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Saints, Sinners and Reformers
The Burned-Over District Re-Visited
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Chapter 2
Joseph Brant
The Demise of the Iroquois League
The Iroquois Nation (the Mohawk, Oneida, Tuscarawas, Onondaga, Cayuga,
and Seneca tribes) was blessed in the eighteenth century with a number
of noted leaders and orators, and among these two who stand out are Joseph
Brant and Handsome Lake. Both of them were to be involved in the cataclysm
which befell the Iroquois Nation at the time of the American Revolution
and thereafter; Joseph Brant will be considered in this chapter while
Handsome Lake will be discussed thereafter. The revolt of the American
colonies against the English authorities at Lexington and Concord in 1775
was to prove the complete undoing of the Iroquois League. It marked the
death of traditional Indian society as well, for the American Revolution
brought to an end the attempt by the English to prevent further incursions
by white settlers into Indian territory. The American Revolution was also
to bring the devastation of war to Iroquois lands, the results of which
Joseph Brant and Handsome Lake had to attempt to resolve.
In 1774, as the American colonists grew more difficult for the English
to control, the Iroquois became concerned for their own welfare. That
year, Guy Johnson, English Superintendent of Indian Affairs, and Joseph
Brant, the Mohawk Indian chief, went to England for advice. They were
particularly concerned about the way in which the colonists were violating
the Proclamation of 1763 which excluded white men from Indian lands in
the western New York colony. Brant was not only a university educated
Mohawk Indian, but he was a communicant of the Church of England with
family ties to Sir William Johnson (who had represented the Crown in the
Mohawk Valley) through his sister Molly who was Johnson's mistress. Joseph
Brant was a handsome man, and, as a result, he was lionized in Britain
as the perfect example of the eighteenth century's idealized concept of
the "Noble Savage." A very attractive portrait of Brant was done by Gilbert
Stuart in 1786 which still hangs in Syon House in London, and it has often
been reproduced. Back in America in 1776, Brant was to fight on the English
side once war broke out between the colonists and England.
When the Revolution began, both the English and the colonists solicited
the members of the Iroquois League for their neutrality in order that
the Indians would favor neither side. The Iroquois Great Council met at
Onondaga (near present day Syracuse, New York) and affirmed their neutrality
in what for them was strictly a white man's war. They would take no part
in the conflict so long as neither side violated Indian lands nor disturbed
traditional Indian trade routes. The new conflict, however, did make it
possible for the Iroquois to play one side against the other to Indian
benefit, as they had done in the earlier wars between the French and English
in America.
Despite the assurances given to the Indians by the colonists' Continental
Congress, American forces attacked the English at Fort Oswego, New York,
on the shores of Lake Ontario—in Iroquois territory. Although the
Iroquois had agreed to remain neutral, this breach of the agreement created
a split within Iroquois ranks. Joseph Brant and his fellow Mohawk tribesmen,
who had been displaced from the Mohawk Valley lands by American colonists
after the Proclamation of 1763, sided with the English in the new dispute
among the whites. Then these Mohawks fought with the English against the
colonists at "The Battle of the Cedars" in Canada on May 20, 1776, without
the permission from the Great Council at Onondaga. As a result of the
Indian involvement in this battle, the Continental Congress on May 25,
1776, authorized the recruitment of 2,000 Indian auxiliaries to aid the
colonists in their revolt. This was the second breach by the colonists
of the Indian neutrality which had been agreed upon by the Continental
Congress with the Great Council at Onondaga.
The Iroquois were now faced with the need to take a stand. At a meeting
of the Six Nations in Niagara, it was agreed by the Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga,
Mohawk, and the allied Ohio tribes that they had best take the side of
the established English authority. The Oneida and the Tuscarawas refused
to join the other major tribes in this action since they favored the colonists.
The Iroquois League was coming apart. The decision to take sides in the
war was not put into force, however, since the Indians, with the exception
of Joseph Brant, still hoped to maintain a neutral stance. Unfortunately,
six months later, in January of 1777, a natural disaster further shattered
the cohesiveness of the Iroquois League. An epidemic struck the Indians
of Central New York, and three sachems (tribal chiefs) and eighty-seven
other important Iroquois leaders died. Thereby, the Great Council Fire
at Onondaga was extinguished. Now decisions could not be made by a central
body of the Iroquois, and decision making reverted to the individual tribes.
