3 Orality and Literacy on the New York Frontier

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On May 23, 1773, New York frontier tavern owner and settler George ... New York, there came about twenty Conajohary Indians in my house at Cana- johary, in ...
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Orality and Literacy on the New York Frontier Remembering Joseph Brant Elizabeth Elbourne

Copyright © 2013. Routledge. All rights reserved.

On May 23, 1773, New York frontier tavern owner and settler George Klock experienced an unpleasant visit. Klock was an inflammatory figure in the ongoing struggle over land in the New York borderlands between land-hungry white settlers and the Mohawk of the Haudenosaunee (Six Nations) in what is now upstate New York. Klock was also in confl ict with Sir William Johnson, Superintendent of Indian Affairs in the northern colonies and a putative ally of the Six Nations, as well as himself such a significant beneficiary of Haudenosaunee land that he had become one of the largest landowners in the American colonies.1 Klock had for many years claimed land, the deed to which the Kanienkehaka, or Mohawk, said he had obtained fraudulently. On that day in 1773 in the Mohawk settlement of Canajoharie, as Klock later complained to the governor and council at New York, there came about twenty Conajohary Indians in my house at Canajohary, in the County of Tryon and Robbed me . . . and dook some Ritings away; and after they had robbed as aforesaid, the Ringleader thereof Joseph Brandt, dook the Pistel, which he Robbed of me and struck me down and four of said Indians kedded [presumably kicked] me so much that I was fainted away, and I sopose if it had not been for one Johs Kelmer and Arent van Betten that just at the same time Came in the house, they would have killed me. 2 A month later, Brant returned with some thirty companions, 3 ‘and as they could not fi nd me, they killed Eight ships [sheep] of my two sons named Jacob G. Klock and George G. Klock and they said that they would Destroy all what I have and all and everything my Children has and Children’s Children after them so long as there was one to be found.’4 This was a very local conflict, but it became part of a major trans-Atlantic crisis. In 1776, shortly after Sir William’s death, as the New York frontier exploded in revolutionary confl ict, Joseph Brant, the ‘ringleader’ of the attack on Klock, and his companion, Oteronyente (John Hill), traveled to London as part of a delegation led by the now-displaced Johnson

Critical Perspectives on Colonialism : Writing the Empire from Below, edited by Fiona Paisley, and Kirsty Reid, Routledge, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/mcgill/detail.action?docID=1565811. Created from mcgill on 2018-05-17 08:03:18.

Orality and Literacy on the New York Frontier

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clan. The two not only presented the wider case of the Mohawk and sealed a military alliance with the British, but also protested specifically against Klock’s actions in an interview with the Colonial Secretary, Lord Germain. Despite their attachment to the King’s government, they said, the ‘Mohocks’ had been badly treated by the King’s people, ‘the City of Albany laying an unjust claim to the lands on which our Lower Castle is built, as one Klock and others do to those of Conijoharrie [sic] our Upper Village.’ Brant observed that:

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It is very hard when we have let the Kings subjects have so much of our lands for so little value, they should want to cheat us in this manner of the small spots we have left for our women and children to live on. We are tired out in making complaints and getting no redress. 5 In the end, the struggle to fend off the incursions of settlers was a critical reason for Kanienkehaka warfare on the side of the British in the upper New York region, however controversial that decision proved in the internal councils of the Six Nations.6 For his part, Klock became a rebel, as he and his sons fought on the patriot side against what one of Klock’s later family members characterized as the tyranny of Sir William Johnson.7 Joseph Brant was one of the best-known (and most controversial) Six Nations or Haudenosaunee politicians of his generation. His actions, and those of his fellow Haudenosaunee warriors at the time of the American Revolution, left many echoes not only in written comment at the time (including Brant’s own letters) but also in oral memory. In this chapter, I want to do two main things. First, mainly using contemporary written sources, I want to look at how Brant tried to shape his own reputation through particular performances on the diplomatic stage in a context in which key white players, including British officials and American rebels, simultaneously were trying to shape Brant’s reputation, and by extension that of the Six Nations as military allies, to their own ends. Second, and inextricably related to this first project, using primarily the written evidence of oral memory (with all the problems this implies), I want to look at some of the stories about Brant and about the Amerindian role in the warfare of the Revolution that were recorded in the nineteenth century, mostly but not exclusively collected from the descendants of white settlers. Here, these stories are drawn primarily from material collected by late nineteenth-century historian and archivist Lyman Draper for a never-completed biography of Joseph Brant. A handful of stories told by some descendants of Brant, interviewed by Draper at the Grand River community in Ontario in the 1880s, suggest a more collective framework for remembering Brant: questions about Brant seemingly sparked memories of events like community migration to Canada, as well as eliciting more troubling family stories, such as Brant’s accidental killing of his son, Isaac. Can these stories—an unusual kind of ‘writing from below’ in one sense, albeit in another an imposition from above—tell us anything

Critical Perspectives on Colonialism : Writing the Empire from Below, edited by Fiona Paisley, and Kirsty Reid, Routledge, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/mcgill/detail.action?docID=1565811. Created from mcgill on 2018-05-17 08:03:18.

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60

Elizabeth Elbourne

more about the relationships between settlers and Six Nations peoples in the borderlands of white settlement in northeastern North America? Can they, in addition, be used to supplement some better-used sources to shed light on what Brant himself thought he was doing, and perhaps by extension illuminate other Six Nations perspectives? Such stories do not give us clear access to internal motivations. What can perhaps be gathered from them, however, is some sense of the politics of performance. Although this is clearly fraught with difficulty and controversy, I want among other things to explore the possibility that ‘frontier stories’ read against the grain suggest that Brant tried to manipulate his reputation and maintain masculine honor through battlefield performance, that he was aware of the political weight of his actions, and that he struggled to satisfy different audiences at once. The many stories that clustered around Brant also suggest that he became something of a trickster figure in popular memory, the subject of many stories—even around events in which he was clearly not involved. A wider question that flows from this work is that of how orality and literacy interacted on the New York frontier in the late eighteenth century. Both white and Six Nations families, and to some extent communities, preserved memories of the American Revolution well into the nineteenth century, reflecting vibrant oral traditions. Discussions of the ‘public sphere’ that occlude orality miss the complicated interaction between written and oral sources by which many people in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries actually obtained information, even as written and oral versions of stories interacted with, and flowed into, one another. It is helpful to try to reconstruct—despite the great difficulties of doing so—rumors, the stories people told each other, and the ways in which families remembered. Finally, the very persistence of stories—together, as I shall suggest, with some aspects of their content—raises the question of whether an oral culture may have existed on the late eighteenth-century New York frontier that was to some degree shared across linguistic and ethnic lines, particularly given the small size of communities. My hypothesis is that one did, at least to a limited extent, in areas of overlapping white and Mohawk settlement characterized by some degree of bilingualism, but that the warfare of the American Revolution and the ethnic cleavages that it exacerbated helped to destroy it. If the very persistence of stories in the 1870s is significant, so too is the process of forgetting and of erasing a Mohawk presence from the landscape that is also illuminated by nineteenth-century stories, pointing to the Revolution as a key moment of rupture.

THE POLITICS OF DISPLAY Joseph Brant was a compelling figure, even for an early American state and certainly for the British. He was the brother of Mary or Molly Brant

Critical Perspectives on Colonialism : Writing the Empire from Below, edited by Fiona Paisley, and Kirsty Reid, Routledge, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/mcgill/detail.action?docID=1565811. Created from mcgill on 2018-05-17 08:03:18.

