Chief Joseph Brant 1776

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The year on this figure is the year Thayendanegea spent in London, and he did not go there to receive instructions. He sailed on 11 November 1775 with Guy Johnson, met George III a t St James's Palace, held what the record calls his most important talks with the Colonial Secretary, Lord George Germain, was interviewed by James Boswell for publication, was given a Masonic apron by the King, and came home in July 1776. What he had gone to obtain was specific: a British promise to settle outstanding Mohawk land grievances, in exchange for Mohawk participation as allies. That is a negotiation between two parties with separate interests, not a recruitment — and his reasoning was hard-headed rather than sentimental. An American victory, he argued, would sweep away the Royal Proclamation of 1763, the one instrument that stood between colonial land speculators and Haudenosaunee territory, and he pointed out that George Washington himself had money in the Ohio Company. He judged the war correctly. The Grand Council had chosen neutrality in 1775; by July 1777 it had abandoned it, four nations siding with the British and the Oneida and Tuscarora with the Americans. And when the Treaty of Paris was signed in 1783, it did not mention the Haudenosaunee at all — not as allies, not as belligerents, not as owners of anything. Brant's verdict was that England had sold the Indians to Congress. What he salvaged came in October 1784, when Governor Haldimand granted some 810,000 hectares along the Grand River in what is now Ontario, where about 1,800 Iroquois settled that same month. He had made the best bargain available to him with the only party willing to make one, and he still had to go and rebuild a homeland from the wreckage of it. The figure shows him as contemporaries described such men: a ruffled linen shirt and silver arm bands, a trade blanket over one shoulder, sash, red leggings with beaded garters and moccasins, a feathered headdress, a tomahawk in his hand. European goods worn in Mohawk fashion, which is a fair likeness of the man himself — schooled in English, Latin and mathematics at Eleazar Wheelock's charity school in Connecticut, the forerunner of Dartmouth, and entirely at home in the councils of both worlds. On the shelf around him stand the men his argument was about. George Washington is the one he named by name over the Ohio Company. Benjamin Franklin sat at the Paris table where the Haudenosaunee went unmentioned. And William Henry Harrison is the next generation of the same question, still being settled by treaty and by force thirty years later. Model: 10115 / W. Britain / 1/30 scale / matte finish / 1 piece set Show more