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
information. He declared that 'living witnesses' had
convinced him that his father was not in the neighbourhood
of Wyoming at the time of the so-called massacre; testimony
has been forthcoming to support the claims which John
Brant then made. It has been shown that the tribesmen of
the Six Nations whom Butler had with him were Senecas,
while the rest were Indians from the western tribes, and
that Brant's tribe, the Mohawks, were not present.
Nevertheless the Wyoming slaughter differs only in degree
from other scenes of bloodshed and plunder in which Brant
took part. In the mo