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Orality and Literacy on the New York Frontier

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(Konwatsi’tsiaienni), who was the main sexual partner of Sir William Johnson from the mid-1750s until Johnson’s death in 1774. Joseph Brant was thus, in a certain sense, Johnson’s brother-in-law. He visited London in 1776 at the outset of the Revolution in the company of other male members of the Johnson clan, and he pledged loyalty to the British after being courted by members of the British elite—seemingly in the mistaken belief that the Mohawk commanded several thousand warriors and could turn the tide against rebellious settlers.8 During the Revolution, he was a captain in the British army and commanded raiding parties that attacked settlements throughout New York and New England.9 Toward the end of the war, the Americans burned the loyalist Haudenosaunee out of New York: an act of ethnic cleansing that saw many leave permanently for Canada. The British Empire then betrayed the Six Nations profoundly at the bargaining table, and not only confi rmed the loss of land taken by the Americans in the Sullivan campaign but also added additional Six Nations territory to the American side of the boundary line. In Canada, Joseph and Molly Brant are often remembered as eminent loyalists; Molly Brant has even been featured on a Canadian postage stamp.10 Although I cannot speak to the wide variety of views held by Six Nations people about Brant and his legacy, it is hard to miss the fact that he has often been a controversial figure, not least for his involvement in land deals at Grand River with contemporary ramifications, but also for his military involvement on the British side and his move away from Six Nations consensus politics—even as he is also for some simply a man who struggled with difficult times.11 At the time, Brant was conscious of the politics of performance, reputation, and display involved in his diplomatic visit, as he was more generally aware of, and concerned about, his reputation throughout his life. In going to England in 1776, Brant was participating in a long history of the display and self-display of Six Nations in Europe. Indeed, it is symbolically apt that it was not only land that was at stake in the Canajoharie confrontation with Klock in 1774 –although that was clearly the central issue in regional tension—but also a struggle over the politics of ethnographic display. Some ten years earlier, Klock had been instrumental in persuading two Mohawk men from Canajoharie, Sychnecta and Trosoghroga, to travel with his associate, a German tailor named Lorenz Blessius, to Europe where they were displayed for money. As George Hamell has documented, after a period of display in Britain and possibly Ireland, including display in London at the Sun Inn, Blessius apparently sold Sychnecta to the widow of the owner of the Blauw Jan in Amsterdam, a venue for exhibitions. At some point, a promoter named Hyam Meyres seems to have become involved; he traveled to Amsterdam to get Sychnecta back and again displayed the Mohawk men in London. The two Mohawk men were rescued by the British House of Lords, which forced Meyres to appear before them to explain himself and resolved that bringing ‘any of the Indians who are under His Majesty’s protection’ from America without proper authority might ‘tend to

Critical Perspectives on Colonialism : Writing the Empire from Below, edited by Fiona Paisley, and Kirsty Reid, Routledge, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/mcgill/detail.action?docID=1565811. Created from mcgill on 2018-05-17 08:03:18.

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62 Elizabeth Elbourne give great Dissatisfaction to the Indian Nations’, and was therefore dangerous to colonists. A second resolution stated that ‘the making a public shew of Indians, ignorant of such proceedings, is unbecoming and inhuman’.12 As Hamell further documents, before the return of these two Mohawk men, within a year Johnson, Calden, and Gage had prevented George Klock’s son, George Klock Jr., and his associate, Martin Nestle, from taking two other Canajoharie Mohawk to be displayed in England, Holland, and Germany. ‘The Indians are all much offended at it,’ wrote Johnson to General Thomas Gage on this occasion, ‘and begged they [Klock and Nestle] might not be allowed to carry away their people but have them sent back, there were two of ye same Nation taken away in the same manner last year & never heard of, which has done a good deal of harm.’13 Ten years later, Klock’s relations with the Canajoharie Mohawk were further strained not only by intense confl icts over land, but also by yet another attempt of Klock’s to bring a young Mohawk man to Britain for profit. As the Mohawk chief Decharihoga (Tekarihoga) informed Johnson in a speech on July 11, 1774, at an emergency meeting of Johnson and Six Nations representatives, Klock, ‘this evil spirit’, had ‘last winter by his cunning seduced one of our foolish young fellows to steal away with him to England, where he exposed him for a shew and cheated him out of his Money—Klock has since stolen home like a Rogue.’14 The situation was so bad that the Mohawk felt compelled to present their case before the entire Six Nations confederacy, ‘that they who know our Rank, may espouse our Cause’. In responding to this speech, William Johnson collapsed and died within two hours. In the maelstrom of confl ict that accelerated in the wake of Johnson’s death, Sir William Johnson’s son-in-law, Sir Guy Johnson, found time to write urgently to Lieutenant Governor Caleden to affi rm that Klock’s ‘repeated offences’ were ‘highly aggravated by the circumstances of his seducing one of their People to accompany him last Winter to England and Exhibiting him as a Show.’15 Lord Dartmouth had intervened and Klock had returned hastily to America. However, he ‘defrauded the Indian of his money on the passage, of this the Indian complained & went (with some others) to his House, where they took part of that Cash away and insisted on his signing a Release for part of the Lands of their Village, included in the patent of Van Horne and Livingston, which all the other Proprietors had long since done.’16 The politics of display were closely tied to land politics: Klock had humiliated Mohawk men by displaying them. In this latter case, his refusal to pay up the money owed was seen as part of his wider refusal to give up a lease that was widely perceived as fraudulent, and the two confl icts merged. When Brant and Oteronyente traveled to Britain in late 1775 to present themselves in a diplomatic sense, they were surely acutely aware of these other less savory precursors and of their own need to display lesshumiliating models of masculinity. Indeed, they informed Lord Germain:

Critical Perspectives on Colonialism : Writing the Empire from Below, edited by Fiona Paisley, and Kirsty Reid, Routledge, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/mcgill/detail.action?docID=1565811. Created from mcgill on 2018-05-17 08:03:18.

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‘We are well-informed there has been many Indians in Country who came without any authority, from their own, and gave much trouble,’ adding that, in contrast, ‘we are warriors known to all the Nations, and are here now by approbation of many of them, whose sentiments we speak.’17 Concern about the line between manly diplomacy and unseemly self-display seems to have typified other native visitors to Britain. For example, Mohegan preacher Samson Occom complained about being put on show during his own highly successful fundraising tour in 1766–1768, as did the later fundraising Methodist missionary Peter Jones. At the same time, Brant was clearly influenced by another significant Hadenosaunee visit to England— that of the so-called ‘Four Kings’ in 1710 during the reign of Queen Anne, a visit that Brant would reference during his visit to the United Kingdom, and that had been an important turning point in the strengthening of an Anglicist party among the Mohawk.18 For a different set of political reasons, in the context of ongoing confl ict in the British military and among British politicians about the deployment of supposedly cruel and ‘savage’ Amerindian allies, Brant also needed to present himself as a gentlemanly, rather than savage, warrior.19 The voyage to London was shared by a group of 34 rebel prisoners who traveled on the same ship, handcuffed and crammed into a small, dark enclosure made of oak wood with two pails for excrement. One of them was Ethan Allen, and his complaints in his later autobiography exemplify the importance of masculine honor in a military setting. Allen and the Tory soldiers sparred with one another, jostled, spat, and traded insults, as Allen accused the soldiers of not respecting his ‘honour’. Allen complained that ‘all the ship’s crew’, with the exception of Daniel Claus, Sir William Johnson’s other son-in-law, behaved toward the prisoners ‘with that spirit of bitterness which is the peculiar characteristic of Tories, when they have the friends of America in their power, measuring their loyalty to the English king by the barbarity, fraud and deceit which they exercise towards the Whigs.’20 This was a tense masculine world, of which Brant was very much a part. If the initial aim of this loyalist voyage was that Brant should perform as a grateful indigene, demonstrating the capacity of the Johnson family to maintain Aboriginal allies, then such hopes were not fully realized. Brant was able to seize control of the optics of the voyage, presenting himself as an independent chief with whom it was possible to negotiate and making important arguments for the protection of Six Nations land. This self-presentation nonetheless depended for its success on the symbiotic relationship that both the Indian Department and the Brant family were struggling to maintain. In the 1770s, the British in North America did in the end still need indigenous allies to combat their own settlers, even if there was division in the ranks of British administrators about how badly, and what was the best way, to cultivate such relationships. However erroneously, the Mohawk were believed to hold the key to the control of the Six Nations, and

Critical Perspectives on Colonialism : Writing the Empire from Below, edited by Fiona Paisley, and Kirsty Reid, Routledge, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/mcgill/detail.action?docID=1565811. Created from mcgill on 2018-05-17 08:03:18.

