A body of Mohawks were among the troops which brought succour to Major Gladwyn in his resistance at Fort Detroit in 1763, and it is possible that Brant was in the thick of the fight in this vicinity.  It is possible, too, that he was with Colonel Bouquet in August at the battle of Bushy Run, near Fort Pitt.  In this engagement, after two days of strenuous backwoods fighting, the Indians were finally worsted.  Pontiac’s star had begun to set.  With hopeless odds against him, the stubborn chief of the Ottawas kept up the struggle until the following year, but at last he was compelled to sue for peace.

In the meantime Brant’s reputation among his tribesmen was steadily rising.  In the spring of 1764, when the fighting was at an end, he returned to Canajoharie Castle.  There he built a comfortable house, wedded the daughter of an Oneida chieftain, and dwelt for some years in peace and quiet.  Two children, Isaac and Christiana, were born to him of this, his first, marriage.  We may pass rapidly over these tranquil years of Brant’s life.  He did his domestic duties as a man should; and Sir William Johnson, finding him trustworthy, had constant work for him, and sent him on many important missions to the Indians, even to the far-western tribes.  During this period Brant became a communicant in the Anglican Church, and, knowing well what hardships the missionaries had to endure, he gave them what help he could in their work among the red people.  He assisted the Rev. John Stuart, a missionary to his tribe and afterwards a distinguished clergyman in Upper Canada, in his translation of the Acts of the Apostles, in a History of the Bible, and in a brief explanation of the Catechism, in the dialect of the Mohawks.  It is related that a belated missionary, footsore and weary, crept one day to Brant’s abode, where he was given food and cared for in his sickness.  ‘Joseph Brant,’ the missionary wrote in grateful tribute, ‘is exceeding kind.’

It was well that a man of judicious mind and fearless heart was coming to the fore among the nation of the Mohawks.  A cloud had begun to fleck the horizon; soon would come the sound of the approaching tempest.  How would it fare with the Six Nations in the day of turmoil?

CHAPTER IV

THE WAYS DIVIDE

The happy ending, in 1763, of the war with France left the English colonies in America with little to disturb them, except the discontented red men beyond the Alleghany Mountains.  The colonies grew larger; they did more business and they gathered more wealth.  But as they prospered they became self-confident and with scarce an enemy at home they became involved in a quarrel with the motherland across the sea.  England, they said, was taxing them unjustly and posting soldiers in their chief cities to carry out her will.  They were by no means disposed to submit.  As early as 1770 a mob in Boston attacked an English