Credit: Independence National Historical Park
The charismatic chief of the Mohawk, Joseph (Thayendanegea) Brant, sometimes spelled Brandt, led raids against patriot communities in New York and northern Pennsylvania during the American Revolution, and participated in the Battle of Wyoming in 1778 which devastated the Yankee settlements in the northern Susquehanna Valley. Charles Willson Peale painted this portrait of Brandt in 1797, the same year that agents from the State of New York duped Brandt and other Mohawk nation leaders into signing a fraudulent treaty that ceded more than 6 million acres to New York.
