his Volunteers were away on a raid. The soldiers burned the houses, killed the cattle, chopped down the apple trees, spoiled the growing corn crop, and killed some native children found in the corn fields. The American commander later described Onaquaga as "the finest Indian town I ever saw; on both sides [of] the river there was about 40 good houses, square logs, shingles & stone chimneys, good floors, glass windows." In November 1778, Brant joined his Mohawk forces with those led by Walter Butler in the Cherry Valley massacre. Brant disliked Butler, who he found to be arrogant and patronizing, and several times threatened to quit the expedition rather than work with Butler. As Brant's force was mostly Seneca and he was a Mohawk, his own relations with the men under his command were difficult. Butler's forces were composed primarily of Seneca angered by the rebel raids on Onaquaga, Unadilla, and Tioga, and by accusations of atrocities during the Battle of Wyoming. The force rampaged through Cherry Valley, a community in which Brant knew several people. He tried to restrain the attack, but more than 30 noncombatants were reported slain in the attack. Several of the dead at Cherry Valley were Loyalists like Robert Wells who was butchered in his house with his entire family. Paxton argued that it is very unlikely that Brant would have ordered Wells killed, who was a long-standing friend of his. Patriot Americans believed that Brant had commanded the Wyoming Valley massacre of 1778, and also considered him responsible for the Cherry Valley massacre. At the time, frontier rebels called him "the Monster Brant", and stories of his massacres and atrocities were widely propagated. The violence of the frontier warfare added to the rebel Americans' hatred of the Iroquois and soured relations for 50 years. While the colonists called the Indian killings "massacres", they considered their own forces' widespread destruction of Indian villages and populations simply as part of the partisan war, but the Iroquois equally grieved for their losses. Long after the war, hostility to Brant remained high in the Mohawk Valley; in 1797, the governor of New York provided an armed bodyguard for Brant's travels through the state because of threats against him. Some historians have argued that Brant had been a force for restraint during the campaign in the Mohawk Valley. They have discovered occasions when he displayed compassion, especially towards