When American troops later scoured the evacuated British siege camp, Deserontyon was surprised by an American soldier who fired on him, “The buckshot caught John Deserontyon full in the meat of his left arm and breast and he crashed to the floor,” according to Watt and Morrison.

His wounds were serious but not fatal and he managed to head east to gather up several Mohawk families from Fort Hunter before it was sacked. Deserontyon was wounded for a second time as he and his party had to fight through a transplanted New Hamsphire Regiment on his way to Fort Edward, New York, and from there headed north to Lachine on the Island of Montreal. The rebels were angered mightily and took revenge for Herkimer’s death by sacking Fort Hunter and defiling Queen Anne’s Chapel by using it as a tavern and a stable.

The following year, 1778, Deserontyon crossed into New York across the Appalachians from Canada and headed to the valley with a party of 200 to retrieve and rescue any other Mohawk and white Tories remaining in the Fort Hunter area. This he did while capturing Americans and burning homes.

Over the next several years he participated in more raids into the Mohawk Valley. The sight of Tory property appropriated and in patriot hands stirred Deserontyon and his men to an ongoing rampage in which buildings were razed, farms destroyed and rebels scalped. Particularly violent were the vengeful attacks led by Sir John Johnson which began in Oswego and moved east as far as Fort Hunter. Deserontyon’s final raid took place in 1782 when he destroyed a mill at Little Falls and took more prisoners.

The Mohawk had supported the British throughout the war largely on Sir Guy Carleton’s and his successor Sir Frederick Haldimand’s specific assurances that their ancestral homelands and properties would be restored to them. Joseph Brant and John Deserontyon were vehemently displeased when the British ordered an end to the fighting in 1782 and ceded the lands south of the 49th parallel in the Treaty of Paris the following year.

An angry Brant and Deserontyon traveled to Quebec to meet with Haldimand, pointing out that the Mohawk had been a free and independent New Yorkers prior to the war and that the British had no right to negotiate away their land to the victorious Americans. Ironically, the two men had helped ravage the Mohawk Valley and played a role in its precipitous drop in population. Thousands of natural and pre-mature deaths of New Yorkers had been brought on by the war: atrocities, murders, evacuations, and escapes had removed more than 6,000 souls from the valley. Whites and Mohawks had co-existed along the rive banks for almost two centuries and the Mohawk had made it their homeland several centuries prior. All bridges between the Americans and the Mohawks had been burned with the valley.

The British, though not hostile to their Mohawk soldiers, officers and allies, were sparing in their restitution. Haldimand had at one time had considered offering the natives all the lands west of Quebec before he was made aware of its significant value and nce enlightened, his offer became significantly more modest.

The Mohawk had little recourse but to accept the land the British had bought from the Mississauga natives in November 1793. Six months earlier Brant and Deserontyon accompanied surveyors to inspect the property along the Canadian shore of the St. Lawrence where it joined Lake Ontario. Deserontyon was happy with the 92,000 acres along the Bay of Quinte, in part, because it was the birthplace of Deganawida. ‘The Great Peacemaker’ had provided the inspiration for the Iroquois confederacy by Chief Hiawatha three centuries before. Brant chose a land grant much further west along the Grand River in order to accommodate the need to be closer to the Seneca homeland

The following year Deserontyon brought 20 Mohawk families from their temporary settlement in Lachine near modern day Kahnawake – where they had lived for five years – to settle the area known as Tyendinaga (derived from Joseph Brant’s native name Thayendanegea) on the Bay of Quinte. About a month afterward, white Loyalists arrived and began building a community led by Peter Van Alstine of the Hudson Valley, a blacksmith whose family had been New Yorkers from the middle of the 17th century. Alstine, like Desrontyon, had seen much action after being jailed and released as a Tory in 1777. The two were also similar in that both had seen their property confiscated and counted on the British army to settle their scores.

Native and white Loyalists began building farmhouses, clearing the lands, sowing crops and rearing horses and livestock. Over the years, the amount of acreage owned by the Mohawks dwindled through disputes with the Crown. The whites also became embroiled in bureaucratic entanglements and delayed supplies and their settlement of Adolphustown was set back by the late arrival of their leader Van Alstine whose wife died before she could make the journey up the St. Lawrence to the Bay of Quinte.

(018) This 19th century keepsake box bears an imprint of the Van Alstine homestead in the Mohawk Valley. It also bears imprints of the homes of combatants U.S. General Nicholas Herkimer and Sir John Johnson.