137 Facts About Joseph Brant

Thayendanegea or Joseph Brant was a Mohawk military and political leader, based in present-day New York, who was closely associated with Great Britain during and after the American Revolution.

Joseph Brant was accused by the Americans of committing atrocities and given the name "Monster Brant", but the accusations were shown by later historians to have been false.

Chief Joseph Brant relocated with many of his people to Upper Canada to the area which is Six Nations Reserve, where he remained a prominent leader.

Joseph Brant was named Thayendanegea, which in the Mohawk language means "Joseph Brant places two bets together", which came from the custom of tying the wagered items to each other when two parties placed a bet.

One of Joseph Brant's friends in later life, John Norton, wrote that Joseph Brant's parents were not born Iroquois, but were rather Hurons taken captive by the Iroquois as young people; the Canadian historian James Paxton wrote this claim was "plausible" but "impossible to verify", going on to write that this issue is really meaningless as the Iroquois considered anybody raised as an Iroquois to be Iroquois, drawing no line between those born Iroquois and those adopted by the Iroquois.

Joseph Brant's mother remarried, and her new husband was known by whites as Barnet or Bernard, which was commonly contracted to Brandt or Brant.

The part of the New York frontier where Joseph Brant grew up had been settled in the early 18th century by immigrants known as the Palatines, from the Electoral Palatinate in what is Germany.

Paxton wrote that Joseph Brant self-identified as Mohawk, but because he grew up with the Palatines, Scots, and Irish living in his part of Kanienkeh, he was comfortable with aspects of European culture.

The common Mohawk surname Joseph Brant was merely the Anglicized version of the common German surname Brandt.

Joseph Brant's mother Margaret was a successful businesswoman who collected and sold ginseng, which was greatly valued in Europe for its medical qualities, selling the plant to New York merchants who shipped it to London.

Joseph Brant's half-sister Molly established a relationship with Johnson, who was a highly successful trader and landowner.

Joseph Brant was described as a teenager as an easy-going and affable man who spent his days wandering around the countryside and forests with his circle of friends, hunting and fishing.

Joseph Brant was well remembered for his charm, with one white woman who let Joseph Brant stay with her family for a couple of days in exchange for him sharing some of the deer he killed and to provide a playmate for her boys who were about the same age, recalling after the Revolutionary War that she could never forget his "manly bearing" and "noble goodhearted" ways.

Joseph Brant was one of 182 Native American warriors awarded a silver medal from the British for his service.

In 1761, Johnson arranged for three Mohawk, including Joseph Brant, to be educated at Eleazar Wheelock's "Moor's Indian Charity School" in Connecticut.

Joseph Brant studied under the guidance of Wheelock, who wrote that the youth was "of a sprightly genius, a manly and gentle deportment, and of a modest, courteous and benevolent temper".

Joseph Brant learned to speak, read, and write English, as well as studying other academic subjects.

Joseph Brant was taught how to farm at the school, math and the classics.

Europeans were afterwards astonished when Joseph Brant was to speak of the Odyssey to them.

Joseph Brant met Samuel Kirkland at the school, later a missionary to Indians in western New York.

In 1763, Johnson prepared for Joseph Brant to attend King's College in New York City.

The outbreak of Pontiac's Rebellion upset his plans, and Joseph Brant returned home to avoid hostility toward Native Americans.

Johnson as the superintendent of northern Indian affairs was heavily involved in diplomatic efforts to keep more Indian tribes from joining Pontiac's war, and Joseph Brant often served as his emissary.

Joseph Brant did not abandon his interest in the Church of England, studying at a missionary school operated by the Reverend Cornelius Bennet of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, in Canajoharie.

However, in Mohawk society, men made their reputations as warriors, not scholars, and Joseph Brant abandoned his studies to fight for the Crown against Pontiac's forces.

On his way, Joseph Brant stayed at the village of Oquaga, whose chief Issac was a Christian, and who became Joseph Brant's friend.

Joseph Brant owned a large and fertile farm of 80 acres near the village of Canajoharie on the south shore of the Mohawk River; this village was known as the Upper Mohawk Castle.

Joseph Brant dressed in "the English mode" wearing "a suit of blue broad cloth".

Joseph Brant later killed his son, Isaac, in a physical confrontation.

Joseph Brant married a second wife, Susanna, but she died near the end of 1777 during the American Revolutionary War, when they were staying at Fort Niagara.

Joseph Brant was the daughter of Catharine, a Mohawk, and George Croghan, the prominent Irish colonist and British Indian agent, deputy to William Johnson, Superintendent of Indian Affairs for the Northern District.