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64 Elizabeth Elbourne the Six Nations in turn to the groups of the interior, while Brant in turn, as a putative ‘chief’, might indeed hold the key to the Mohawk themselves. 21 This was the context in which Joseph Brant was widely fêted in London, in a manner that cemented male elite alliances. On February 29, 1776, Brant was received by King George III at St. James Palace. With this stamp of approval, Brant had a significant entrée to high social circles. The Earl of Warwick commissioned society painter George Romney to paint Brant’s portrait; Brant had himself painted in dress that combined elements of European and Amerindian dress, with details demonstrating both his Mohawk identity and his loyalty to George III. 22 He was also initiated as a Freemason. The writer and diarist James Boswell published a short profile of Brant and report on his visit in the London Magazine in July 1776, shortly after Brant’s departure from London.23 Boswell’s written account of his encounter with Joseph Brant was marked not by the mutual recognition of selfmade intelligent outsiders for which one might romantically hope, but by a more banal but perhaps more revealing argument that Brant symbolized the rapid advancement of the ‘Mohocks’ in civilization. Boswell suggested, in essence, the feasibility of rapid advance of a primitive people toward civil society in keeping with the precepts of Scottish Enlightenment theorists such as Ferguson and Smith.24 When the ‘chief of the Mohock Indians’ visited England in the reign of Queen Anne, the ‘Mohocks were a very rude and uncivilized nation’ whose very name was ‘terrible’. Now, however, the Mohawk were ‘so well trained to civil life, as to live in a fi xed place, to have good commodious houses, to cultivate land with assiduity and skill, and to trade with the British colonies’, in addition to having adopted Christianity, familiar items in the list of traits of civil society, marked by an ascent to virtuous domesticity and commerce.25 Interestingly, Boswell also found the chief disappointingly ordinary: ‘this chief had not the ferocious dignity of a savage leader; nor does he discover any extraordinary force either of mind or body’. The journal’s solution was to ask him to remove his London garb and to portray him instead ‘in the dress of his nation’ in order to make him more striking, ‘for when he wore the ordinary European habits, there did not seem to be anything about him that marked pre-eminence.’26 Clothes made the man—as Brant, an expert in strategic cultural cross-dressing, knew well. 27 During this visit, Brant was invited to at least one high-society masquerade, which he attended disguised as an Indian chief. According to the Christian Observer, a Turkish diplomat assumed that his half-painted face was a mask and attempted to tweak his nose. Brant threw back his cloak to reveal a tomahawk, drew it on the surprised Turkish ambassador and gave a war cry. 28 Brant then, however, removed another layer of disguise to reveal himself as a gentleman disguised as a Six Nations chief. He was posing as a chief to the British, while also presenting himself as a man who understood the conventions of social deceit and who could play openly with

Critical Perspectives on Colonialism : Writing the Empire from Below, edited by Fiona Paisley, and Kirsty Reid, Routledge, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/mcgill/detail.action?docID=1565811. Created from mcgill on 2018-05-17 08:03:18.

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Orality and Literacy on the New York Frontier

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these conventions, all the time reinforcing his central performances as chief and as gentleman, according to British codes. A further level of irony was, however, provided by the detail that Brant was not in fact a chief, even if he did become a war chief during the Revolution (a non-hereditary and supposedly non-permanent role). The visit to London significantly increased Brant’s ability to claim status, and for the rest of his life he would present himself as a Mohawk chief.29 In all these relationships, masculinity, and elite status loomed large. These were important attributes in forging a way in late eighteenth-century London. They were also crucial to forming the relationships of trust on which Brant clearly felt the British–Mohawk alliance depended. As he implied in a later address to Lord George Germain, Brant wanted the British to trust primarily himself and the Johnson clan. More than that, however, he wanted the Mohawk to control their own image. As Brant told Germain, ‘we request you, and the great men who take charge of the affairs of government, not to list to every story that may be told about Indians.’30 The Mohawk quest to control their own image was to prove difficult. In colonial New York, war had broken out in earnest by the time Sir Guy Johnson and his companions returned. Johnson never went back to Johnson Hall, but fled to Canada. For much of the war, Brant would lead raids into the disputed borderlands of what is now New York state from the Mohawk refugee base in Niagara, harassing settlers and burning settlements. These raids formed the basis for an American language about Brant as a savage killer, which in turn encapsulated a hardening view of the loyalist Six Nations (like the ‘Tories’ in general) as inherently violent. Paradoxically, some of these ‘savages’ were actually white. Brant’s warriors were both First Nations men and, increasingly, impoverished white ‘rangers’, who chose to work with Brant rather than with less skillful white British officers, such as Colonel Butler, with less forest experience. These white soldiers sometimes went into battle (following long-standing tradition) wearing Amerindian dress and uttering Amerindian war cries. Here, too, the cultural significance of ethnic ‘cross-dressing’ and the possibilities of fluid identities, even as open warfare hardened lines, is apparent. One white ‘volunteer’ with a different mixed white-Amerindian war party in Quebec, for example, claimed to speak the Iroquois language fluently, admired the level of skill required to scalp effectively, and clearly enjoyed occasions on which ‘to avoid suspicion we were all dressed like Savages’.31 From the outset of the war, loyalists sought to exploit the reputation of the Six Nations for ‘savagery’ and indeed to foster this reputation where it didn’t exist. As early as 1777, the pro-British governor of New York, Colonel Tryon, argued that he agreed with Colonel Luc de la Corne that ‘il faut brutalizer les affaires’ (or, roughly, ‘we need to make things brutal’), and ‘set loose’ the ‘Indians’ upon the settlers. 32 Although Daniel Claus generally presented the Mohawk as justifiably aggrieved, angered by settler land theft, and not in fact guilty of atrocities, 33 in at least one private dispatch

Critical Perspectives on Colonialism : Writing the Empire from Below, edited by Fiona Paisley, and Kirsty Reid, Routledge, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/mcgill/detail.action?docID=1565811. Created from mcgill on 2018-05-17 08:03:18.

66 Elizabeth Elbourne to Haldimand, then based in Quebec as governor, Claus underscored the political need to have the Mohawk take the fall for guerilla actions against white settlers. It would look much better in the Eye of the public, such Feats [as killings and destruction of homesteads] to come rather from Savages than Whites, in particular when it may be held with Truth and Justice. It would likewise silence sooner the Clamor of the Opposition in England, that Government employed officers to encourage Indians to murder and scalp the Rebels, when they could be answered that the Indians acted on their own accord and came against them.34 In sum, the reputation of the Six Nations was a political football.

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ORALITY AND THE NEW YORK FRONTIER What happens if we turn to less conventional evidence to explore similar questions? I have tried to argue above that Brant’s reputation had political consequences, and that Brant himself sought to tend his own image among the British. In the second part of this discussion, I explore some oral evidence, ambiguously transferred into writing—much of it in the form of war stories—around Amerindian activities during the Revolution. I want to suggest that this material tells us something about local readings of Brant, and perhaps also about how Brant tried to perform on the battlefield as well as in the drawing rooms and ballrooms of Britain. It also tells us something about how families remembered and told one another stories. In an article in the New York Mirror in 1837, American historian and literary scholar Samuel Knapp recalled the comments of an aged American soldier, Beza Woodbury. Woodbury had been present at the battle of Lake George in 1755, a tragic fratricidal moment in which French-allied and British-allied Hadenausaunee killed one another in large numbers. Before the battle, Hendrik, leader of the British-allied Kanienkehaka, rallied his forces. Woodbury, Knapp said, ‘has often fought his battles over again in my presence, and never forgets to mention the effect the sound of Hendrik’s voice had on him who did not understand but a few words of his discourse’: ‘I can hear it now,’ the veteran would say, as he proceeded in his narrative, ‘ringing through the trees, while all the Indians stood ready to start for the fight.’ I asked whose voice it resembled. At this he paused a moment, and replied—‘Like Parson Murray’s when he was preaching upon the Last Solemn Scene.’ This was the title of a sermon by an eloquent Irish clergyman who settled in this country, and was alike renowned for his patriotism and his eloquence, and also for his strong possession of the hearts and memories of his hearers. 35

Critical Perspectives on Colonialism : Writing the Empire from Below, edited by Fiona Paisley, and Kirsty Reid, Routledge, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/mcgill/detail.action?docID=1565811. Created from mcgill on 2018-05-17 08:03:18.

