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CANADIAN NOTABILITIES, VOLUME I

BY JOHN CHARLES DENT






JOSEPH BRANT--THAYENDANEGEA.



Few tasks are more difficult of accomplishment than the overturning of the
ideas and prejudices which have been conceived in our youth, which have
grown up with us to mature age, and which have finally become the settled
convictions of our manhood. The overturning process is none the less
difficult when, as is not seldom the case, those ideas and convictions are
widely at variance with facts. Most of us have grown up with very erroneous
notions respecting the Indian character--notions which have been chiefly
derived from the romances of Cooper and his imitators. We have been
accustomed to regard the aboriginal red man as an incarnation of treachery
and remorseless ferocity, whose favourite recreation is to butcher
defenceless women and children in cold blood. A few of us, led away by the
stock anecdotes in worthless missionary and Sunday School books, have gone
far into the opposite extreme, and have been wont to regard the Indian as
the Noble Savage who never forgets a kindness, who is ever ready to return
good for evil, and who is so absurdly credulous as to look upon the
pale-faces as the natural friends and benefactors of his species. Until
within the last few years, no pen has ventured to write impartially of the
Indian character, and no one has attempted to separate the wheat from the
chaff in the generally received accounts which have come down to us from
our forefathers. The fact is that the Indian is very much what his white
brother has made him. The red man was the original possessor of this
continent, the settlement, of which by Europeans sounded the death-knell
of his sovereignty. The aboriginal could hardly be expected to receive the
intruder with open arms, even if the latter had acted up to his professions
of peace and good-will. It would have argued a spirit of contemptible
abjectness and faintness of heart if the Indian had submitted without a
murmur to the gradual encroachments of the foreigner, even if the latter
had adopted a uniform policy of mildness and conciliation. But the invader
adopted no such policy. Not satisfied with taking forcible possession
of the soil, he took the first steps in that long, sickening course of
treachery and cruelty which has caused the chronicles of the white conquest
in America to be written in characters of blood. The first and most hideous
butcheries were committed by the whites. And if the Indians did not tamely
submit to the yoke sought to be imposed upon their necks, they only acted
as human beings, civilized and uncivilized, have always acted upon like
provocation. Those who have characterized the Indian as inhuman and
fiendish because he put his prisoners to the torture, seem to have
forgotten that the wildest accounts of Indian ferocity pale beside the
undoubtedly true accounts of the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition.
Christian Spain--nay, even Christian England--tortured prisoners with a
diabolical ingenuity which never entered into the heart of a pagan Indian
to conceive. And on this continent, in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, men of English stock performed prodigies of cruelty to which
parallels can be found in the history of the Inquisition alone. For the
terrible records of battle, murder, torture and death, of which the history
of the early settlement of this continent is so largely made up, the white
man and the Christian must be held chiefly responsible. It must, moreover,
be remembered that those records have been written by historians, who have
had every motive for distorting the truth. All the accounts that have
come down to us have been penned by the aggressors themselves, and their
immediate descendants. The Indians have had no chronicler to tell their
version of the story. We all know how much weight should be attached to
a history written by a violent partisan; for instance, a history of the
French Revolution, written by one of the House of Bourbon. The wonder is,
not that the poor Indian should have been blackened and maligned, but that
any attribute of nobleness or humanity should have been accorded to him.

Of all the characters who figure in the dark history of Indian warfare,
few have attained greater notoriety, and none has been more persistently
villified than the subject of this sketch. Joseph Brant was known to us in
the days of our childhood as a firm and staunch ally of the British, it
is true; but as a man embodying in his own person all the demerits and
barbarities of his race, and with no more mercy in his breast than is to be
found in a famished tiger of the jungle. And for this unjust view of his
character American historians are not wholly to blame. Most historians of
that period wrote too near the time when the events they were describing
occurred, for a dispassionate investigation of the truth; and other writers
who have succeeded have been content to follow the beaten track, without
incurring the labour of diligent and calm enquiry. And, as it is too often
the case with writers, historical and other, many of them cared less for
truth than for effect. Even the author of "Gertrude of Wyoming" falsified
history for the sake of a telling stanza in his beautiful poem; and when,
years afterwards, grant's son convinced the poet by documentary evidence
that a grave injustice had been done to his father's memory, the poet
contented himself by merely appending a note which in many editions is
altogether omitted, and in those editions in which it is retained is much
less likely to be read than the text of the poem itself. It was not till
the year 1838 that anything like a comprehensive and impartial account of
the life of Brant appeared. It was written by Colonel William L. Stone,
from whose work the foregoing quotation is taken. Since then, several other
lives have appeared, all of which have done something like justice to the
subject; but they have not been widely read, and to the general public
the name of Brant still calls up visions of smoking villages, raw scalps,
disembowelled women and children, and ruthless brutalities more horrible
still. Not content with attributing to him ferocities of which he never
was guilty, the chronicles have altogether ignored the fairer side of his
character.

