The information brought to his chieftain by the
Mohawk runner, though of deep import to more
than one actor in the scenes we are about to describe,
will hardly be intelligible to the reader, unless
he revives his historical recollection of the political
intrigues that distracted the important province
of New-York, as the drama of the Revolution
was gradually unfolded along her far-spreading
borders.

[figure description] Page 022.[end figure description]

The long possession of the fur-trade, and the
frequent Indian wars incident to the pursuit of this
hardy and precarious branch of commerce, had at
an early day given an adventurous and enterprising
character to the population of this province. Their
military spirit had been well tested in the arduous
campaigns of the old French war; they had borne
no feeble part in the conquest of Canada; and
when the fall of Quebec, in consummating the glory
of Wolfe, brought peace to the land, it found almost
every man capable of bearing arms a soldier.
While, therefore, the different parties of Whig and
Tory were almost equally balanced in the province
of New-York throughout the Revolution, that memorable
political struggle found fewer neutrals here
than in any state of the Union; all men were eager
to bear arms on one side or the other, and it is this
circumstance only which will account for the great
numbers that fell in battle, when the inferior degree
of population, as compared with that of several of
the other colonies, is considered.

But, bitter as were the political animosities existing
in every part of this province, both before and
after a recourse was had to arms, yet the spirit of faction
called out in no district the same stormy feelings
as now distracted the valley of the Mohawk.
The elements of civil dissension had been long
brewing in this beautiful region, where such a diversity
of origin, of interest, and, we may add, of religion,
existed among the heterogeneous population,
that the soul of Discord might well have been
roused even in times the most peaceable.

Here had been the ancient seat of the most
powerful and civilized, yet most warlike nation of
aborigines, upon the northern part of this hemisphere,
a large remnant of which still retained their
possessions in the immediate neighbourhood of the
European settlements. Here the sturdy and

[figure description] Page 023.[end figure description]

adventurous Dutch trader had at an early day been
tempted to abandon his precarious means of livelihood,
and sit down to cultivate the rich alluvial
lands that had been readily granted to him by
the grateful Mohawks, who had ever been treated
as brothers by his countrymen during their sway
over the province. Hither the German soldiers
of Queen Anne's Protestant allies had in large
bodies followed their European neighbours to settle
upon the extensive tracts, granted to them when
New-York first took its modern name in passing to
the British crown. Here, side by side with these
brave mercenaries, or perched, rather, upon the
northern hills that overlooked their fertile meadows,
hundreds of Catholic Scotch Highlanders, with
many Irish soldiers of fortune, the exiled followers
of the last Stuart, had established themselves;
while successive families of the Cameronian countrymen
of the former had found their frugal homes
upon the uplands south of the river, whose cultivation
had been rejected by those who preceded them
in gaining an interest in the soil.

The diversity of feeling which this difference of
origin, of language, and of religion may be presumed
to have created, was still farther enhanced in
its effects by the difference in tenure throught which
the broad domains of the valley were held. For
while the majority of the old “residenters” were
freeholders, constituting a large and independent
yeomanry, yet among those of British descent there
were extensive feudal proprietors, holding their patents
immediately from the crown, who could number
a powerful array of dependants; and some of
whom (as was actually the case with Colonels
Butler and Johnson both before and during the
war) commanded regiments of militia, raised exclusively
among their own tenantry.

There was one feature common to this

[figure description] Page 024.[end figure description]

heterogeneous people, which will hardly be thought to have
reconciled the jarring elements of strife, though
capacitating them for acting in unison under some
circumstances; and this was that, throughout the
valley, there was scarcely an individual who had
not been in some way trained to the use of arms.

The threatening storm of civil war had at an early
day found both patriot and loyalist upon the alert
to enlist the principles, the prejudices, or affections
of their neighbours upon the side that either was
determined to espouse. The leading gentlemen of
Tryon county, whether Whig or Tory, kept up indeed
for a long time the most friendly relations towards
each other, so far as outward seeming was
concerned. Both parties affected to be actuated
by the greatest zeal in preserving the peace of the
country, and particularly in all their public conferences
agreed to act in unison in preventing the
Indians from taking any part in the impending controversy,
should a fatal issue be ultimately joined
between them. But the acts of either faction seem
sufficiently to have belied their words from the first.