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Both this voice, and the fact that it was recalled over 80 years after the event, might stand as useful symbols for the power of the spoken word and the importance of oral performance on lands shared by Six Nations and by white settlers in the late eighteenth century in what is now upper New York state. The anecdote points to multiple layers of oral culture and of performance as well as the persistence of historical memory through storytelling. Tellingly, Woodbury conflates the solemnity of Six Nations battlefield oratory with the solemnity of a sermon– both masculine modes touching on matters of life and death. The preservation of the article also points, of course, to the parallel power of the written word, as well as to some ways in which memory functioned at different points in time. The article that described this written version of what was in fact the oral memory of an oral discourse was in its turn carefully transcribed and copied by Lyman C. Draper, the corresponding secretary of the Wisconsin State Historical Society from 1854 to 1890. The transcription formed part of a vast collection of notes and documents, the product of a lifetime of research that would be arranged after Draper’s death into almost five hundred volumes of papers. 36 Lyman Draper was a foundational figure in early American historical writing, although he himself published little. 37 He not only collected archival materials from many scattered sources, but in countless letters and interviews sought to elicit memories of frontier days from the descendants of white settlers and, to a much more limited extent, from the descendants of Amerindian people themselves. This was a vast, ambitious project, the major aim of which was to document the settlement of the trans-Alleghany American West. Much of the material he collected was later used extensively in the history of the American West. Indeed, southern historian William Heseltine claimed in 1953 that Draper’s work was foundational for the influential (and highly controversial) ‘frontier thesis’ enunciated by Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893, arguing that American identity was forged on the ‘frontier’. 38 In contrast to his material on the Western ‘frontier’, Draper’s late-life material on his own home area of what is now upstate New York has flown under the radar and has been only selectively exploited. This is scarcely surprising: the northeastern notebooks constitute in fact a jumble of material with few detailed guides out of the labyrinth. Many pages include hard-to-decipher notes scrawled in Draper’s handwriting, lines jostling one another, and abbreviations bristling across the page. Above all, this archive is dauntingly extensive. Much of it consists of people either documenting their absence of memory or, more frequently, giving fragments of information that, like memory itself, make a kind of sense but not a coherent and readily legible sense. Furthermore, this work is probably most illuminating about the politics of memory in the nineteenth century. In New York, for example, Draper’s oral work should be seen as part of a wider project by historians such as William Stone and

Critical Perspectives on Colonialism : Writing the Empire from Below, edited by Fiona Paisley, and Kirsty Reid, Routledge, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/mcgill/detail.action?docID=1565811. Created from mcgill on 2018-05-17 08:03:18.

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68

Elizabeth Elbourne

Jeptha Simms to use oral history to build a new history for a new nation partly on the basis of popular memory. 39 Even so, the very feasibility of such projects suggests the long-standing importance of orality in the region; nineteenth-century collectors drew on deep eighteenth-century roots. The oral transmission of knowledge was, of course, central to Six Nations politics and culture on many levels, both in formal and informal settings. To take just one example from the formal realm, at public meetings particular individuals known for their oral skills were designated spokespeople for particular factions, including the clan mothers; considerable time was allotted to elaborate public speeches, governed by complex rules of appropriate speech. Non-elite white settlers also, however, clearly had an oral culture, similarly marked by storytelling and by the oral transmission of knowledge—albeit in ways that interacted more extensively with written texts. It is possible that to some extent oral cultures overlapped. The New York borderlands in the late eighteenth century was a place of uneasy compromises and considerable tension. Where did Six Nations land end and where did that of the British state begin? However symbolically important the 1763 Proclamation Line, both in indigenous memory and in the settler complaints about British constraints on their natural expansion enshrined in the preamble to the American Constitution, it was frequently breached. Whites continued to encroach on Six Nations land, however, even after the substantial additional, and controversial, concessions of the Treaty of Fort Stanwix of 1768, brokered by Johnson with his significant interest in land speculation.40 Fort Stanwix, in addition, had left some Haudenosaunee enclaves, including the Mohawk towns of Canajoharie and Tiononderoge and the Oneida settlement of Oriske, on the colonial side of the new boundary line; white settlers claimed some of the lands of these settlements. As James Paxton argues, there were often intimate and complex relationships between white settlers and indigenous peoples in the multicultural world of the Mohawk Valley.41 Indeed, Ned Landsman cites the Mohawk Valley as an example of ‘one of the most unusual community forms in the Middle Colonies, the mixed settlements of Indians and Europeans’.42 Most recently, Gail McLeitch has shown how Iroquois culture and society experienced both change and continuity as a result of complicated entanglements with settler society and imperial power.43 As was typical of contested borderlands elsewhere, as late as the 1770s the lack of fi nal resolution of struggles over land and political power was also reflected in cultural exchange. At the mid-century mark, at least a few white settlers close to, or even on, Six Nations lands spoke Iroquoian languages, just as some Iroquoian individuals spoke English and experimented with Christianity. ‘My Grandpa spoke the language of the Six Nations,’ recalled a descendant in Swallowhill, New York, on May 22, 1879. The grandfather remembered Joseph Brant as a child: ‘Brant when a boy used to be at his Father’s, and they would give him bread and butter with them

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or eat at the table.’44 Mrs. McGennis, the wife of a trader, spoke Mohawk fluently and had such influence with the community that during the Revolution she was able to seize a conciliatory wampum belt sent by the Americans and persuade the warriors to bury it.45 Even the family of John Wells, who was killed at Cherry Valley by British forces, including Brant, during the guerilla warfare that followed the outbreak of the Revolution, could reproach Brant with a betrayal of former intimacy, claiming that Brant had ‘met with Mr. Wells often in the course of his [Wells’] duties among the Indians’ and had been ‘frequently at his house on business and otherwise, and was received with kindness and treated with hospitality.’46 There was both intimacy and resentment between white settlers and the Six Nations in the waning days of the British state: as the Revolution began, the balance would tilt toward resentment and, quickly, violence. Many of the stories collected by Draper and others do in fact turn around betrayal and conflict among intimates, whether former friends or long-standing enemies. Consider, for example, accounts of a conference called with Brant by Nicholas Herkimer, local landowner and the commander of the Tyron County militia. This example is drawn in part from the material collected by Jeptha Simms in the 1830s, and smoothed over for publication by Simms, as well as from Draper’s revisiting of local memories in the 1870s. Herkimer called the conference in order to try to persuade Brant not to espouse the British side. The two men had been neighbors before the war. According to Simms’s interview with Joseph Wagner, who was present at the meeting on Herkimer’s side, Brant was accompanied by three other men, William Johnson, a son of William Johnson by a Six Nations woman (locals claimed there were many), ‘Pool, a smart looking fellow with curly hair, supposed part Indian and part negro, and a short dark skinned Indian, the four encircled by a body-guard of some twenty noble looking warriors.’ Among others, Colonel Cox, the brother-in-law of George Klock, accompanied Herkimer. ‘Provoked to anger, Brant asked Cox if he was not the brother-in-law of old George Klock? Yes! Replied Cox in a tone of malignity, and what is that to you, you damned Indian.’ In London, Brant met the king but on the frontier he was a ‘damned Indian’. Brant’s guards then ran back to their camp, fi ring guns and yelling. Clearly this is a story given narrative form by Simms for nationalist ends, but it still has its roots in a complicated oral tradition, which in turn was drawing on written sources. Simms’s account is corroborated, for example, by the lengthy oral testimony given by militia member John Duesler in his application for a pension in 1832: he was illiterate, as he gave a mark rather than signing the deposition and his long and detailed deposition bears the narrative marks of non-literate forms of remembering and telling stories. Duesler attested that: General Herkimer and Colonel Brant talked a while then Col. Cox spoke and said damn him and let him go—Brant mentioned this in

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70 Elizabeth Elbourne

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Indian to his men who were close by—they all at once sprang up & shouted, patting their hands on their mouths as they hollered and then ran off —and directly they heard them fi ring their pieces—General Herkimer took Brant by the arm and told him not to mind what Cox said, that they were old neighbours and ought not to be spilling each other’s blood.47 The two met again the following day, on Brant’s suggestion; distrusting Brant’s intentions, Herkimer primed four men to shoot down Brant and his companions if need be. Wagner was to shoot Brant. As he told his grandson, and as the grandson in turn told Draper, in a different stream of tradition from the Wagner family, the elder Wagner had attended school at the Indian Castle with Brant.48 He also said that he had told Brant after the war that he had been instructed to kill him, and that Brant was astonished and not unnaturally somewhat displeased. At the time, Brant refused Herkimer’s overtures, supposedly telling him (in Simms’s embellished version): ‘General Herkimer, I now fully comprehend the object of your visit, but you are too late, I am already engaged to serve the king. We are old friends and I can do no less than let you return home unmolested, although you are entirely within my power.’49 A few months later, at the battle of Oriskany in what is now upstate New York, a British force that included Brant and a high number of native warriors (tipped off by Molly Brant, who supposedly had the information from Mary Hill, the Mohawk mistress of American General Schuyler) laid an ambush for Herkimer’s forces, who were in their turn on their way to hunt the British. Herkimer’s forces included a number of Seneca warriors as well as George Klock’s son, Jacob, and his son-in-law, Cox. The Mohawk are said to have begun fi ring before Herkimer’s forces had entirely entered the ravine in which the trap was laid; the fact that this early shooting killed Cox may suggest how much killing Cox mattered to Brant. This example, among a multiplicity, again underscores the extent to which warfare in New York was a war among those who knew each other intimately, on both the white and native side, rather than a war of faceless forces. Whatever the truth about what happened, this type of material reflects a frontier tradition about the breaking of old friendships that was meaningful in a larger sense. The tales also nonetheless fi rmly convey the importance of the Klock–Mohawk feud, and the persistence of deep-seated hostilities. Other stories told of the death of Herkimer at Oriskany, and the ultimate destruction of the Brant–Herkimer relationship in Herkimer’s death. Christian House recalled that his grandfather (another former neighbor of Brant’s) carried Herkimer to his death, only to die himself, in a symbolic cycle of destruction: [A]fter the Battle Herkimer still living he carried him on his back over a mile to the Baggage wagon it being a very warm day he over het

