Here he kept up a large establisment, including seven or eight negro servants who had formerly been slaves. He exercised a profuse and right royal hospitality alike towards the whites and the Indian warriors who gathered round him. On the first of May in each year he used to drive up, in his coach-and-four, Mohawk Village, to attend the annual Indian festival which was to held there. On these occasions he was generally attended by a numerous retinue of servants in livery, and their procession used to strike awe into the minds of the denizens of the settlements through which they passed.
He died at his house at Wellington Square, after a long and painful illness, on the 24th November, 1807, in the sixty-fifth year of his age. His last thoughts were for his people, on whose behalf he had fought so bravely, and whose social and moral improvement he was so desirous to promote. His nephew, leaning over his bed, caught the last words that fell from his lips: "Have pity on the poor Indians; if you can get any influence from the great, endeavour to do them all the good you can."
His remains were removed to Mohawk Village, near Brantford, and interred in the yard of the little church which he had built many years before, and which was the first Christian church erected in Upper Canada. And there, by the banks of the Grand River,
"After life's fitful fever he sleeps well."
Sufficient has been said in the course of the preceding sketch to enable the reader to form a tolerably correct idea of the character of this greatest representative of the heroic Six Nations. No expression of opinion was ever more unjust than that which has persistently held him up to the execration of mankind as a monster of cruelty. That the exigences of his position compelled him to wink at many atrocities committed by his troops is beyond question. That, however, was a necessary incident of Indian warfare; nay, of all warfare; and after a careful consultation and comparison of authorities we can come to no other conclusion than that, for an Indian, reared among the customs and traditions of the Six Nations, Joseph Brant was a humane and kind-hearted man. No act of perfidy was ever brought home to him. He was a constant and faithful friend, and, though stern, by no means an implacable enemy. His dauntless courage and devotion to his people have never been seriously questioned. The charges of self-seeking and peculation which Red Jacket, "the greatest coward of the
