Aptly named Odeserundiye –‘where thunder was’ – Captain John Deserontyon stood alongside the great Mohawk leaders of his time. A native to upper New York’s Mohawk Valley, he never lost in battle and spent his final days near his namesake town, Deseronto, at the junction of the St. Lawrence River and Lake Ontario.

(012) Captain John Deserontyon, born in the Mohawk Valley in the 1840s, spent most his early life as a British American officer at Fort Hunter near modern day Schenectady. Map, Mark Jodoin

The smell of gunpowder had faded and a long awaited calm befell New York’s Mohawk Valley in 1783 as the Revolutionary War ended.

The Mohawk natives of the valley had been resettled in Canada though many returned briefly with the British army to burn the crops and villages they had left behind. Whether acts of war or of vengeance, the attacks ensured any Mohawks who dared enter their American ancestral homeland would face fierce retribution.

Despite the dangers, a small Mohawk party silently entered the river’s corridor on a secret assignment. They avoided the remnants of the Continental Army’s ‘long knives’ as rebel forces had been known and made their way towards Fort Hunter near the site of modern day Schenectady west and north of Albany. Their mission was to recover a lost symbol of the Mohawk’s early American heritage: the ‘Queen Anne Silver’ that had been hidden and buried by a Mohawk chief six years earlier on the farm of Boyd Hunter.

The silver has been given to the ‘four Iroquois Kings’ who had travelled to England in 1710 to meet with the British sovereign, Queen Anne. She gifted the royal silver to one of the chiefs who passed it down through several tribal generations as a symbol the Anglican church of England’s friendship with the Mohawk nation in New York. Decades later the natives buried their treasure near the chapel at Fort Hunter as they hastened to escape to Canada in 1777 at the height of the War of Independence.

(013) The Queen Anne Silver has been an icon of the British monarchy's affinity with the Mohawk people for three centuries. Drawing, Mark Jodoin.

Leading the party of insurgents as it descended from Montreal was Captain John Deserontyon of the King’s Royal Regiment of New York, the same chief who had buried the silver six years earlier. Fittingly as a Mohawk who had heard the clap of cannonades and crack of muskets from a very young age, Deserontyon’s native of Odeserundiye translated as ‘where thunder was’.

Deserontyon was born in the Mohawk Valley in the 1740s. Little is known about his early years other than he participated as a teenager in the siege of Fort Niagara in 1759. The fort had been built in the second half of the 17th century and was expanded and fortified in 1755 during the French and Indian War. During the summer of 1759 – two months before Quebec fell to General Wolfe – the British, led by Brigadier General John Prideaux, placed Niagara under siege. Prideaux lost his head, literally, when decapitated by a British mortar test fired during the siege.

To the New York militia and young John Deserontyon the siege was a coming-of-age engagement; its ambitious and gifted leader, Sir William Johnson, replaced Prideaux. Johnson had been knighted four years earlier following the Battle of Lake George where he lost his good friend Hendrick Peters, a Mohawk sachen of the Bear Clan, known as ‘King Hendrick’ to the whites and as ‘Theyanoguin’ to the natives. In a coincidence noted by historian Dean R. Snow, it had been another ‘King Hendrick’ of the Mohawk’s Wolf Clan known as ‘Tejonihokarawa‘ who was one of the original ‘Four Iroquois Kings’ and who received Queen Anne’s Silver in London in 1711.

(014) King Hendrick or ‘Theyanoguin' (left), was the recipient of the Queen Anne Silver. ‘Tejonihokarawa‘, also named King Hendrick (right), died in the Battle of Lake George.

Johnson’s baronet status afforded him huge land tracts upon which he built several large estates; his lands and his large extended family included many Mohawks and played significant roles in the course of John Deserontyon’s life.

The year after he took Fort Niagara, Johnson joined Sir Jeffrey Amherst at Montreal for the final defeat of the French in 1760, a battle at which Deserontyon was present as a teenager. Johnson had been the natives’ ‘Sole Agent and Superintendent and Their Affairs’ and had assembled more than 600 Iroquois to assist in his campaign. With Johnson, Deserontyon was witnessing the very finest in colonial leadership and compassion. For example, Johnson saw that prisoners were properly shod and clothed for their long journeys while in his custody.

Less compassionate was Sir Jeffery Amherst whose impeccable military reputation was later tarnished by his correspondence supporting the use of ‘biological warfare’ during the Pontiac rebellion of 1763. Pontiac was an Ottawa chief with French sympathies who led an uprising against the British after the French governor general, Marquis de Vaudreuil, surrendered Quebec. The Native Americans had enjoyed prosperous trade and friendly relations with the French and were angered by Amherst's decision to discontinue the custom of providing gifts and supplies in exchange for native friendship and assistance. Amherst’s indifference was evident in his writings in which he suggested blankets riddled with smallpox be distributed to the natives as a way of helping put down the rebellion.

Johnson initiated parlays to negotiate a settlement with Pontiac and did so with the help of his Iroquois circle including Deserontyon and older Mohawk leaders many of whom helped tutor Sir William’s son John and his nephew Guy in the art of native negotiation. Pontiac had persuaded the Chippewas, Delawares, Shawnees and Senecas to attack British forts with a vengeance and many whites were either brutally killed or captured. Johnson and his entourage held two peace settlement discussions with the ‘Six Nations’ during 1763 and the following year held a parlay with 1400 natives at Fort Niagara.