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[heated] himself & drinking while warm from a pool of water which had collected in the footprints of the horses he never fully recovered from the effect of the overexertion dying shortly after the battle of consumption his age being as near as I can tell about Fifty years. 50 Not surprisingly, many stories about ‘Indians’ and the American Revolution in New York were about attacks on homesteads and people, as a memory of Amerindian violence was a key justification for ethnic cleansing. Even here, however, people remembered in ambivalent ways. Even the extreme circumstances of a day of horrific killings at Cherry Valley, during which a joint white–Amerindian force killed over thirty people at a small town around a fort, drew forth mixed memories. Samuel Clyde had been so fervent a revolutionary that he was the chairman of the Tryon County Committee of Safety, as well as a pioneer Cherry Valley settler and a staunch Presbyterian. Clyde family members told Draper stories about Samuel Clyde’s heroism and about the murders committed at Cherry Valley. After a long correspondence with Draper, Jefferson Clyde fi nally wrote down for Draper an alternate family story from that of his grandmother, whose father had lived near the Johnsons. He had

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often heard her say that her fathers farm was a favorite resort of the Indians for fishing purposes, and particularly of the Indian boys—that she had two brothers nearly the age of Brant, and he Brant had often remained several days at a time with her brothers—that she took a great interest in him as the future Chief of the Mohawks that she has watched them days together in their boyish shorts with the view of studying his character . . . that she Considered him a noble good-hearted boy . . . that if she could have been sure of seeing Brant on the morning of the destruction of Cherry Valley that she would not have left the House that she was sure Brant would have known and protected her. 51 Another Cherry Valley story suggests that Brant did in fact spend much of the day of the massacre protecting another family. The grandson of Mr. and Mrs. Shankland recounted what he said was a story he had heard ‘fifty times’. He began by describing how his grandfather had gone early in the morning to the mill and was captured by ‘Indians’. Mrs. Shankland, who was my grandmother, later in the day, sat spinning at her wheel when Capt. Brant came into the house, alone, he being acquainted with Mr. Shankland. He says, as he entered the house, ‘my good woman, what are you doing here, when all your neighbors are murdered around you,’ and as she had not heard of the raid before, she stood for a moment and answered that they were in favour of the king. Brant replied that will not avail you, as I am not in command today, for they have killed all of Mr. Wells’ family, and they were as dear to me as

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72 Elizabeth Elbourne

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my own. She replied, ‘If there is one Joseph Brant among the Indians he will save us, for my husband is a great friend of his’. He replied, ‘I am Joseph Brant and will do for you what I can. Get into bed and pretend yourself sick’, at that she put three of the oldest children at home in the cradle Nancy, Jane, and Gilbert, and took the two youngest Margaret and Robert in bed with her. He put his mark of red ochre on them and said ‘now you are safe’. 52 There was, in fact, an entire genre of stories about Brant saving selected white people during frontier warfare. Some have mythic overtones. As happens in oral tradition elsewhere, Brant appears to have become a trickster figure. Stories coalesced about him that might or might not have been originally about him, in a process of telescoping that enabled one man to stand in for the ambivalence created by the warfare of loyalist Six Nations. Consider, for example, the story, repeated in different form in a number of sources, of the rescue of Captain McKinstry from the hands of native warriors at the battle of Les Cèdres, a small community about 50 kilometers out of Montreal. In the version told by W. L. Stone, Brant’s earliest biographer in the 1830s, who was in turn drawing on family memories, at the battle of Les Cèdres the rebel officer John McKinstry was captured by Six Nations warriors and preparations were made to put him to death by burning. Joseph Brant and several ‘humane English officers’ made up a purse and purchased an ox to substitute for the prisoner. According to Stone, Captain McKinstry ‘was treated with kindness while a prisoner and contracted an intimacy with Brant which continued until the chieftain’s death’; Brant never afterward visited the Hudson without spending a few days with McKinstry. During his last visit in 1805, the pair—who were both Freemasons—attended the lodge in Hudson, where Brant’s presence ‘attracted great attention’. 53 In 1874, McKinstry’s great-grandson confi rmed to Lyman Draper that this was the story his grandfather had given to Stone, and that it accorded with family tradition. His grandfather could not, however, confi rm a critical element of the story as it was also circulating, which was that on the verge of being put to death, McKinstry had made a secret Masonic sign. Since Joseph Brant was also a freemason, he recognized the sign and immediately rescued McKinstry. According to an account in the Hudson Whig, cited in the Niles’Register’s 1822 obituary of McKinstry: The British officers were too much in dread of their savage allies, on account of their vast superiority of numbers, to risk an interposition of their authority to prevent the horrid sacrifice they saw preparing. Already had the victim been bound to the tree, and surrounded by the faggots intended for the immolation—hope had fled—and in the agony of despair he uttered that mystical appeal which the brotherhood of masons never disregard—when, as if heaven had interposed for his salvation, the warrior Brant understood him and saved him. 54

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By the 1860s, this story was reproduced in a McKinstry family genealogy, with McKinstry as the agent of his own salvation through his knowledge of his captors: He was bound to a stake, and the faggots piled around him; when it occurring to him that the Indian Chief Brandt was a mason, he communicated to him the Masonic sign, which caused his immediate release, and subsequent good treatment.55

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A key problem with these accounts is that Brant was not at the battle of Les Cèdres, since it was fought in May 1776 and Brant did not return from Britain until July 1776. So this is a fabricated story but a very persistent one. Can any use be made of this type of myth, when taken in context as part of a genre? I would suggest that Brant’s freemasonry was a troubling sign of Indian knowledge of whites. Stories about other battles claimed that Brant similarly spared from massacre those who gave Masonic signs, or refrained from burning houses on which the occupant had painted a Masonic sign. Such legends might be seen as speaking to what oral history theorists such as Alessandro Portelli point to as the underlying meaning of (possibly) untrue stories—in this case, perhaps, the ambivalent status of Brant as both enemy and community member, confusingly adept in the language of shared civility.56 The version of this story recounted in the Hudson Whig gives a sense of Brant’s sojourn in London as a transition period, going so far as to describe Brant as having been educated in England and there having become civil. Mohawk tradition of the 1870s also recalled Brant’s visit to London as a turning point in Brant’s life, reflecting a sense that Brant acquired eminence in Britain. In 1879, Thomas Green, a Mohawk chief in his early eighties, was interviewed by Draper near Mill Point. Green recalled: When presented to the King, he bowed three times, & also to the Queen; & some of the authorities promised a commission, & gave it to him; & thus it was that Brant had the precedence of the other Mohawks—his commission of Captain being the oldest; & this informant (Mr. Green) thinks, that Brant may have had more land than others.57 In both versions, Britain was a space from which Brant returned transformed to take up changed relationships on the frontier. A story from the region around Minisink reflects a similar mix of memories of violence and mercy centered on Brant. As Brant and his men tried to derail the coming Sullivan campaign against Six Nations territory, houses were burned and a schoolteacher was murdered. According to George Cuddeback, the teacher was a lame man. He ‘met the Indians in the wood and called to them “Brother”, and offered to shake hands with them, they tomahawked him in the road, my Father, Joshua Ventken & John Vanstut fled to the mountain’. In another letter, he added:

Critical Perspectives on Colonialism : Writing the Empire from Below, edited by Fiona Paisley, and Kirsty Reid, Routledge, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/mcgill/detail.action?docID=1565811. Created from mcgill on 2018-05-17 08:03:18.

