



Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Charles Aldarondo, and
Project Gutenberg Distributed Proofreaders. This file was
produced from images generously made available by the
Canadian Institute for Historical Microreproductions.











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