  "The evil that men do lives after them;
  The good is oft interred with their bones."

We have carefully gone through all the materials within our reach, and have
compiled a sketch of the life of the Great Chief of the Six Nations, which
we would fain hope may be the means of enabling readers who have not ready
access to large libraries to form something like a fair and dispassionate
estimate of his character.

Joseph Brant--or to give him his Indian name, Thayendanegea--was born in
the year 1742. Authorities are not unanimous as to his paternity, it
being claimed by some that he was a natural son of Sir William Johnson;
consequently that he was not a full-blood Indian, but a half-breed. The
better opinion, however, seems to be that none but Mohawk blood flowed
through his veins, and that his father was a Mohawk of the Wolf Tribe, by
name Tehowaghwengaraghkin. It is not easy to reconcile the conflicting
accounts of this latter personage (whose name we emphatically decline to
repeat), but the weight of authority seems to point to him as a son of one
of the five sachems who attracted so much attention during their visit to
London in Queen Anne's reign, and who were made the subject of a paper
in the _Spectator_ by Addison, and of another in the _Tatler_ by Steele.
Brant's mother was an undoubted Mohawk, and the preponderance of evidence
is in favour of his being a chief by right of inheritance. His parents
lived at Canajoharie Castle, in the far-famed valley of the Mohawk, but at
the time of their son's birth they were far away from home on a hunting
expedition along the banks of the Ohio. His father died not long after
returning from this expedition. We next learn that the widow contracted an
alliance with an Indian whose Christian name was Barnet, which name, in
process of time, came to be corrupted into Brant. The little boy, who had
been called Joseph, thus became known as "Brant's Joseph," from which
the inversion to Joseph Brant is sufficiently obvious. No account of his
childhood have come down to us, and, little or nothing is known of him
until his thirteenth year, when he was taken under the patronage of that
Sir William Johnson, who has by some writers been credited with being his
father. Sir William was the English Colonial Agent for Indian Affairs,
and cuts a conspicuous figure in the colonial annals of the time. His
connection with the Brant family was long and intimate. One of Joseph's
sisters, named Molly, lived with the baronet as his mistress for many
years, and was married to him a short time before his death, in 1774. Sir
William was very partial to young Brant, and took special pains to impart
to him a knowledge of military affairs. It was doubtless this interest
which gave rise to the story that Sir William was his father; a story for
which there seems to be no substantial foundation whatever.

In the year 1755, the memorable battle of Lake George took place between
the French and English colonial forces and their Indian allies. Sir William
Johnson commanded on the side of the English, and young Joseph Brant, then
thirteen years of age, fought under his wing. This was a tender age, even
for the son of an Indian chief, to go out upon the war-path, and he himself
admitted in after years that he was seized with such a tremor when the
firing began at that battle that he was obliged to steady himself by
seizing hold of a sapling. This, however, was probably the first and last
time that he ever knew fear, either in battle or out of it. The history of
his subsequent career has little in it suggestive of timidity. After
the battle of Lake George, where the French were signally defeated, he
accompanied his patron through various campaigns until the close of the
French war, after which he was placed by Sir William at the Moor Charity
School, Lebanon, Connecticut, for the purpose of receiving a liberal
English education. How long he remained at that establishment does not
appear, but he was there long enough to acquire something more than the
mere rudiments of the English language and literature. In after years he
always spoke with pleasure of his residence at this school, and never
wearied of talking of it. He used to relate with much pleasantry an
anecdote of a young half-breed who was a student in the establishment. The
half-breed, whose name was William, was one day ordered by his tutor's son
to saddle a horse. He declined to obey the order, upon the ground that he
was a gentleman's son, and that to saddle a horse was not compatible
with his dignity. Being asked to say what constitutes a gentleman, he
replied--"A gentleman is a person who keeps racehorses and drinks Madeira
wine, and that is what neither you nor your father do. Therefore, saddle
the horse yourself."

In 1763, Thayendanegea, then twenty-one years of age, married the daughter
of an Oneida chief, and two years afterwards we find him settled at
Canajoharie Castle, in Mohawk Valley, where he for some years lived a life
of quiet and peaceful repose, devoting himself to the improvement of the
moral and social condition of his people, and seconding the efforts of
the missionaries for the conversion of the Indians to Christianity. Both
missionaries and others who visited and were intimate with him during this
time were very favourably impressed by him, and have left on record warm
encomiums of his intelligence, good-breeding, and hospitality. Early in
1772 his wife died of consumption, and during the following winter he
applied to an Episcopal minister to solemnize matrimony between himself and
his deceased wife's sister. His application was refused, upon the ground
that such a marriage was contrary to law; but he soon afterwards prevailed
upon a German ecclesiastic to perform the ceremony. Not long afterwards he
became seriously impressed upon the subject of religion, and experienced
certain mental phenomena which in some communities is called "a change of
heart." He enrolled himself as a member of the Episcopal Church, of which
he became a regular communicant. The spiritual element, however, was not
the strongest side of his nature, and his religious impressions were not
deep enough to survive the life of active warfare in which he was soon
afterwards destined to engage. Though he always professed--and probably
believed in--the fundamental truths of Christianity, he became
comparatively indifferent to theological matters, except in so far as they
might be made to conduce to the civilization of his people.

