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.