Secret clubs and committees were organized
upon the one side; and many of the wealthy upon
the other, keeping open house for their partisans,
made their hospitality a cloak for the dangerous
councils that were rife at the festive board. The
country was traversed by mounted men, bearing tokens
from one disaffected family to another. Travellers
upon the highways were stopped by the myrmidons
of either party, and their papers examined
by these border regulators with the coolest assumption
of authority; and as, on the one side, the great
landed proprietors soon commenced fortifying their
houses and arming and drilling their tenantry, so,
among the smaller freeholders on the other, several
of the influential Whigs ventured to reorganize the
militia in their own districts, and officers were

[figure description] Page 025.[end figure description]

deposed and others appointed, according to the peculiar
tenets and wishes of the people.

This last innovation had been attended with some
danger; though in one instance, Sir John Johnson,
the leading magistrate of the county, met with a
signal discomfiture when rashly intruding upon a
party of villagers whom a lieutenant, elected by
themselves, was engaged in drilling. The baronet
chanced to be taking a drive with his lady when
he came upon this squad of young soldiers; and
incensed at seeing a man in the uniform of an officer
who he knew did not hold the king's commission,
leaped from his barouche, and advancing upon
the patriot lieutenant, rebuked his presumption with
great insolence, and called upon his comrades instantly
to disperse. Swords were drawn, and Sir
John, being the more skilful fencer of the two, disarmed
his youthful opponent, but was ultimately
compelled to retire from the levelled muskets which
were instantly presented at his life, when he attempted
to push his advantage, by seizing the young
man and securing him as a traitor to the king taken
in open arms.

Convinced, by this and similar scenes, of the unpopularity
in that part of the province of the cause
which he had espoused, the zealous baronet addressed
himself to the promotion of his royal master's
interest in another quarter; and, in defiance of
the implied stipulation existing between both parties
of the whites, that the Indians should not be
permitted to take a part in the family quarrel, as it
was called, he proceeded to avail himself of his
connexion with the tribes, to influence them to raise
the tomahawk against his political opponents. His
brother-in-law, Col. Guy Johnson, the superintendent
of Indian affairs for all the provinces of British
America, readily lent his powerful aid to the furtherance
of these intrigues; and the vigilant Whigs,

[figure description] Page 026.[end figure description]

while keeping a wary eye upon the powerful Tory
families in their neighbourhood, soon became aware
that Indian runners were continually passing and
repassing between the settlements and the straggling
troops of warriors that hovered on their border.
The moose-hunter was one of a hundred similar
agents of frontier diplomacy, that were continually
traversing the country between Guy Park, the
seat of the Indian agency, and the different councilfires,
or outlying bands of the Six Nations.

Sir John Johnson's numerous tenantry of Scotch
Highlanders were already in arms at Johnstown,
where the baronet had fortified his large mansion
with several brass fieldpieces; and the different cantons
of the Iroquois, with the single exception of
the Oneidas, were known to be so favourably disposed
toward the royal cause, that the only question
was now, how to unite the whole force, both
European and aboriginal, so as to make it most effective,
and overwhelm at its first outbreak the least
movement of rebellion; this, however, required no
feeble energies to accomplish.

The yeomanry of the valley had long regarded
Sir John Johnson with a suspicious eye; alike
from the baronial state that he affected upon his
princely domains, and the insolent and dictatorial
assumption with which he more than once intruded
upon their popular assemblies. Colonel Guy
Johnson, the superintendent of the Indian department,
was held in hardly less aversion than his
kinsman, and the celebrated Joseph Brant, or Thayendanagea,
as he called himself, who filled the important
post of secretary of that department for “all
his majesty's provinces in North America,” had,
from his political connexions, lost much of the confidence
of his old friends. Brant, indeed, though
living upon the most intimate terms with many of
the leading Whigs of Tryon county, was always

[figure description] Page 027.[end figure description]

suspected to hold himself in readiness for employment
more congenial to the tastes of an Indian warrior,
who, amid all the allurements of a European
court, and when surrounded by every luxury and
embellishment of civilized life, had made it his pride
and his boast that he was a “full-blooded Mohawk.”

