Brant, Joseph

Brant, Joseph, or Thayendanegea (1742–1807), pro‐British Mohawk chief.The son of the Mohawk chief Niklaus Brant and grandson of Sa Ga Yean Qua Prah Ton (one of four Indian leaders to visit London in 1710), Joseph Brant grew up in the household of Sir William Johnson (1715–1774), a fur trader, superintendent of Indian affairs north of the Ohio River 1755–1774, and proprietor of a vast estate on the Mohawk River near present‐day Amsterdam, New York. Brant's sister Molly was Johnson's common‐law wife and bore him eight children. In 1758, during the Seven Years' War, young Joseph Brant guided the expedition of Colonel John Bradstreet to the French Fort Frontenac on Lake Ontario, which fell to the British.

Educated at the Indian Charity School in Lebanon, Connecticut, Brant served in the late 1760s and 1770s as a translator and diplomat who helped the British negotiate with the Iroquois Confederacy. After the death of his first wife, Margaret, daughter of the Oneida sachem Skenandoah, Brant married Catherine Croghan, the Mohawk daughter of a British agent.

In 1775, as the Revolutionary War began, Brant allied with the British. He visited England and was commissioned a colonel in the British army. Recruiting Iroquois allies for the Loyalist cause, Brant led ruinously effective Iroquois raids against American settlements in the Mohawk Valley, northern Pennsylvania, and the Ohio Valley in 1777 and 1778. In retaliation, American forces devastated Iroquois villages in 1779. After the Revolution, Brant ignored the American‐Iroquois peace treaties and continued to raid the frontier.

For his military services, the British awarded him a pension and land along the Grand River in Ontario. In his last years, Brant translated the Bible into Mohawk. He died near his estate at Brantford, Ontario.
See also Indian History and Culture: From 1500 to 1800.

Bibliography

Isabel Thompson Kelsay , Joseph Brant, 1984.
Donald A. Grinde Jr. and and Bruce E. Johansen , Exemplar of Liberty: Native America and the Evolution of Democracy, 1991.

Donald A. Grinde Jr.