74 Elizabeth Elbourne I have always been informed that Brant came along at the time they tomahawked the teacher Van Aucken, Brant with a Brush threw red paint on the girls’ aprons and told them if they came along where the Indians was they should hold up their aprons and it would save them and further I have been informed that they took their aprons off while the paint was yet wet and put it on the Boys coat and when the girls and Boys came along by the Indians [?] it saved them. 58 The continuation of the story of the man whose father spoke the language of the Mohawk, known as Captain Harper, suggests both intimacy and the fracturing of intimacy occasioned above all by the escalating violence of the Revolution in civilian areas. In a long letter with oral cadences and no punctuation, E. C. Stuart recounted how Harper’s sister, Mrs. Moore, and her family were taken captive after the Cherry Valley massacre and carried to Mohawk territory outside Montreal. Harper took white commander John Butler’s family hostage and told Butler he would kill one of the family for every family member killed by the Mohawk. They were all exchanged, except for the eldest daughter of the Moore family, who married a white member of Brant’s troops. Later, one day in the snow, Brant caught up with Harper and another man attempting to escape a besieged fort on damaged snowshoes:

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Brant says ‘Harper I am sorry that you were here’. He says ‘Why?’ Brant looked him in the face as they had been school mates together ‘for’ he says that ‘I must kill you’: he drew the hatchet to strike then stopped and asked him if there were any soldiers in the fort?59 Reluctant to kill, Brant spared Harper’s life in exchange for (false) information about the whereabouts of soldiers. Harper eventually tried to escape: ‘he rode up in front of Brant and dared him to come out called him an Indian dog & Brant shot at him three times until Murphy pulled him off his horse and put a log between them and then got away he told him he was a target for all of Brant’s men’.60 Yet the story continues that, after the war, Brant and Kasper talked over the events of the day; Brant told Kasper he tried to aim at him three times but was so angry he couldn’t shoot properly. Warfare in this context might be seen in some ways as a form of performance, in oral cultures in which battle stories were important pieces of information, to be reenacted in public and to be used to create a hierarchy of masculine prowess. Warfare provided another forum in which Brant attempted to present himself in a satisfactory manner to all his audiences, including rebel and loyalist settlers, and different Haudenosaunee groups, and perhaps also to the common cultural space that in some instances united them—ostentatiously sparing women and children, for example, and asking that this be broadcast, while still attempting to terrorize settlers. Violent conflict destroyed, however, most of this tenuous common space, as well as the capacity of a man such as Brant to play to diverse audiences.

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Memories Among Brant’s Descendants In late 1879, Lyman Draper traveled to Grand River and spoke directly with a number of descendants of Joseph Brant. It is telling that Draper seems to have been met in the fi rst instance not by oral narrative but by a written text: General Haldimand’s Proclamation of 1784, in which he granted the Six Nations land six miles deep along the Grand River, purchased from the Anishnaabeg on behalf of the Haudenosaunee in the wake of their dispossession. Draper transcribed a copy of the document with a note as to its provenance: ‘From the original on parchment—presented by the late Mrs. Catherine John—now by Mrs. Dee, daughter of Mrs. Charlotte Smith—& great grand-daughter of Capt. Jos. Brant—Middleport, Canada, Sept. 25–26, 1879, Tuscarora PO.’61 Could this be seen as a genealogy of transmission through women, echoing the genealogy of transmission (and thus attestation of authenticity) attached to an oral document, such as the Code of Handsome Lake? Be that as it may, this written document was the guarantor of Six Nations land, and it remains the centerpiece of ongoing Six Nations land claims. Very clearly, the Six Nations recognized the importance of the written document to legal process. Draper did not usually record the questions that he asked, which we must assume elicited responses on particular topics; these are not unmediated comments, and they are somewhat scattered. It is nonetheless striking that the elders seem often to have told stories that related to the community as a whole (or at least to parts of it). A central theme, for example, was that of exodus from America and fl ight through the wilderness, as the Mohawk walked from upper New York state to Canada. Thomas Green attested, for example, that Americans wanted Mohawks ‘to stay at their homes, & take no part in the war; but so fi rmly attached were they to the King, that they would not listen to this advice. They started to retire in a body to Canada; Capt. John was in the rear, to protect the women & children.’ They were attacked on the way, and had to fight. They also suffered from great hunger: The retreating Indians became nearly starved—children would cry of hunger—camped out; & the Indian hunters went out in every direction to hunt, killing only a few birds, & made them into gruel, so as to go as far as possible, but afforded the hungry scarcely a spoonful apiece, with small bits of the scanty meat.62 Mrs. Hill’s mother, who was three years old on the trek, had told how they would stop at some of the houses by the way & get buttermilk. The only food they took with them was parched cornmeal—called in the Mohawk ona-quits-sa-rah; of which each carried as much as he could. They were pursued by the Americans & six Mohawk women,

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76 Elizabeth Elbourne lagging behind with their heavy loads, were overtaken & made prisoners, & were put in prison & kept a long time, suffering much during their incarceration.63 Mrs. Catherine Hill, Joseph Brant’s granddaughter, told how:

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It was probably in the fall of 1776, the Mohawks left the Mohawk river—Indians would carry the small children on their shoulders, & large packs. They sat down on the southern shore of the St. Lawrence—saw a large boat approaching them, well manned with oarsmen, & many oars: the Mohawk women fearing it was a party of Americans began to cry; but at length they espied red colors & other British indications & dried up their tears; it proved to be Sir John Johnson, & all rejoiced, as they all knew him—& he piloted them to a suitable place (Lachine) & supplied their almost famishing necessities.64 These and other histories were stories of dispersal and relocation. They were also stories of community choices (other elements of the Six Nations might have given different community stories, of course). Tales included accounts of American attacks against the Mohawk, including Mohawk women; other stories told of fighting on the way. Other Mohawk leaders were emphasized as well as Brant. For example, ‘Mrs. Hill’ insisted that ‘Brant does not deserve to be regarded as alone the controlling spirit of the Mohawks—but that Capt. John Deserontyn should share the honor’. Draper noted that this was a ‘voluntary suggestion’, and that Mrs. Hill ‘seemed to be quite decided in the opinion’.65 Not surprisingly, perhaps, many other family stories were included. In sum, these accounts did not telescope Brant as the representative of the Six Nations in general, but presented him as someone embedded in family and community relationships. Possibly because Draper asked about it, these family ties included Brant’s turbulent relationship with his son, Isaac, and his accidental killing of his son in self-defense in 1804. These family relationships also included kinship ties to whites. The daughters of Molly Brant and William Johnson were unusual in that they all married well-placed white men, seeking to preserve status, but the fact of intermarriage (in addition to concubinage relationships) was not in itself unusual in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Catherine Hill told, for example, how Lemoine, the white husband of one of Molly Brant’s daughters, wanted to marry another daughter, Susan, after his wife’s death. Molly Brant opposed the match on the basis both of Lemoine’s ill-treatment of the fi rst daughter and of her own fi rm opposition as an Anglican to marriage with a deceased wife’s sister. Lemoine came to the house of a third daughter, Mrs. Ferguson, and pleaded to see Susan, who was being confi ned in an upper room. Being refused, Lemoine ‘blew his brains out in the parlor with a pistol—& informant, Mrs. Hill, pointed out the spot in the wall where the bullet punctuated.’66

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These were very concrete stories that moved closer to the present. At the same time, a few informants did present Brant in mythic terms, particularly past the horizon of recent memory. Draper recorded that Mrs. Betsy Bonberry (whose identity is somewhat unclear to me from Draper’s notes, but who seems by context also to have been a descendant of Brant’s) recounted that she had learned from ‘aged Mohawk people’ that Brant’s father died when Joseph was a child—& in some way, Joseph & his sister, strayed off into the wilderness—got lost—this was in the spring of the year—when Joseph was perhaps 8 or ten—& found late in the fall, nearly naked, & nearly starved—covered themselves up with leaves at night: were found by some Cayuga hunters; who gave notice of it, & friends sent for them, & they were taken to their Mohawk friends. Can’t tell who brought them up. This is not a story that I have seen repeated elsewhere. Whether or not the story is true (and it seems unlikely, given many other contradictory stories), it seems to echo the idea of a vision quest, or perhaps the idea of a rebirth after a sojourn away from people in a dangerous state: the classic prerequisite for becoming a prophet.

