Indians; he had learned their language and studied
their ways; and he had gained such an ascendancy over
them that he came to be known as 'the Indian-tamer,' and
was appointed the British superintendent-general for
Indian Affairs. In the Seven Years' War he served with
great distinction against the French. He defeated Baron
Dieskau at Lake George in 1755, and he captured Niagara
in 1759; for the first of these services he was created
a baronet, and received a pension of 5,000 pounds a year.
During his later years he lived at his house, Johnson
Hall, on the Mohawk river; and he died in 1774, on the
eve of the American Revolution, leaving his title and
his vast estates to his only son, Sir John.

Just before his death Sir William Johnson had interested
himself in schemes for the colonization of his lands. In
these he was remarkably successful. He secured in the
main two classes of immigrants, Germans and Scottish
Highlanders. Of the Highlanders he must have induced more
than one thousand to emigrate from Scotland, some of them
as late as 1773. Many of them had been Jacobites; some
of them had seen service at Culloden Moor; and one of
them, Alexander Macdonell, whose son subsequently sat in
the first legislature of Upper Canada, had been on Bonnie
Prince Charlie's personal staff. These men had no love
for the Hanoverians; but their loyalty to their new
chieftain, and their lack of sympathy with American
ideals, kept them at the time of the Revolution true
almost without exception to the British cause. King George
had no more faithful allies in the New World than these
rebels of the '45.

They were the first of the Loyalists to arm and organize
themselves. In the summer of 1775 Colonel Allan Maclean,
a Scottish officer in the English army, aided by Colonel
Guy Johnson, a brother-in-law of Sir John Johnson, raised
a regiment in the Mohawk valley known as the Royal Highland
Emigrants, which he took to Canada, and which did good
service against the American invaders under Montgomery
in the autumn of the same year. In the spring of 1776
Sir John Johnson received word that the revolutionary
authorities had determined on his arrest, and he was
compelled to flee from Johnson Hall to Canada. With him
he took three hundred of his Scottish dependants; and he
was followed by the Mohawk Indians under their famous
chief, Joseph Brant. In Canada Johnson received a colonel's
commission to raise two Loyalist battalions of five
h