Under the influence of Joseph Brant, a meeting of the tribes took place
with the English in Oswego, New York, on Lake Ontario in the summer of
1777. Brant pled with the other tribes to take the part of the English
in the conflict under way. The Seneca leaders Red Jacket, a conservative,
and Cornplanter, a liberal, argued for neutrality. Brant poured scorn
upon his opponents, and, in the end, it was agreed that the four tribes,
Seneca, Onondaga, Mohawk, and Cayuga, would aid the English against the
colonists. The die was cast. The English General Barry St. Leger and his
Indian allies, the Seneca and the Mohawk under the leadership of Joseph
Brant, moved south from Oswego to Fort Stanwix in the Mohawk Valley (present
day Rome, New York) to lay siege to the towns in the Mohawk Valley. From
there they would head east to Albany where they would be joined by General
Burgoyne and his troops coming down from Montreal while the English navy
sailed up the Hudson River from Manhattan. The three forces would meet
at Albany, New York, cut New England off from the rest of the colonists
and thereby bring the revolt to an early end.
The forces coming from Oswego joined battle with the colonists at the
Battle of Oriskany, and here the split in the Iroquois League was made
manifest since the Oneida and Tuscarawas were allied with the Colonial
militia against the Seneca, the Mohawk, and the English. The attacking
English and Indian forces were ultimately defeated, the Seneca and the
Mohawk suffering the greatest number of casualties. With grave, misgivings,
the surviving tribesmen returned to their Indian villages in western New
York and the Niagara region for the winter, since winter was not a time
for war parties. (For the Iroquois, summer was a time for politics and
diplomacy, autumn was the normal time for war, while winter was spent
back in the villages for hunting.)
Nevertheless, Joseph Brant was determined to pursue the fight against
the colonists, and in the spring of 1778 he formed new Indian raiding
parties in Canada. These raiders swept down from Niagara into the lands
of the Painted Post in western New York to the Canisteo River (now Hornell,
New York) where they fashioned canoes and "arks" or rafts. (Later white
settlers found the debris of the "ark" construction at a town which is
still known as Arkport, New York.) The raiders then continued by canoe
and rafts down the Canisteo River to the Painted Post, to the Chemung
River, and so south into the Susquehanna River to Wyoming (the later Wilkes-Barre,
Pennsylvania). In their sweep east and then south, the Indians destroyed
eight forts of the colonists and many villages. The 1778 Battle of Wyoming
saw 340 of the 400 defending American militia killed. The survivors fled
south, and the Indians burned the village of Wyoming to the ground. Although
Brant insisted that British military discipline be maintained and that
there be no molesting or massacring of women or children, and that no
torture be used, the fleeing colonists spread untrue tales of rape and
torture. The Americans later retaliated by burning Indian towns along
the upper reaches of the Susquehanna River in New York, thereby strengthening
the Iroquois determination to protect their land.
Brant took his captives back to Niagara and turned them over to the English
in Canada. One of these captives, the American General Freegift Pachen
in 1788 gave one of the earliest descriptions of the post at what would
later become the town of Painted Post, New York. He described the post
as a weather-beaten, hewn tree with twenty-eight figures in red "signifying
captives" and thirty headless figures "Symbolizing dead men," as he interpreted
the post and its figures. The post stood at the confluence of the Cohocton
and Tioga Rivers which here formed the Chemung River flowing to the east.
That post stood into the new century, after the Indians had long been
gone from the Territory, until one night some drunken revelers in the
now white village named "Painted Post" threw the post into the river to
be forever lost. (A modern replica of the post stands today in the middle
of the village of Painted Post across from a statue of a Seneca brave.)
Now, in retaliation for the destruction of their villages along the Susquehanna
in New York, Brant's Indian raiders attacked the settlers' village of
Cherry Valley in central New York, a battle in which thirty Americans
were killed. Again, rumors and untruths distorted the savagery of the
Indian attacks. The coming winter of 1778 brought a temporary end to Indian
attacks, but in the spring of 1779 the Indian raids were renewed to reach
as far south as Sunbury on the Susquehanna River in central Pennsylvania.
People fled to the nearest stockaded American forts, and there they held
out in primitive conditions until the Indian fury had passed.
Although few colonists were killed and little physical damage was sustained
by the Americans in these later raids, the morale of dwellers in central
Pennsylvania was damaged. This deprived Washington and his forces of militia
and agricultural provisions from the area. Unfortunately for the colonists,
this occurred at a period when Washington had few troops to spare to staunch
Indian raids. By August of 1779, however, Washington decided that action
had to be taken, and he ordered General James Clinton and General John
Sullivan to destroy the possibilities of further Indian attacks. General
Sullivan moved his 2,500 troops up the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania
toward the New York border while General Clinton moved his 1,500 troops
south from the Mohawk Valley to the southern end of Lake Otsego, the future
site of Cooperstown, New York.
