Itself to defence, and thither the tribesmen flocked from

the surrounding districts. So determined were the settlers

to capture him that they offered a reward to any one who

would bring them any knowledge of his movements. Even

men like Captain McKean, whom Brant had mentioned so

kindly to the farmer's boy, were hot upon his trail. This

officer set out with five other men in order, if possible,

to effect Brant's capture. While on their quest the little

party came one night to the house of a Quaker. To their

great delight, the Quaker told them that Brant had been

at his place during the day and would come back. He warned

them, however, that Brant was prepared to meet them, and

that if he returned suddenly their lives would be in

danger. McKean, however, was stubborn in his resolve to

stay.

'Your house, friend Sleeper,' he said, with a show of

bravado, 'shall be my fort to-night.'

But the Quaker would have none of them, and sent the

searchers on their way. Then Captain McKean wrote a letter

to Brant. Placing this in a stick, he cast it on an Indian

path, where it was soon found by a redskin and carried

to the War Chief's wigwam. In the letter McKean arraigned

Brant for the ferocious manner in which he was fighting,

and dared the Mohawk chief to single combat, or to send

a chosen body of men to meet him in fair field against

an equal number. If he showed his face in Cherry Valley,

threatened McKean, 'they would change him from a Brant

into a Goose.'

Brant knew the impulsive nature of McKean and took this

amusing letter for what it was worth. Yet the letter was

not without its effect upon him. They had dared him;

they had taunted him with threats; he would show them

that Joseph Brant would have a day of reckoning and that

right early. 'Cherry Valley people,' he wrote in the

postscript of a short note sent to an ardent loyalist,

'[are] very bold, and intended to make nothing of us;

they call us wild geese, but I know the contrary.'

Early in July a bloody engagement had occurred in the

valley of Wyoming, an extensive region in Pennsylvania

on the north branch of the Susquehanna river. For many

years after the encounter it was commonly believed that

Brant was the leader of the Indians who took part in it.

The valley of Wyoming had once been a possession of the

tribes of the Six Nations but, in 1754, they had been

ousted from their inheritance by a colonizing company.

When the Revolutionary War began it was already well

peopled with settlers. Naturally eager for vengeance,

the dispossessed Indians invited the co-operation of

Colonel John Butler and his rangers in a raid. Butler

accepted the invitation, and the Indians and rangers to

the number of five hundred made a swift descent of the

Susquehanna and invaded the valley. Their approach,

however, had been discovered, and the entire militia of

the district, mustering eight hundred, advanced against

them. In the battle which followed, the defenders were

defeated with great slaughter and many scalps were taken.

Older American historians misrepresented the fight as a

cruel massacre of non-combatants and asserted that Brant

was present. British writers, following them, fell into

the same error. Thomas Campbell's poem, 'Gertrude of

Wyoming,' written in 1809, gives a gruesome picture of

the episode, telling of the work which was done by the

'monster Brant.' During his visit to England in 1823,

the War Chief's youngest son, John Brant, vindicated his

father in a letter to Campbell, and showed that the

reference to his father in this poem was based on false