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.