Of all the characters who figure in the dark history of Indian warfare, few have attained greater notoriety, and none has been more persistently villified than the subject of this sketch. Joseph Brant was known to us in the days of our childhood as a firm and staunch ally of the British, it is true; but as a man embodying in his own person all the demerits and barbarities of his race, and with no more mercy in his breast than is to be found in a famished tiger of the jungle. And for this unjust view of his character American historians are not wholly to blame. Most historians of that period wrote too near the time when the events they were describing occurred, for a dispassionate investigation of the truth; and other writers who have succeeded have been content to follow the beaten track, without incurring the labour of diligent and calm enquiry. And, as it is too often the case with writers, historical and other, many of them cared less for truth than for effect. Even the author of "Gertrude of Wyoming" falsified history for the sake of a telling stanza in his beautiful poem; and when, years afterwards, grant's son convinced the poet by documentary evidence that a grave injustice had been done to his father's memory, the poet contented himself by merely appending a note which in many editions is altogether omitted, and in those editions in which it is retained is much less likely to be read than the text of the poem itself. It was not till the year 1838 that anything like a comprehensive and impartial account of the life of Brant appeared. It was written by Colonel William L. Stone, from whose work the foregoing quotation is taken. Since then, several other lives have appeared, all of which have done something like justice to the subject; but they have not been widely read, and to the general public the name of Brant still calls up visions of smoking villages, raw scalps, disembowelled women and children, and ruthless brutalities more horrible still. Not content with attributing to him ferocities of which he never was guilty, the chronicles have altogether ignored the fairer side of his character.
"The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones."