Joseph Brant
Joseph Brant led Mohawk warriors for the British in the American Revolution and spent the rest of his life trying to secure land for the people it displaced. Born about 1743 in the Ohio country and known in Mohawk as Thayendanegea, he was raised in the Mohawk valley of New York, and his sister Molly was the consort of Sir William Johnson, the British superintendent of Indian affairs — a connection that shaped his whole career. He was educated at Eleazar Wheelock's school in Connecticut, learned English and some Greek and Latin, translated the Anglican prayer book and the Gospel of Mark into Mohawk, and fought his first campaign at fifteen. He went to London in 1775, was received at court, sat for Romney, and returned convinced that the Crown was a better guarantor of Iroquois land than the colonists pressing on it. That judgement split the Six Nations Confederacy, which had held together for centuries and now divided, with the Oneida and Tuscarora siding with the Americans. Brant's raids through the Mohawk and Susquehanna valleys were effective and were answered by the Sullivan expedition of 1779, which burned some forty Iroquois towns and their crops and drove thousands into a starving winter at Fort Niagara. The peace of 1783 handed the whole region to the United States without mentioning Britain's Indigenous allies at all, which Brant regarded as a betrayal and said so. He obtained the Grand River lands in Ontario as compensation and settled several thousand people there, then spent decades fighting the colonial government over whether they owned it. He died in 1807. He was one of the very few people of his generation to be painted repeatedly by European artists, in a deliberate mixture of English coat and Mohawk ornament, and he used the ambiguity. Brantford in Ontario is named for him, and the community he founded at Six Nations of the Grand River is the largest reserve in Canada.
- Lived: 1743 CE – 1807 CE
- Nationality: Mohawk
- Roles: military_leader, diplomat, political_leader
