGC cert page link and images --- https://ngccoin.com/certlookup/2589353-011/65/

One last thing: I like showing this picture taken just after lunch around Woodstock, New York, a few hours prior to our stop at the Wyoming Battle Monument as we were enroute to Hershey, Pennsylvania. Enjoy, and post any similar medals if you own one.

Al H.

trueblood · October 14, 2020 12:40PM

Good lookin medal.

ricko · October 14, 2020 12:47PM

Great post Al, Thanks for the history and picture of the medal. Great picture of you and that other dude... Cheers, RickO

Catbert · October 14, 2020 3:25PM

Is that your girlfriend pictured with you?

Interesting that the Indians are looking ahead and none are looking downward to finish off the two on the ground.

The medal looks very nice. I think I’d prefer it being in copper.

abcde12345 · October 14, 2020 3:33PM

Nice to see a memorial park that hasn't been desecrated or graffitied.

kaz · October 14, 2020 4:35PM

Thanks for the history, good looking medal with nice color.

Winchester1873 · October 14, 2020 5:02PM

@keets Great post! I thoroughly enjoy these posts with a mix of history and numismatics! Thanks!
Steve

SeattleSlammer · October 31, 2020 8:25AM

This is such a cool educational post thank you for sharing. The writing on the monument is eloquent and powerful.

“a small band of Patriotic Americans chiefly the undisciplined, the youthful, and the aged”

“with a courage that deserved success”

“erected over the bones of the slain”

Wow.

Zoins · October 31, 2020 8:51AM

Great medal @keets!

I've noticed that a number of these medals and monuments have commemorated losses so that we can remember the sacrifices made. They provide a profound sense of loss and unity.

It makes me wonder why we don't do this as much for more modern sacrifices.

Here's another view of the Stack's photos:

Zoins · October 31, 2020 9:12AM

@keets said:
The lot in question is HK-120, a Bronze medal commemorating the Battle of Wyoming on July 3rd, 1778 at Wyoming, Pennsylvania during which some 300 American Patriots and Loyalist were killed by members of the Iroquois Tribe under the command of British General John Burgoyne.
--- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Wyoming

Very informative. Here's the section on the massacre from Wikipedia:

Butler reported only two Loyalist Rangers and one Indian killed out of 1,000 men, and eight Indians wounded. He claimed that his force took 227 scalps, burned 1,000 houses, and drove off 1,000 cattle plus many sheep and hogs. Only about 60 of the 300 militiamen and 60 Continentals escaped the disaster,[12] though Graymont states about 340 killed.[2] The Seneca Indians were angered by the accusations of atrocities which they said they had not committed, and at the militia taking up arms after being paroled. Later that year, Joseph Brant under the command[13] of Butler[14] further retaliated in the Cherry Valley massacre.[15]

The American public were outraged by reports of the massacres of prisoners and atrocities at Wyoming. Afterward, Colonel Thomas Hartley arrived with Hartley's Additional Continental Regiment to defend the valley to try to harvest the crops.[16][17] They were joined by a few militia companies, including that of Captain Denison. In September, Hartley and Denison ascended the east branch of the Susquehanna with 130 soldiers, destroying Indian villages as far as Tioga and recovering a large amount of plunder taken during the raid. They skirmished with the hostile Indians and withdrew when they learned that Joseph Brant was assembling a large force at Unadilla.[18]

Connecticut Continentals led by Captain Jeremiah Blanchard and Lieutenant Timothy Keyes held a fort in Pittston, several miles away from the battlefield. A group of British soldiers took over the fortress on July 4, 1778, one day after the Battle of Wyoming, and some of it was destroyed. Two years later, the Continentals stormed the fortification and recaptured it, and it remained under Patriot control until the end of the war.[citation needed]