Joseph Brant lived in Oswego, working as a translator with his then-wife Peggy, known as Neggen or Aoghyatonghsera, where she gave birth to a son who was named Issac after her father.

Joseph Brant owned about 80 acres of land in Canajoharie, though it is not clear who worked it.

Joseph Brant became Stuart's interpreter and teacher of Mohawk, collaborating with him to translate the Anglican catechism and the Gospel of Mark into the Mohawk language.

Joseph Brant became Anglican, a faith he held for the remainder of his life.

Joseph Brant demanded that Klock stop obtaining land via this method and return the land he already owned.

Johnson Hall was inherited by his son John Johnson, who evicted his stepmother, Molly Joseph Brant, who returned to Canajoharie with the 8 children she had borne Sir William to live with her mother.

Guy Johnson suggested that Joseph Brant go with him to Canada, saying that both their lives were in danger.

Joseph Brant met George III during his trip to London, but his most important talks were with the colonial secretary, George Germain.

Joseph Brant complained that the Iroquois had fought for the British in the Seven Years' War, taking heavy losses, yet the British were allowing white settlers like Klock to defraud them of their land.

In London, Joseph Brant was treated as a celebrity and was interviewed for publication by James Boswell.

Joseph Brant was received by King George III at St James's Palace.

Joseph Brant was accepted into freemasonry and received his ritual apron personally from King George.

Joseph Brant participated with Howe's forces as they prepared to retake New York.

Joseph Brant became lifelong friends with Lord Percy, later Duke of Northumberland, in what was his only lasting friendship with a white man.

On his return voyage to New York City, Joseph Brant's ship was attacked by an American privateer, during which he used one of the rifles he received in London to practice his sniping skills.

Joseph Brant asked the men of Onquaga to fight for the Crown, but the warriors favored neutrality, saying they wished to have no part in a war between white men.

In reply, Joseph Brant stated that he had received promises in London that if the Crown won, Iroquois land rights would be respected while he predicted if the Americans won, then the Iroquois would lose their land, leading him to the conclusion that neutrality was not an option.

Joseph Brant noted that George Washington had been a prominent investor in the Ohio Company, whose efforts to bring white settlement to the Ohio river valley had been the cause of such trouble to the Indians there, which he used to argue did not augur well if the Americans should win.

Joseph Brant traveled from village to village in the confederacy throughout the winter, urging the Iroquois to enter the war as British allies.

Frustrated, Joseph Brant returned to Onoquaga in the spring to recruit independent warriors.

Joseph Brant's Volunteers consisted of a few Mohawk and Tuscarora warriors and 80 white Loyalists.

The majority of the men in Joseph Brant's Volunteers were white.

Herkimer requested that the Iroquois remain neutral but Joseph Brant responded that the Indians owed their loyalty to the King.

Joseph Brant was not present, but was deeply saddened when he learned that Six Nations had broken into two with the Oneida and Tuscarora supporting the Americans while the Mohawk, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca chose the British.

St Leger was eventually forced to lift the siege when another American force approached, and Joseph Brant traveled to Burgoyne's main army to inform him.

Burgoyne restricted participation by native warriors, so Joseph Brant departed for Fort Niagara, where his family joined him and he spent the winter planning the next year's campaign.

The British Army officers found Molly Joseph Brant to be bad-tempered and demanding, as she expected to be well rewarded for her loyalty to the Crown, but as she possessed much influence, it was felt to be worth keeping her happy.

Joseph Brant became one of the most active partisan leaders in the frontier war.

At the Battle of the Cobleskill, Joseph Brant ambushed an American force of 50 men, consisting of Continental Army regulars and New York militiamen, killing 20 Americans and burning down the farms.

Joseph Brant warned settlers at Columbia and Petrie's Corners, most of whom then fled to safety at Fort Dayton.

Joseph Brant disliked Butler, who he found to be arrogant and patronizing, and several times threatened to quit the expedition rather than work with Butler.

The force rampaged through Cherry Valley, a community in which Joseph Brant knew several people.

Joseph Brant tried to restrain the attack, but more than 30 noncombatants were reported slain in the attack.

Paxton argued that it is very unlikely that Joseph Brant would have ordered Wells killed, who was a long-standing friend of his.

Patriot Americans believed that Joseph Brant had commanded the Wyoming Valley massacre of 1778, and considered him responsible for the Cherry Valley massacre.

Long after the war, hostility to Joseph Brant remained high in the Mohawk Valley; in 1797, the governor of New York provided an armed bodyguard for Joseph Brant's travels through the state because of threats against him.

Some historians have argued that Joseph Brant had been a force for restraint during the campaign in the Mohawk Valley.