Sir William Johnson died in 1774. He was succeeded in his office of
Colonial Agent for Indian Affairs by his son-in-law, Colonel Guy Johnson.
Brant was as great a favourite with the Colonel as he had been with that
gentleman's predecessor. The new agent required a private secretary, and
appointed Brant to that office. The clouds that had been gathering for
some time over the relations between the mother country and her American
colonies culminated in the great war of the revolution. The Americans,
seeing the importance of conciliating the Six Nations, made overtures to
them to cast in their lot with the revolutionists. These overtures
were made in vain. Brant then and ever afterwards expressed his firm
determination to "sink or swim with the English;" a determination from
which he never for a moment swerved down to the last hour of his life.
Apart altogether from the consideration that all his sympathies impelled
him to adopt this course, he felt himself bound in honour to do so, in
consequence of his having long before pledged his word to Sir William
Johnson to espouse the British side in the event of trouble breaking out in
the colonies. Similar pledges had been given by his fore-fathers. Honour
and inclination both pointed in the same direction, he exerted all his
influence with the native tribes, who did not require much persuasion to
take the royal side. Accordingly when Colonel Guy Johnson fled westward to
avoid being captured by the Americans, Brant and the principal warriors
of the Six Nations accompanied him. The latter formed themselves into a
confederacy, accepted royal commissions, and took a decided stand on the
side of King George. To Brant was assigned the position of Principal War
Chief of the Confederacy, with the military degree of a Captain. The Crown
could not have secured a more efficient ally. He is described at this time
as "distinguished alike for his address, his activity and his courage;
possessing in point of stature and symmetry of person the advantage of most
men even among his own well-formed race; tall, erect and majestic, with
the air and mien of one born to command; having been a man of war from
his boyhood; his name was a power of strength among the warriors of
the wilderness. Still more extensive was his influence rendered by the
circumstance that he had been much employed in the civil service of the
Indian Department under Sir William Johnson, by whom he was often deputed
upon embassies among the tribes of the confederacy; and to those yet more
distant, upon the great lakes and rivers of the north-west, by reason
of which his knowledge of the whole country and people was accurate and
extensive."

In the autumn of 1775 he sailed for England, to hold personal conference
with the officers of the Imperial Government. Upon his arrival in London he
was received with open arms by the best society. His usual dress was that
of an ordinary English gentleman, but his Court dress was a gorgeous and
costly adaptation of the fashions of his own people. In this latter dress,
at the instigation of that busiest of busybodies James Boswell, he sat to
have his portrait painted. The name of the artist has not been preserved,
nor is the preservation of much importance, as this is the least
interesting of the various pictures of Brant, the expression of the face
being dull and commonplace. A much better portrait of him was painted
during this visit for the Earl of Warwick, the artist being George Romney,
the celebrated painter of historical pictures and portraits. It has been
reproduced by our engraver for these pages.

The effect of this visit was to fully confirm him in his loyalty to the
British Crown. Early in the following spring he set sail on his return
voyage. He was secretly landed on the American coast, not far from New
York, from whence he made his way through a hostile country to Canada at
great peril of his life. Ill would it have fared with him if he had fallen
into the hands of the American soldiery at that time. No such contingency
occurred, however, and he reached his destination in safety. Upon his
arrival in Canada he at once placed himself at the head of the native
tribes, and took part in the battle of "the Cedars," about forty miles
above Montreal. This engagement ended disastrously for the Americans; and
after it was over, Brant did good service to the cause of humanity by
preventing his savage followers from massacring the prisoners. From that
time to the close of the war in 1782, Joseph Brant never ceased his
exertions in the royal cause. From east to west, wherever bullets were
thickest, his glittering tomahawk might be seen in the van, while his
terrific war-whoop resounded above the din of strife. In those stirring
times it is not easy to follow his individual career very closely; but one
episode in it has been so often and so grossly misrepresented that we owe
it to his memory to give some details respecting it. That episode was the
massacre at Wyoming.

This affair of Wyoming can after all scarcely be called an episode in
Brant's career, inasmuch as he was not present at the massacre at all, and
was many miles distant at the time of its occurrence. Still, historians and