In summer 1779, the Sullivan Expedition commissioned by General George Washington methodically destroyed 40 Iroquois villages and an enormous quantity of stored corn and vegetables throughout upstate New York. The Iroquois never recovered from the damage inflicted by Sullivan's soldiers, and many died of starvation that winter. The tribes allied with the British continued to raid Patriot settlements until the end of the war.[19]

Here's some more information on the response from George Washington:

https://www.historynet.com/massacre-retribution-the-1779-80-sullivan-expedition.htm

The July 3, 1778, clash in Pennsylvania’s Wyoming Valley—a stretch of the Susquehanna River in present-day Luzerne County—pitted some 800 of Butler’s Rangers, Senecas and other Indians against about half that number of local militia. Near the settlement of Forty Fort the Loyalist forces lured the Patriots into an ambush, broke their line, and pursued and killed many of the militia, reportedly taking 227 scalps (a custom then practiced by Indians and whites on both sides). Iroquois warriors also killed a number of prisoners. Afterward, rumors of wholesale torture and murder by the Indians spread throughout the area, prompting thousands of settlers to flee. In New York state that spring and summer Brant led his Indians and Tories on raids of half a dozen settlements, burning them to the ground and driving off or killing their cattle, setting the stage for the most brutal of the actions, at Cherry Valley.

keets · October 31, 2020 9:20AM

The medal looks very nice. I think I’d prefer it being in copper.

there is at least one very choice "Gilt Copper" medal, HK-120c, that I am aware of. I hope to own it someday, sooner than later.

Unknown · October 31, 2020 9:34AM

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bolivarshagnasty · October 31, 2020 1:37PM

Brutal time in American history. Thanks for the lesson. Great medal!

keets · October 31, 2020 2:17PM

we think War is terrible today, and I agree that it is, but the advances in Medicine over almost 250 years mean many of the injured survive. on top of that is the brutality of how War was fought during the Revolution, much of it hand-to-hand or at point blank range.

just brutal. imagine accidentally cutting yourself and dying of gangrene, it makes me shudder. imagine that Patriot on the medal, looking up at what he sees.

Zoins · October 31, 2020 5:28PM

Here are two articles from the Smithsonian that bring home how brutal the colonies were as shown on this medal.

Here's the intro for the Hannah Duston article comparing her statue to that of Lady Liberty. Follow the link for a painting.

In a small island north of Concord, New Hampshire, stands a 25-foot-tall granite statue of Hannah Duston, an English colonist taken captive by Native Americans in 1697, during King William’s War. Erected in 1874, the statue bears close resemblance to contemporary depictions of Columbia, the popular “goddess of liberty” and female allegorical symbol of the nation, except for what she holds in her hands: in one, a tomahawk; in the other, a fistful of human scalps.

Though she’s all but forgotten today, Hannah Duston was probably the first American woman to be memorialized in a public monument, and this statue is one of three built in her honor between 1861 and 1879. The mystery of why Americans came to see patriotic “heroism” in Duston’s extreme—even gruesome—violence, and why she became popular more than 100 years after her death, helps explain how the United States sees itself in world conflicts today.
...
In the 1820s, virtue was central to American national identity, and embodied in women. This is why Columbia became such a popular symbol of the nation—and why some turned to the story of Hannah Duston
...
Still, the powerful dynamic the story helped to establish remains with us today. The idea of a feminized, always-innocent America has become the principle by which the United States has structured many interactions with enemy others. In international wars as on frontiers past, it has portrayed itself as the righteous, innocent, mother-goddess-of-liberty patriotically defending herself against its “savage” enemies.

Lakesammman · November 1, 2020 7:04AM

Thanks for posting this - was unaware of the medal or the history behind it.

Zoins · November 1, 2020 8:26AM

@Lakesammman said:
Thanks for posting this - was unaware of the medal or the history behind it.

The history is part of what I love about So-called Dollars. It's step back into not only our history but what people thought was important to commemorate before us.

Live at Stack's, my newest So-Called Dollar.

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