Joseph Brant
Thayendanegea was the name given to the Mohawk who became famous to the English and French rivals for control of the New World as Joseph Brant. Under that name he became likely the most widely known American Indian of his day, and he fought against the French during the French and Indian War, and against the American’s during the American Revolutionary War two decades later. Through the intervention of William Johnson, the English supervisor of Indian Affairs in New York (and the common law husband of Brant’s sister) Joseph was educated in Connecticut, at a charity school which one day became Dartmouth College.
He was to have gone on to study at King’s College in New York, today’s Columbia University, but Pontiac’s Rebellion interfered and in 1764, Joseph was again at war on the side of the English. The alliance Pontiac had formed considered the war to be one of annihilation of the white race, an attitude quickly adopted by their enemies towards the members of the alliance. Joseph engaged in raids against Lenape villages. Pontiac’s Rebellion ended in a treaty which included an acknowledgement by the English that the Indian tribes had rights to the land they occupied and restricted colonial settlement beyond the Alleghenies and in the Ohio Country.
During the years preceding the American Revolution Brant owned a farm of eighty acres, adopted the colonist’s dress, and worked at translating English manuscripts. The Mohawk were a matrilineal nation which believed farming to be women’s work, and it is likely that Brant hired women to work his farm and care for his crops. Brant became war chief of the Mohawk under the urging of William Johnson, who pointed out that Brant spoke most, if not all, of the languages of the Six Nations of the Iroquois, as well as English, and his courage in war was well proven.
In the fall of 1775 Brant accompanied William Johnson’s successor, Guy Johnson, to London. Brant was a celebrity in London, dressing in his Mohawk garb for public appearances, and was accepted into Freemasonry, receiving his apron from the hand of King George III. Returning to America with British promises of Iroquois lands in Canada in return for their alliance against the revolutionaries, Brant served in several campaigns of the Revolution, in upper New York, and as far west as Detroit. Following the war he traveled to meet with the Western Confederacy of tribes which were determined to prevent American settlement of the Ohio Valley.
Joseph Brant lived until 1807, spending much of his later life in Canada, although he did make another trip to England in the 1780s and made several trips to Philadelphia, where he met President George Washington and other dignitaries. He was largely dismissed by the Western Confederacy when he refused to go to war in their support during the Northwest Indian War. He began to train the men of the Six Nations to adopt the skills of the white settlers over those traditional to the Iroquois, such as blacksmithing, surveying, and even the practice of law. Ultimately, his efforts to unite the varying tribes failed in his lifetime, but another would arise to try it again, a Shawnee named Tecumseh.