One British officer, Colonel Mason Bolton, the commander of Fort Niagara, described in a report to Sir Frederick Haldimand, described Joseph Brant as treating all prisoners he had taken "with great humanity".

Joseph Brant chose to have children stay in Kanienkeh, deciding that a frontier fort was no place for children.

For Joseph Brant, being away from his children as he went to campaign in the war was a source of much emotional hardship.

Joseph Brant promised provisions, but no pay, for his Volunteers.

Joseph Brant bought a slave, a seven-year-old African-American girl named Sophia Burthen Pooley.

Joseph Brant served him and his family for six years before he sold her to an Englishman named Samuel Hatt for $100.

Joseph Brant built a small chapel for the Indians who started living nearby.

Joseph Brant's raid failed to disrupt the Continental Army's plans, however.

Joseph Brant's Volunteers harassed, but were unable to stop Sullivan who destroyed everything in his path, burning down 40 villages and 160,000 bushels of corn.

Joseph Brant pressed the British Army to provide more for his own people while at the same time finding time to marry for a third time.

Joseph Brant's third wife, Adonwentishon, was a Mohawk clan mother, a position of immense power in Haudenosauee society, and she did much to rally support for her husband.

Captain Joseph Brant tried his best to feed about 450 Mohawk civilians who had been placed in his care by Johnson, which caused tensions with other British Army officers who complained that Joseph Brant was "more difficult to please than any of the other chiefs" as he refused to take no for an answer when he demanded food, shelter and clothing for the refugees.

At one point, Joseph Brant was involved in a brawl with an Indian Department employee whom he had accused of not doing enough to feed the starving Mohawks.

In early 1780, Joseph Brant resumed small-scale attacks on American troops and white settlers in the Mohawk and Susquehanna river valleys.

Joseph Brant burned his former hometown of Canajoharie because it had been re-occupied by American settlers.

Joseph Brant was wounded in the heel at the Battle of Klock's Field.

Joseph Brant's leadership was praised by British Army officers who described him as an intelligent, charismatic and very brave commander.

Joseph Brant denounced the British "no offensive war" policy as a betrayal of the Iroquois and urged the Indians to continue the war, but they were unable to do so without British supplies.

In 1783, Joseph Brant consulted with Governor Haldimand on Indian land issues and in late summer of 1783, Joseph Brant traveled west and helped initiate the formation of the Western Confederacy.

Joseph Brant argued that if all of the Indians held together to negotiate peace with the United States, then they would obtain better terms as he argued the Indians needed to prove to the Americans that they were not "conquered peoples".

Joseph Brant expressed extreme indignation on learning that the commissioners had detained as hostages several prominent Six Nations leaders and delayed his intended trip to England attempting to secure their release.

Deeply interested in the Anglican church, Joseph Brant used his spare time to translate the Gospel of St Mark from English into Mohawk.

Joseph Brant had about twenty white and black servants and slaves.

Joseph Brant thought the government made too much over the keeping of slaves, as captives were used for servants in Indian practice.

Joseph Brant had a good farm of mixed crops and kept cattle, sheep, and hogs.

Joseph Brant was nostalgic for Kanienkeh, and as much possible, Joseph Brant tried to recreate the world he had left behind in the Grand river valley.

Joseph Brant was to trying to recreate the "human geography" of Kanienkeh along the Grand as the families he allowed to settle by the Grand River had all been his neighbors in Kanienkeh before the war.

Joseph Brant gave leases with an average size of 400 acres to former Loyalists along the Grand river, which became an important source of revenue for the Iroquois, as well recreating the multi-racial and multi-cultural world that Joseph Brant had grown up in.

Much to everyone's surprise, Molly Joseph Brant did not settle at Joseph Brant's Town, instead settling in Kingston.

Joseph Brant attempted to enter Fort Niagara carrying his weapons, and was told by a sentry that as an Indian, he would have to lay down his arms.

An indignant Joseph Brant refused, saying that as both a Mohawk warrior chief and as a British Army officer, he would keep his weapons, and the commandant of Fort Niagara agreed that Joseph Brant would enter with his weapons.

From 1790 onward, Joseph Brant had been planning on selling much of the land along the Grand river granted by the Haldimand proclamation and using the money from the sales to finance the modernization of the Haudenosaunee community to allow them equal standing with the European population.

Joseph Brant refused; he instead asked Lord Dorchester, the new governor of Quebec, for British assistance.

Joseph Brant was attempting to revive the traditional "play-off" system in order to strengthen the position of his people.

However, Joseph Brant knew that the British were not willing to go to war with the United States to save the Western Confederacy, and his position was not as strong as it seemed.

