Canadian Notabilities - John Charles Dent (free ebook reader for pc .TXT) 📗

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 School, Lebanon, Connecticut, for the purpose of receiving a liberal English education. How long he remained at that establishment does not appear, but he was there long enough to acquire something more than the mere rudiments of the English language and literature. In after years he always spoke with pleasure of his residence at this school, and never wearied of talking of it. He used to relate with much pleasantry an anecdote of a young half-breed who was a student in the establishment. The half-breed, whose name was William, was one day ordered by his tutor's son to saddle a horse. He declined to obey the order, upon the ground that he was a gentleman's son, and that to saddle a horse was not compatible with his dignity. Being asked to say what constitutes a gentleman, he replied--"A gentleman is a person who keeps racehorses and drinks Madeira wine, and that is what neither you nor your father do. Therefore, saddle the horse yourself."
In 1763, Thayendanegea, then twenty-one years of age, married the daughter of an Oneida chief, and two years afterwards we find him settled at Canajoharie Castle, in Mohawk Valley, where he for some years lived a life of quiet and peaceful repose, devoting himself to the improvement of the moral and social condition of his people, and seconding the