That haughty chief, who, whether at the entertainments
of princes and nobles, in the saloons of
fashion, or the palaces of royalty, had always persisted
in presenting himself in the peculiar costume
of his people, seemed to have brought home but
little from his European intercourse with the learned
and the polite, save a strong feeling of attachment
to the British crown: a sentiment of feudal
loyalty, which, notwithstanding his early New-England
education, had become strangely grafted upon
the peculiar love which he bore to the ancient republican
institutions of the Five Nations. He
seemed to regard England as the only muniment
of their freedom, and was willing to render a cordial
allegiance to her as the price of the protection;
and while, in his intercourse with the whites, arrogating
to himself a full share of that assumption
which induced his semi-barbarous countrymen to
call themselves the Ongi-honwe, or “men who surpassed
all others,” he was still willing to look up
to the head of the British empire both as the fountain
of public honours and the guardian of his country's
welfare.

But while this aspiring and sagacious sachem saw
that the safety of his people and his own pre-eminence
as a chieftain depended upon their siding with
the royal cause—for at a very early day he foretold
the blighting influence which this great overshadowing
republic would bring upon the aborigines when
its independence was fully established—yet his private
partialities were from the first at war with the
dictates of his ambition and his policy. He had

[figure description] Page 028.[end figure description]

been educated in one of the leading Whig families
of Connecticut; he had fought side by side with
the colonial troops in “the old French war;” and
though he had derived preferment, fortune, and influence
from his connexion with the officers of the
crown, yet his old friends and neighbours in the
valley of the Mohawk were adherents of the popular
cause; and, save among the powerful family of
the Johnsons, his nearest and dearest friends, the
comrades of his hunts, the companions of his youth,
were banded together against the party which he
had joined. What wonder, then, that when the
storm of revolution was about to burst upon his native
valley, Brant should shrink from imbruing his
hands in the blood of its inhabitants, sprung from
the same soil, though of a different lineage from
himself?

These considerations will sufficiently account for
the noble Mohawk so long endeavouring to temporize
with the patriot party; and, when finally taking
up arms with the loyalists, presenting himself with
a few followers, instead of bringing his whole power
into the field, after having already made a proud
display of his warriors in his celebrated pacific interview
with the republican general, Herkimer. It
would appear, however, from some of his numerous
letters still extant, that true Indian policy was not a
little mingled with the unwillingness he showed to
procure the gathering of the tribes, when all of the
Iroquois confederates, with the exception of the single
canton already mentioned, were eager to lift the
hatchet for the mother country.

Brant thought that the family quarrel was of
doubtful duration, and he was unwilling that the
brunt of it should fall upon his people until England
had tried what she could do to repress the rebellion
in the province of New-York, without having recourse
to the aid of the Indians. He left it, there

[figure description] Page 029.[end figure description]

fore, for Col. Guy Johnson to collect the warriors of
the Six Nations, while he, with a chosen band of his
own Mohawks, hovered near the border, watching
the turn events might take, and still secure in the
deep forests where we have first introduced him to
the reader.

These mountain wilds, which are now chiefly
embraced in the counties of Montgomery, Herkimer,
and Hamilton, still preserve much of their
savage and romantic character; but, at the day
of which we write, they were almost inaccessible
to any but an Indian or a hunter of the border.
Here the chieftain held his woodland court, until
the issue should be fairly joined between the high
parties that now so threateningly lowered upon each
other; and here he awaited the fitting moment,
when the contest should be fairly begun, to make
the most advantageous descent upon the lower
country, and, by some brilliant exploit at the first
outbreak of Indian hostilities, make good his haughty
claim to be considered as the great captain of all
the Indian nations that should take up arms on the
side of the crown.

In the mean time, however, Sir John Johnson had
assiduously kept up his influence with the wary but
aspiring sachem; not only by a constant correspondence;
not only through the various Indian runners
who were continually bearing messages between
himself and Brant,[1] but also by placing near him a
zealous and sagacious Scotch officer, who, being
made the bearer of a commission of captain in the
royal army, which had been politically bestowed
upon Brant, made his way to the camp of the gratified
Mohawk, and remained among his people

[figure description] Page 030.[end figure description]

under the easy pretence of wishing to become initiated
in the wild sports of the aborigines.

Leaving these two partisans of the royal faction
to discuss the tidings which had just been brought
them by the moose-hunter, let us now learn their
nature by shifting the scene to the valley of the
Mohawk, and proceed with the action of our story.

eaf153v1.n1

[1] “The Indians conveyed letters in the heads of their tomahawks
and the ornaments worn about their persons.”