Joseph Brant set about this work with restless energy.  He was no longer the stripling who had gone away to the West that he might aid in bending the pride of Pontiac.  Ten years had passed, and now he was a mature man with an ever-broadening vision.  Some time during these years he had reached the position among his tribesmen which he long had coveted.  He had been recognized by the Mohawks as one of their chieftains.  This honour he had won by right not of birth but of merit, and for this reason he was known as a ‘Pine-tree Chief.’  Like the pine-tree, tall and strong and conspicuous among the trees of the forest, he had achieved a commanding place in the Mohawk nation.  True, he was a chief merely by gift of his tribe, but he seems, nevertheless, to have been treated with the same respect and confidence as the hereditary chiefs.  He rejoiced in his new distinction.  Evil days were ahead, and he was now in a position to do effective work on behalf of his people and of the British when the inevitable war should break out.  A still greater honour was in store for him.  When war was declared he at once became recognized as the war leader of the Six Nations—­the War Chief.  The hereditary successor of King Hendrick, who was slain at Lake George in 1755, was Little Abraham; but Little Abraham, it appears, desired to remain neutral in the impending struggle, and by common consent Brant assumed the leadership of the Iroquois in war.

Two things favoured Brant in any appeal he might make in the interests of the British to the loyalty of the Six Nations.  For over a hundred years they had taken from the colonial agents who represented the crown wampum belts as a sign of treaty obligations.  Treaties had been made with the king; the word of the red man had been given to the king.  Promises made to them by the king’s agents had always been performed.  Why, therefore, should they now plight their faith to any other than their Great Father the King, who dwelt far over the waters?  Besides, by recent actions of the colonists, the resentment of the Indians had been fanned to a fury.  In 1774 some colonial land-hunters were scouring the country of the Shawnees.  Without any real cause they fell upon some redskins and butchered several in an inhuman way.  Not satisfied with this act of cruelty, they seized two brave chiefs, Bald Eagle and Silver Heels, and killed them in cold blood.  The anger of the Indians was aroused and they rallied under the banner of the noble Logan, ‘Mingo Chief’ of the Shawnees.  Against him the Virginians sent a large force of more than two thousand men.  A fierce battle took place at the Great Kanawha river, at the point where that stream flows into the Ohio.  For a time Logan and his Indian ally Cornstalk and their followers fought desperately, but in the end they were forced to flee across the Ohio.  This war was short, indeed, but it had no just warrant, and the Indians could not forget the outrage that had been committed.  The memory of it rankled with the Six Nations, especially among the Cayugas, to whom Logan was bound by ties of blood.