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REMEMBERING AND FORGETTING Brant himself spent a great deal of effort before and after the war tending his reputation. He translated the gospel of St. Mark and was an ostentatious Christian. Toward the end of his life, Brant even tried to contact the sole surviving member of the Wells family, who refused to meet with him. More controversially, according to a story told by Canadian journalist J. C. Dent to Draper in 1877, in 1804 or 1805, Brant reacted angrily to a slur on his reputation from the Anglican pulpit. The Anglican Bishop Dr. Strachan preached a sermon in Toronto in which he alluded to Brant’s growing propensity to drink: Brant, who lived at Burlington Beach, hearing of the matter got gloriously drunk and started for York swearing that he would make the . . . Scotch turncoat apologise wherever he found him, even if it were in church. Arriving in York, he met the Doctor on King Street, drew his tomahawk and hurled the unhappy ecclesiastic to the ground. Of course the apology was forthcoming.67 Brant’s descendants also tended his reputation. The family had input into the biography of Joseph Brant written by William Stone in the 1830s, for example, in which Brant was presented as a tragic hero, unable to control the supposedly barbarous Seneca or indeed his barbarous white colleagues at Cherry Valley.68

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78

Elizabeth Elbourne

None of this activity, however, could control either the memory of Iroquois warfare or indeed the ways in which the presence of the Six Nations was also forgotten, and largely erased from a landscape that increasingly was commemorated through settler acts of possession, including the sacrifices of blood. Before, during, and after the Revolution, Brant performed, and his reputation had political consequences, in Mohawk, settler, and imperial circles. Nonetheless, memory faded in the New York region—in contrast to Canada, where a carefully cultivated story about Molly and Joseph Brant became important to a Canadian settler sense of identity (despite ongoing incursions on Mohawk lands at Grand River) and where, at a different end of the political spectrum, historical memory bolstered Six Nations political claims. In New York, in contrast, few traces remained of the Sullivan campaign by the early nineteenth century. In the 1830s, William Campbell (a descendant of New York settlers, including a Cherry Valley captive) would lament that in the absence of a Brant to write a history of their wrongs, the Six Nations were ‘passing away from among us, without leaving upon the land which they inhabited any memento of their greatness.’ He cited two lines of verse: ‘Their yell of vengeance was their trump of fame/Their monument a grave without a name.’69 In 1878, W. L. Greene would write to Draper that ‘my father’s farm covers the site of the old Indian village. . . . There is nothing remaining of Brant’s home except the cellar hole and a few blackened stains which appear to have sometime formed part of a fireplace. . . . We have no tradition of Brant and his sister.’70 Even Simms and Draper commented themselves on the rapidity of forgetting in the late nineteenth century.71 Farmers at Unadilla, the site of the conference between Brant and Herkimer, found Indian bones and artifacts and deduced they were building on a cemetery. The politics of forgetting might in sum be as significant as the politics of memory in any exploration of the many biographies of Joseph Brant. Nonetheless, phenomena such as rumors, war stories, and family memories did shape the general understanding of colonial confl ict remarkably far into the nineteenth century. Such stories surely influenced popular understanding of the past. They faded and changed as the ways in which the past overlapped with the present changed—like the memory of Brant, they were discarded as needed. NOTES 1. The most recent biography of Sir William Johnson is F. O’Toole, White Savage: William Johnson and the Invention of America, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005. 2. George Klock to Governor and Council at New York, transcribed in Lyman Draper manuscripts, Wisconsin Historical Society, Series F, Joseph Brant Papers, vol. 2, p. 53. According to a note in Draper’s manuscript, the original is in ‘NY Col MSS, 6c fol 122’. The spelling errors in this document are Klock’s. Brant series in Draper manuscripts henceforward annotated as Draper papers, ser. F.

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3. Among them, Klock named in his idiosyncratic spelling, ‘Joseph Brand, Johs Ro, Henry a son of Jacob Gahogtoro, Jacob Onhagtorow, John Peter, a French man, Peter who living in Brand’s house, Chequa Adam, a son of Caristalgee, Elias a son of Eve, Paulus Petersen, [Gobe’s?] Rahunsie & Petrus his son Cajockhaw Brand’. 4. George Klock to Governor and Council at New York, transcribed in Draper Papers, ser F, vol. 2, p. 53. According to a note in Draper’s manuscript, the original is in ‘NY Col MSS, 6c fol 122’. 5. ‘Speech of Captain Brant, Thayendenegeh, accompanied by Oteronghyanento, a warrior, both of the Six Nations, to Lord George Germain’, March 14, 1776, in E. B. O’Callaghan (ed), Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York Procured in Holland, England and France by John Romelyn Brodhead, Albany, NY: Weed, Parsons & Co., 1857, vol. 8, pp. 670–1. 6. The division of the confederacy in order to take sides in the American Revolution, and Brant’s role both in precipitating the split and in arguing against neutrality, remain controversial topics. Brant is remembered as having kicked over the council fi re and extinguished it, for example (Karl Hele, personal communication). 7. Milo Nellis, ‘Jacob Klock, Patriot’, St. Johnsville Enterprise and News. This is reproduced in the collection of historical documents pertaining to the Mohawk Valley maintained on the web by historical novelist Joyce Berry. Unfortunately, the editors could only date the article to the pre-war period. Accessed from www.fortklock.com/coljacob.htm; site address recently changed to www. threerivershms.com. 8. The most comprehensive biography of Brant to date is Isabel Kelsay, Joseph Brant, 1743–1807: Man of Two Worlds, Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1984. 9. Seminal accounts of the role of the Six Nations in the warfare of the American Revolution include A. Taylor, The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers and the Northern Borderlands of the American Revolution, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006; B. Graymont, The Iroquois in the American Revolution, Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1972; and C. Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. 10. Earle Thomas, The Three Faces of Molly Brant: A Biography, Kingston, ON: Quarry Press, 1997. Molly and Joseph Brant are commemorated in the Canadian Museum of Civilization. 11. Brant is particularly controversial for the leases and grants he made at Grand River, and for his participation in major treaty settlements. I am grateful to Angus Hemlock, Rick Montour and Brian Deer for some preliminary discussion of Brant’s reputation, suggesting a diversity of views. Hemlock describes Brant as a man who tried to stand with one foot in a canoe and another in a ship, who fell into the water when the two moved apart. 12. G. R. Hamell, ‘Mohawks Abroad: The 1764 Amsterdam Etching of Sychnecta’, in C. F. Feest (ed), Indians and Europe: An Interdisciplinary Collection of Essays, Aachen, Germany: Alano Verlag, 1999; British Parliamentary Papers, Journals of the House of Lords, 3 George 5, 5 March 1765, p. 62 and 6 March, 1765, p. 64. Hamell cites William Cobbett and John Wright, The Parliamentary History of England, from the Earliest Period to the Year 1803, London: T.C. Hansard, 1813, vol. 16, p. 51. The Act ruled that it was necessary to have a ‘license’ to bring ‘free Indians’ from America, possibly already suggesting a view of Amerindian peoples as wards rather than allies.

