The reason I know so much about it is I researched it for a chapter in a book I'm slowly writing , about a motorcycle gang called the Patriots.
Here is the relevant excerpt from my book =
We waited, in his Volkswagen in the fading evening light, listening to the radio as the rush hour traffic ebbed and flowed. The highway was lined on both sides with that cheap back lit corporate shanty town that anyone would recognize instantly, anywhere in America. The signs began to light the sides of the highway; McDonalds, Kmart, a half dozen gas stations with “ fresh express” food. Small strip malls with a dollar store next to a pizza place. Not a bookstore within 30 miles either direction.
Being a professor of archeology, Jophus loved to talk about the landscape and history and I sat back and let him talk. He told me the French Huguenots once owned all this area and they paddled down from the Dutch settlement Kingston to New Paltz and burned the homes and took the land of the Esopus Indians. They then walked East around the mountain and followed the creek down to where they knew the Hudson River lay and built a landing here, just a few hundred yards from where we were sitting. Ever industrious, they realized that between the Walkill River in New Paltz and the Hudson, their land straddled two perfect natural highways and in between lay some of the most fertile farmland in the Valley. They built their houses out of stone, so they couldn't be burned or shot through. They couldn't lose, except for the simple matter that they had to commit genocide to make it all work.
A hundred years later, the river landing had become a village itself, alongside a creek that descended through a notch in the cliffs and created a natural cove. In my time the cove was long gone, it was a landfill with a sewer treatment plant on it, but archeologists had found cannonballs there. Back in 1777 on an October evening very much like this one, the British Navy shelled the landing and hamlet. The residents fled to the mountain where they took shelter in a large cave, but not before they mustered a tiny militia to man the cliffs over the landing and fire back at the most powerful warships in the world. Jophus knew all of this and as he spun the tale my in my mind I pictured it all, the men running along the cliffs over the water, muskets in hand like in the last of the Mohicans. Their loved ones fleeing west into the mountain with just their family bibles and tiny rear guard for protection. A dangerous time, but I looked out at that desolate roadside with dead soul drivers passing on the highway and I thought I'd change places with them in a minute. Musket in hand I’d kiss my family goodbye in the fading evening light and run along the cliffs in buckskins to stand shoulder to shoulder with my neighbors and fire my weapon at the British Navy. They believed in something, the land was still beautiful, you stood by and defended the people of your town. There were no gangs, committees, or false patriotism. You simply put your life on the line for your friends and they did the same for you.