(015) It was under the command of Sir William Johnson that Deserontyon learned the nuances of cultural interpretation between his own Mohawk people and white colonials. Photo: Mark Jodoin

John Deserontyon helped guard the white settlers from attacks by the Seneca and in 1764 he went to Detroit to impose the peace on the Delawares and Shawnees. He joined Col. John Bradstreet and General Israel Putman on an expedition from Fort Niagara on the eastern edge of Lake Erie to Fort Detroit on its western edge just after the rebellion ended. They were successful in putting down the residual native violence in the area, retrieved captives and managed the peace.

By this time Deserontyon had already been a Mohawk chief at the British settlement of Fort Hunter from for several years. The fort had been the result of the Four Iroquois Kings – who were actually three Mohawk sachems and a Mahican man –following their visit to England half a century earlier. That seven month trip had been sponsored by the then mayor of Albany Peter Schuyler in an attempt bring attention to the need for a greater military presence in the colonies. A result of their trip was a greater resolve by British missionaries to convert the natives to Christianity.

‘The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts’ ordered that a fort with a chapel and a mission house be built along the Mohawk River at the junction of the Schoharie. The Queen Anne silver given to the Four Kings was a communion set for use during Anglican masses held at Fort Hunter, a settlement named for the New York governor at the time, Robert Hunter.

The fort was built as a square with a 12-foot high wooden palisade with two-story blockhouses at each corner houses seven and nine pounder cannons. The first chapel in 1711 was a log cabin – a modest home for royal silver – and was replaced by a stone chapel in the 1740s, about the time John Deserontyon was born. By the 1770s, just prior to the outbreak of war, Sir William Johnson built a school in the fort and rebuilt the chapel with a new floor, pulpit, communion table, belfry and bell. Eventually, two services were held every Sunday in the chapel, one for the Mohawk converts and one for the white settlers. The fort, however, suffered a fire in 1773 and lost a blockhouse and two of its walls.

(016) Fort Hunter enclosed the Anglican chapel in which the Queen Anne Silver was kept. The silver was secretly buried nearby by Deserontyon as rebels forces neared in 1778. Drawing: Mark Jodoin.

The fort’s parsonage was built a mile to the east and there the Mohawk leader, Joseph Brant, translated the ‘Anglican Book of Common Prayer’ into the Iroquois language. When war broke out, Deserontyon and the parsonage was garrisoned while the fort was one among the British network that ran the length of the valley. Sir William Johnson died from a stroke in 1774 and the management of his estates and the militia fell to his son John while his nephew Guy Johnson managed Indian affairs. Both men headed units of the New York’s Tyron County Militia. Joseph Brant served as Johnson’s secretary in his role as superintendent of Indian affairs.

To the American military there was little doubt that Brant, Guy Johnson and Deserontyon would remain Tories. All had been beneficiaries of the largess of Sir William Johnson and the British. In the spring of 1775 the local Committee of Safety issued a reprimand to Guy Johnson for his ‘aggressive and partisan acts’; with this order, the Patriots forced both Brant and Johnson men out of their command of New York militias. Guy was forced to move up the Mohawk Valley to the German Flats on the premise he was calling an Indian parlay. From there, along with Brant and 30 other Mohawks and 120 settlers, he escaped to Canada. Deserontyon joined them but not before he ensured the Queen Anne silver was buried and hidden from oncoming Patriots. In going to Canada, he left all that he owned in America: a substantial house, over 80 acres of rich arable farmland and all its accompanying tools and equipment, plus personal possessions equal to the value of the farm.

Deserontyon returned the next year to aid Sir William Johnson’s son and successor Sir John Johnson, who along with other Loyalist families dug in at Johnson Hall in an uneasy peace with the rebels. Eventually the New York congress and committee of safety ordered General Philip Schuyler to march with 3000 men to disarm Johnson and the other Tories the Mohawk Valley. He did so in January 1776 and Johnson was arrested but released on parole on an oath that he would cease forming Loyalist militia. The cagey patrician from a venerable New York family, General Philip Schulyer, suspected Johnson’s loyalty to the Crown would trump his oath and eventually lead to his recapture and imprisonment.

The previous few months had not been good ones for the British war effort. In Canada the former strongholds of Sorel, Montreal and Trois Rivieres had fallen to Americans. Continental Army units under Generals Montgomery and Benedict Arnold lay siege on Quebec and on New Years Eve of 1775 their attack on Quebec failed when repelled by 1200 men including British regulars and seamen, Canadiens, and Royal Highlanders. Their long siege of Quebec, however, continued through the winter into May of 1776.

That same month, John Deserontyon and his scouts learned the Continental Army was preparing once again to attack Johnson Hall owing in response to Johnson’s continued arming of his Loyalist tenants despite being on parole. The rebels had been justifiably heartened by the Battles in Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts, and Congress has issued orders instructing the Thirteen Colonies to form their own governments. Emboldened, General Schuyler dispatched Colonel Elias Dayton with 300 men to arrest Johnson.

Deserontyon was able to send warning that the rebels were en route. Johnson prepared to escape to Canada while Deserontyon and other Mohawk leaders held up Dayton with protracted negotiations to permit American troops to cross their lands. This allowed Johnson enough time to gather Mohawk guides and approximately 170 of his tenants, and set off across the Appalachians for Canada. The trip was much harsher than expected and the party eventually had to eat plants such wild onions and any other edible vegetation simply to stay alive. They arrived at the St. Lawrence exhausted and close to death.

Meanwhile Guy Johnson and Joseph Brant had gone to England but were unsuccessful in securing authority to negotiate on behalf the Iroquois. They returned to Montreal via New York and John Deserontyon joined them there.