I've sung this thing for years, usually in spite of myself because it is so damn depressing. But I live about a half-mile from the village of Alplaus (the "eel place" on what is now called Alplaus Creek), NY, the locale where the war party is said to have last camped before the massacre, only a couple of miles from the site of the old Schenectady stockade.

The song is on my 'Pea Soup and Port' album (songs of the pre-Erie Canal batteau era on the Mohawk River), currently-but-not-forever-out-of-print.
The tune I use is an appropriately somber - and probably 18th century - one. Can't think what it is just now, but I will.

My off-the-cuff recollection is that Dr. Thompson's source, publication date 1846, is as far back in time as I could find a firm date for the ballad's existence. I've always felt, however, that it is the real thing, contemporaneous with the event (and perhaps intentional propaganda, as so many like ballads were), and that an original broadside might yet exist in some archive or other...or in some old family scrapbook or shoebox.

- George