In the spring of 1780, Brant renewed his warfare against our settlements. He seems, in almost all cases, to have been successful, uniting, as he did, the means of civilized warfare with all the art and duplicity of the savage.
In later years Colonel Brant exerted himself to preserve peace between the whites and Indians; and during the important treaties which were made in 1793 he was in favor of settling matters amicably. He had won from the British Government all the honors it was willing to bestow upon a _savage_ ally, and what were they? A Colonel's commission, with liberty to do work for the king which British soldiers did not care to do—the slaughter of women and children, and the sacking of villages. It is quite probable that, after Wayne's decisive castigation of the Indians, and British insolence had thereby also received a blow, Brant retired from a service which he knew must be worse than fruitless.
Colonel Brant was married, in the winter of 1779, to the daughter of Colonel Croghan by an Indian woman. He had lived with her some time, according to the Indian manner; but being present at the wedding of Miss Moore, (one of the Cherry Valley captives,) he took a fancy to have the "civilized" ceremony performed between himself and his partner. King George III. conferred valuable lands upon him, and he became quite wealthy. He owned, at one time, thirty or forty negroes, to whom he was a most brutal master. Brant professed to be a great admirer of Greek, and intended to study that language so as to be able to make an original translation of the New Testament into Mohawk.
He died in November, 1807, and was said to have been sixty-five years old at the time of his death. He left several children, some of whose descendants are wealthy and respectable people. His wife, at his death, returned to her wild Indian life.
One of the great and almost insurmountable difficulties attendant upon the settlement of a new country, is that of rearing farm stock, and preserving it from the attacks of wild beasts. The experience of the pioneers of civilization in the valley of the Ohio, on this point, taught them that, until the country became more fully settled, and the increase of inhabitants so great as to drive back the denizens of the forest to more distant lairs, they must depend upon their rifles alone for a supply of animal food for the table. On the principle of recompense, perhaps, it was not so hard as it might otherwise seem, for when pork and beef were scarce, "b'ar meat" was plenty—and _vice versa_. But then, it was hard when one took a notion to raise a pig or two to furnish his table in time of need, to find it missing some bright morning, and know that all that pork had gone to fill the greedy stomach of a bear or "painter." Many and frequent were the encounters at the sty between the settler and his dusky neighbor, the bear, in which the contest for the possession of the pork was maintained with vigor and determination on the one side, and on the other with a hungry energy, which was deserving of commendation, if not of success.