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.