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80 Elizabeth Elbourne 13. William Johnson to Thomas Gage, 20 November 1764, in James Sullivan et al., The Papers of Sir William Johnson, Albany, NY: University of the State of New York, 1921–65, vol. 11, pp. 473–4, cited in Hamell, ‘Mohawks Abroad’, p. 184. 14. ‘Speech of Decharihoga to William Johnson, 11 July 1774’, transcribed in Draper papers, ser. F, vol. 2, p. 54. Also reproduced in “Proceedings of Sir William Johnson with the Six Nations &c at Johnson Hall”, enclosed in Sir Guy Johnson to the Earl of Dartmouth, 26 July 1774, in O’Callaghan (ed), The Documentary History of the State of New York, Albany: Weed, Parsons & Co., 1849, vol. 2, pp. 478–9. Decharihoga may have been Hendrick Tekarihoga. 15. Sir Guy Johnson to Lieutenant Governor Calden, Guy Park, 2 August 1774, transcribed in Draper papers, Series F, vol. 2, p. 56. Also reproduced in Documentary History of the State of New York , vol. 2, p. 1006. 16. Ibid. 17. ‘Speech of Captain Brant, Thayendenegeh, accompanied by Oteronghyanento, a warrior, both of the Six Nations, to Lord George Germain’, 14 March 1776, in O’Callaghan (ed), Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York, vol. 8, pp. 670–1. 18. E. Hinderaker, ‘The “Four Indian Kings” and the Imaginative Construction of the First British Empire’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 53 (1996): 487–526; A. Vaughan, Transatlantic Encounters: American Indians in Britain, 1500–1776, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, p. 246. 19. Graymont, Iroquois in the American Revolution, p. 161. 20. E. Allen, A Narrative of Colonel Ethan Allen’s Captivity, 4th ed., Burlington, VT: Chauncey Goodrich, 1846, pp. 37–8. 21. Taylor, Divided Ground. 22. S. Pratt, American Indians in British Art, 1700–1840, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2005, p. 97. 23. Anon [James Boswell], ‘An Account of the Chief of the Mohock Indians, who lately visited England’, London Magazine, July 1776, p. 339; Kelsay, Joseph Brant, p. 171. 24. A. Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Edinburgh: Printed for A. Millar and T. Caddel in the Strand, London, and A. Kincaid & J. Bell, 1767. 25. E. Elbourne, ‘Domesticity and Dispossession: The Ideologies of Domesticity and “Home” and British Conceptions of the “Primitive” from the 18th to Early 19th Centuries’, in W. Woodward, P. Hayes, and G. Minkley (eds), Deep hiStories: Gender and Colonialism in Southern Africa, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002, pp. 27–54. 26. [Boswell], “Account of the Chief of the Mohock Indians”, p. 339. 27. Compare Timothy Shannon, ‘Dressing for Success on the Mohawk Frontier: Hendrick, William Johnson and the Indian Fashion’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 53, no. 1 (1996): 13–42. 28. There is a version of this story in William Leete Stone, Life of Joseph BrantThayendanegea, New York: Alexander Blake, 1838, vol. 2, p. 259. 29. Brant had little hereditary status from his birth parents. Brant’s close associate John Norton claimed in 1810 that both of Brant’s parents were of Wyandot descent, meaning that they had been incorporated as war captives from an enemy group. Brant actually gained status from women: from his sister’s relationship with Johnson and the fact that his third wife, Adonwentishon (Catherine Croghan), possessed the right to name the leading chief of the turtle clan. 30. ‘Answer of Captain Brant, Thayendanegeh, and of Ohronte, Mohawk warriors, to Lord George Germain’, May 7, 1776, in O’Callaghan (ed),

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32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

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44. 45.

46. 47.

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Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York, vol. 8, p. 678. J. Long, Voyages and Travels of an Indian Interpreter and Trader, London: printed for the author, 1791, p. 20 (quote) and passim; P. Way, ‘The Cutting Edge of Culture: British Soldiers Encounter Native Americans in the French and Indian Wars’, in M. Daunton and R. Halpern (eds), Empire and Others: British Encounters with Indigenous Peoples, 1600–1850, London: UCL Press, 1989, pp. 123–48. ‘Letter of Governor Tryon to Secretary Knox—necessity of exciting the Indians against the rebels to inspire terror &c’, New York, 21 April, 1777, in O’Callaghan (ed), Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York, vol. 8, p. 708. For example, D. Claus to Rev. Hind, Montreal, 27 June 1778, National Archives of Canada, United Society for Propagation of the Gospel papers, MG 17 B1, vol. C1, fi le 14. Daniel Claus to F. Haldimand, Montreal, 13 October 1778, British Library, Add MS 21774, Haldimand Papers. Samuel L. Knapp, ‘Original Sketches: The Aborigines of New York’, The New York Mirror:A Weekly Gazette of Literature and the Fine Arts, 20 May 1837, p. 369; copy of article in Draper Papers, Ser. F, volume 1, p. 70. William B. Heseltine, ‘Lyman Draper and the South’, The Journal of Southern History 19, no. 1 (1953): 20–31. Draper’s only substantial historical book to be published in his lifetime was King’s Mountain and its Heroes: History of the Battle of King’s Mountain, October 7th 1780, and the Events Which Led Up to It, Cincinnati: P. G. Thomson, 1881. Heseltine, ‘Lyman Draper’, 20. Compare, for example, J. R. Simms, History of Schoharie County and Border Wars of New York, Bowie, MD: Heritage Books, 1991, fi rst published 1845, p. v. Taylor, Divided Ground, pp. 42–5. James Paxton, Joseph Brant and His World: Eighteenth-Century Mohawk Warrior and Statesman, Toronto: James Lorimer & Co., 2008. N. C. Landsman, Crossroads of Empire: The Middle Colonies in British North America, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010, pp. 101–2 (quote on p. 101). Gail McLeitch, Imperial Entanglements: Iroquois Change and Persistence on the Frontiers of Empire, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. See also David L. Preston, The Texture of Contact: European and Indian Settler Communities on the Frontiers of Iroquoia, 1667–1783, Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2009. [E.C. Stuart?] to Lyman Draper, Swallowhill, New York, 22 May 1879, Draper Papers, ser. F, vol. 5, pp. 12–126 (the signature is hard to read). Daniel Claus to Frederick Haldimand, Montreal, November 1778, British Library, Add MS 21774, Haldimand Papers; I discuss the example further in Elbourne, ‘Family Politics and Anglo-Mohawk Diplomacy: The Brant family in imperial context’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 6, no. 3, (Winter 2005). A Memorial of the Life and Character of John Wells, privately printed 1874; copied in Draper Papers, ser. F, vol. 5, pp. 101–7. John Duesler or Deusler pension application (W.16244) transcribed at fortplainmuseum.com/ dueslerpension.pdf, accessed August 22, 2013. The original is held in the Records of the Department of Veterans Affairs, Record Group 15, National Archives, Washington, D.C..

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82 Elizabeth Elbourne 48. Peter Webster to Draper, 6 September 1878, Draper Papers, ser. F, vol. 3, p. 77. 49. Simms, History of Schoharie County, p. 223. 50. Christian House to Lyman Draper [Howard?], n.d., Draper Papers, ser. F, vol. 3, pp. 70–1. 51. Jefferson Clyde to Lyman Draper, Cherry Valley, 11 February 1878, Draper Papers, ser. F, vol. 5, p. 74(3). 52. ‘Account of Capt. Brant’s visit at the house of William Shankland on the 11th of November 1778’ (appears to be from a letter sent by William McCulloch), Draper Papers, ser. F, vol. 5, folios 112–13. 53. W. L. Stone, Life of Brant, vol. 1, New York: George Dearborn and Co., 1838, p. 155. 54. ‘Miscellaneous’, Niles’ Register, June 29, 1822, p. 276. 55. W. Willis, Genealogy of the McKinstry Family, with a Preliminary Essay on the Scotch-Irish Immigration to America, 2nd ed., Portland: David Tucker, 1866, pp. 29–30; a slightly different version is copied by Draper in Draper Papers, Ser. F, vol. 3, pp. 82–3. 56. A. Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastuli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991. Compare also L. White, Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. 57. Draper Papers, ser. F, vol. 13, p. 74. 58. George Cuddeback to Lyman Draper, Port Jervis, New York, 24 March 1878, Draper Papers, Ser. F, vol. 8, pp. 25(1)–25(2). 59. [E. C. Stuart?] to Lyman Draper, Swallowhill, New York, 22 May 1879, Draper Papers, Ser. F, vol. 5, p. 12(7). 60. Ibid. 61. Draper Papers, ser. F, vol. 13, pp. 18–19. 62. Draper Papers, ser. F, vol. 13, p. 67. 63. Draper Papers, ser. F., vol. 13, pp. 33–4. 64. Draper Papers, ser. F, vol. 13, p. 92. 65. Draper Papers, ser. F, vol. 13, p. 98 66. Draper Papers, ser. F, vol. 13, pp. 92–3. 67. J.C. Dent to Lyman Draper, Toronto, 28 May 1877, Draper Papers, ser. F, vol. 2, p. 103. 68. Elbourne, ‘Family Politics and Anglo-Mohawk Diplomacy’. 69. W. Campbell, Annals of Tryon County; or, The border warfare of New York during the revolution, New York: J. & J. Harper, 1832, p. 190. 70. W. L. Greene to Lyman Draper, Danube, New York, 4 January 1878, Draper Papers, ser. F, vol. 2, pp. 43ff. 71. J. Simms to L. Draper, Fort Plain, NY, 20 November 1877, Draper Papers, ser. F, vol. 13, p. 175.

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