The outlet of Lake Otsego was at its southern end where it formed the
infant Susquehanna River, and here Clinton had a dam built to back up
the waters of the lake. When the lake waters had built sufficiently, the
dam was breached, and Clinton's 220 flat boats loaded with provisions
and ammunition coursed down the now swollen young Susquehanna River on
the crest of the flood. His army's progress on foot down the valley to
Tioga Point on the Pennsylvania border took from August 9th to 22nd, and
the troops destroyed all the Indian villages along the river as they headed
south. At Tioga Point, on the New York-Pennsylvania border, they joined
forces with General Sullivan and his troops who had come up the Susquehanna.
With more than 4,000 troops under his command, General Sullivan set out
to the west along the Chemung River to destroy all the Iroquois villages
and their crops and orchards. The devastation visited upon Indian life
was meant to break the back of Indian society and to deter further raids
into central New York and Pennsylvania.
On August 29, 1779, at Newtown, just to the east of the later village
of Elmira, the American troops encountered 250 Tory raiders and 500 Indians
under Joseph Brant. In the ensuing skirmish, the colonists' artillery
panicked the Indians, and they fled the battle field, and the Indian retreat
did not stop until they reached to the west of the Genesee River. Sullivan's
forces proceeded to the north and up the valley from the Chemung River
to Lake Seneca, destroying Queen Catherine Montour's Town (the site of
the later colonists' Montour Falls village) with its cabins, cornfields,
and orchards. In all, thirty Mohawk, Seneca, Onondaga, and Cayuga villages
were destroyed with only two villages left standing. Reaching the Genesee
River, Sullivan turned his forces back east to continue the campaign of
destruction. On this return march, just to the west of Newtown (Elmira)
the colonists' army mules gave out and had to be shot. The pile of horses'
heads at that spot later gave the village of Horseheads, New York, its
name in the years to come.
The winter of 1779-1780 was one of the most bitter winters which the
Indians could remember, and with their homes and crops destroyed, they
suffered greatly. The snow began to fall in November, becoming worse in
December when powerful Arctic winds swept down from Canada. For thirteen
weeks that Arctic air mass dominated the Northeast, the temperature remaining
below zero for twenty-two days in January, as low as minus 20 degrees
Fahrenheit at times. By October 12th the Port of New London had frozen
over and one could walk from Staten Island to Manhattan and from Long
Island to Connecticut over the frozen waters. Harbors froze as far south
as Virginia and North Carolina.
Spring finally arrived in 1780, and the tribes were determined to avenge
their suffering. Some 1,200 Indian warriors under Joseph Brant descended
on the Mohawk Valley and the Catskill Mountains and then south to the
Delaware and Susquehanna Rivers. All white settlements west of Schenectady
and westward to Ohio were destroyed. In revenge against the tribes which
had sided with the colonists, Brant and his Mohawks destroyed the Oneida
and Tuscarawas villages of central New York as well. Fear among the American
settlers caused villages along the Susquehanna River south to Sunbury
to be abandoned. By the end of 1779, the Iroquois had successfully eliminated
the American settlers from the original Indian territories of New York.
The Iroquois success was short lived, however, for in 1781 they were
faced with the fact of the English surrender at Yorktown, Virginia, and
by the complete victory of the American colonists. The Indian dilemma
was thus brought to a crisis level after the English defeat. Their policy
of balancing power between the European opponents had failed. They had
sided with the vanquished, and by the treaty of Paris in 1783, which ended
the American Revolution, the English claims to American lands now lay
with the new United States. The Indian villages had been destroyed, the
tribes were without allies, and their lands were in danger of being lost.
The Mohawk lands were already gone since they had been excluded from
the Indian lands protected by the original Proclamation of 1763 to which
the Iroquois Nation had agreed. Since the Mohawk had been the strongest
allies of England under Joseph Brant during the American revolt, the English
granted them 600,000 acres at Grand River in Ontario for a new home, and
here Brant would be their natural leader. For the other Iroquois tribes,
the loss of land was to be almost complete before the eighteenth century
ended. The white population could now spread beyond the limits set by
the 1763 Proclamation as that order no longer carried any force.