Joseph Brant advised the Americans to negotiate with the Western Confederacy as a whole instead with the individual nations and at the same time used his talks with the Americans to impress upon the British that they needed to have respect for First Nations land rights in Upper Canada.

Joseph Brant refused, but Pickering said that Joseph Brant did take some cash payments.

In 1793, Joseph Brant spoke at a council meeting of the Western Confederacy where he suggested that they accept the American settlements north of the Ohio river while excluding white settlement to the rest of the land west of the Ohio as the price of peace.

Joseph Brant was outvoted and the assembled chiefs announced that no white settlement west of the Ohio were the only peace terms they were willing to accept.

Joseph Brant often clashed with General John Graves Simcoe, the governor of Upper Canada.

Joseph Brant had begun selling some of the land he owned along the Grand river to British settlers with the intention of investing the profits into a trust that would make the Six Nations economically and politically independent of the British.

Joseph Brant rejected the Simcoe patent, saying that Simcoe did not the right to alter the Haldimand proclamation; the question of whether the Iroquois owned all the land to the beginning of the Grand river to its mouth or not is still, as of the 21st century, part of an ongoing land dispute.

Joseph Brant had responded to Simcoe's threat to call out the Upper Canada militia that "it would be seen who the most interest with the militia and that the Governor wold not be able to make them Act against him".

Joseph Brant was to be haunted by the death of his son for the rest of his life, feeling much guilt over what he had done.

In early 1797, Joseph Brant traveled again to Philadelphia to meet the British diplomat Robert Liston and United States government officials.

In 1798, Joseph Brant began to build a new house at Burlington Bay, reflecting his wish to be way from the Grand River community of Joseph Brant's Town where so many had criticized his leadership.

In late 1800 and early 1801 Joseph Brant wrote to New York Governor George Clinton to secure a large tract of land near Sandusky, Ohio, which could serve as a refuge.

Joseph Brant planned its use for the Grand River Indians if they suffered defeat.

Joseph Brant says the British Government shall not get it, but the Americans shall and will have it, the Grand River Lands, because the war is very close to break out.

In January 1801, Joseph Brant was interviewed by an American minister, the Reverend Elkanah Holmes about the history of the Iroquois.

In 1804, Joseph Brant sent his agent and friend John Norton to London to meet lobby various British politicians to allow the Haudenosaunee to sell their land directly along the Grand, and to remind them that Joseph Brant had fought for the Crown in the American Revolutionary War.

Claus, who felt threatened by Norton's mission, organized a meeting at Buffalo Creek of various Seneca chiefs to denounce Joseph Brant, and announced he was now removed from office.

Joseph Brant organized a meeting of the clan mothers living along the banks of the Grand River who affirmed their confidence in Joseph Brant to represent them.

In July 1806, Joseph Brant attended a meeting at Fort George to tell Claus that only the clan mothers had the power to depose officials in the Haudenosaunee community and asked that Claus not be involved anymore in the land issue, saying he had not shown good faith.

Joseph Brant was to spend the last year of his life involved in lawsuits with Claus as he sought to argue for the legal right to sell the land along the Grand.

Joseph Brant bought about 3,500 acres from the Mississauga Indians at the head of Burlington Bay.

Around 1802, Joseph Brant moved there and built a mansion that was intended to be a half-scale version of Johnson Hall.

Joseph Brant had a prosperous farm in the colonial style with 100 acres of crops.

Joseph Brant died in his house at the head of Lake Ontario on November 24,1807, at age 64 after a short illness.

Joseph Brant acted as a tireless negotiator for the Six Nations to control their land without Crown oversight or control.

Joseph Brant used British fears of his dealings with the Americans and the French to extract concessions.

Joseph Brant was a war chief, and not a hereditary Mohawk sachem.

The Canadian historian James Paxton wrote that Joseph Brant's willingness to embrace numerous aspects of European culture, his preference for wearing European style clothing and that he was a devoted member of the Church of England has led to Joseph Brant being criticized for not being sufficiently "Indian" enough.

Many of his critics would prefer Joseph Brant to have been a leader like Tecumseh or Pontiac, leading his people into a brave but doomed battle with the white men.

Paxton wrote that Joseph Brant grew up in a world where the Palatines and Scots-Irish settlers were his neighbors, and he understood that the European colonization was not going to be undone, leading him to attempt to secure the best possible future for his people by seeking an accommodation with the Europeans.

Joseph Brant put his loyalty to the Six Nations before loyalty to the British.

In more recent times, Joseph Brant's legacy has received debate due to his use of slave labour.

Once African slavery was introduced into North America by European settlers, some Iroquois, such as Joseph Brant, did own African slaves.

Joseph Brant was the first among Mohawk men who advanced themselves economically and politically outside the traditional matrilineal political system.