As one of the ironies of fate, the warriors of Joseph Brant, of Cornplanter,
and of John Montour had met at the Painted Post in 1778 to launch their
canoes and rafts down the Chemung River to begin their raids on American
settlement in Pennsylvania. Three years later in 1781 the Indians and
the victorious representatives of the Continental Congress were to meet
at the Painted Post to sign the Treaty of Painted Post. This treaty would
end the question as to the right of white Americans to settle in the lands
of western New York. Trade goods worth three hundred English pounds sterling
were carried up the Susquehanna and Chemung River by the Americans for
the conference. The shallowness of the water in the river, however, caused
the meeting to be held at Newtown, some twenty-five miles downstream from
the Painted Post, the scene of the Indian defeat by General John Sullivan
and his troops at the Battle of Newtown just two years previously.
Here the Treaty of Painted Post was signed, granting the right to the
whites to settle in the lands of the Painted Post and the Genesee, right
up to the Genesee River which formed a natural barrier as it coursed from
Pennsylvania to the site of the future city of Rochester. Three years
later, in 1784, another meeting was held at Fort Stanwix (at Rome, New
York) between the victorious Americans and the Iroquois. The Treaty of
Fort Stanwix brought no resolution to the problems of the Indians since
the Americans refused to recognize the rights of the Iroquois League which
was now in disarray. Within two more years the Indians had turned their
backs on what they saw as the unjust Treaty of Fort Stanwix, but fortunately
the exhaustion on the part of both sides kept the war from being rejoined.
Both of the contestants were too weak to renew any conflict. Moreover,
the Americans were reluctant to undertake more battles since in the fight
with the Indian tribes in Ohio in 1790-1791, two-thirds of the U.S. military
involved had been killed.
The New York Indians, defeated and in despair, desperately needed peace.
Under Chief Cornplanter of the Seneca, they had determined on a settlement
with the new State and Federal governments, The sale of their traditional
lands, however, left the Iroquois in political and economic disarray.
Not only were the Iroquois traditions becoming undermined, but their political
society was coming apart. The Iroquois Indian allies in the Ohio lands
had from the 1770s gradually formed their own confederacy, and now that
the Northwest Ordinance has been passed by the U.S. government opening
the Ohio Territory to settlement, the plight of the Ohio tribes was sealed.
In 1794 the breach became complete when the Iroquois of New York repudiated
any allegiance to the western tribes. That same year, Joseph Brant and
his group at the Grand River in Canada split with the New York Iroquois,
and in 1803 the New York Iroquois Chiefs broke with Brant. There were
now two Iroquois Council Fires, one at Onondaga, the other at Grand River
in Ontario, Canada.
The New York Iroquois were now fragmented and with no political base
from which to operate. Under political pressure from the victorious Americans,
in 1797 the Treaty of Big Tree at Geneseo, New York, was signed in which
the Seneca sold their lands to the west of the Genesee River. Bribery
and deceit had won the day for the Americans at this meeting. The Iroquois
were now left with small, non-contiguous reservations at Buffalo Creek
(the future site of the American city of Buffalo) and along the Alleghany
and Genesee Rivers. These reservations in no way could support the traditional
Indian way of life.
A new way of life was needed by the Indians who had been displaced from
their traditional hunting grounds and who were now confined to circumscribed
reservations surrounded by an ever-growing and unsympathetic number of
white settlers. Brant and Cornplanter, the respective leaders of the Canadian
and the New York Councils, favored ways which would permit the tribes
to engage in the style of life of the white man, This would include white-style
farming, mills for grain, lumber processing, cloth making—and, above
all, literacy in English. In opposition, Red Jacket and other conservative
Indian leaders among the Seneca wished to continue the traditional way
of life, now a virtual impossibility given the size of the Reservations
to which the tribes were confined.
Red Jacket was particularly critical of the Christian missionaries who
moved in to convert the Indians to their particular brand of Christianity
but who offered no real help in the Indians' desperate economic plight
or their psychological despair. At his Buffalo Creek Reservation, Red
Jacket asked the missionaries:
If your book (the Bible) is true, why didn't the Great Spirit
give us that book long ago? How can we believe your religion when we are
so often deceived by the white man? Our religion teaches us to be thankful
for all the favors we receive, to love each other, and to be united. We
never quarrel about religion. Brother, we do not wish to destroy your
religion or take it from you. We only want to enjoy our own. If we find
your religion makes our white neighbors good, makes them honest and less
disposed to cheat Indians, we will then consult again what you have said.
So ended the traditional Iroquois way of life, leaving a disheartened,
poverty stricken people with little hope for the future.
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