“If they were looking for a recognizable Native American from New York to put on the building, Joseph Brant would probably be one of the first people they would think of,” Lehman said. Lehman, the Capitol curator, theorizes that by the time the building was completed in 1899, Brant was remembered more for his peaceful advocacy on behalf of Native Americans than for his wartime notoriety. By the end of the 19th century, Brant’s reputation had been rehabilitated as contemporary historians softened their views of him.
The nation was waging wars out west against tribes resisting forced relocations to reservations, giving Americans new tribal leaders to vilify. Missing records - and one mystery solvedīy the time the New York state Capitol was under construction in the 1870s, the people who had survived the horrors of frontier warfare during the American Revolution were dead. Brant died at his home in nearby Burlington in 1807 at 64. The British, at Brant’s urging, eventually granted the Mohawks and other Iroquois loyalists land along the Grand River in Ontario, Canada, where he founded the settlement of Brantford, adjacent to what is now the Six Nations Reserve, 55 miles southwest of Toronto. He was the leading Native American diplomat of his era, traveling to Philadelphia after the war to negotiate treaties with George Washington and other Founding Fathers while seeking redress for the New York lands his people were forced to abandon at musket point. Will Waldron/Times Unionīrant, however, was more than a prominent military figure from the nation’s violent founding. A bust of Joseph Brant faces down State Street from the Capitol looking east on Friday, July 22, 2022, in Albany, N.Y. During a four-year period starting in 1778, Brant led raids along the New York and Pennsylvania frontiers that brought such terror and bloodshed to so many settlements that he was deemed “Monster Brant” even though, in some cases, he was nowhere in the vicinity when atrocities were committed against civilians. Brant? Not so much, or at least not when considering his wartime exploits for his fellow Haudenosaunee (Iroquois), who remained loyal to the British Crown. Giving English explorer Henry Hudson a place of honor facing the river that bears his name makes some sense, historically. Nearby is a sculpture in the same style depicting a goateed European man wearing a hat and Elizabethan collar. The name “BRANT” is carved into the base. The stonework depicts a Native American man with braided hair and a feathered headdress.
The sculpture in question is a granite bust nestled between fifth-floor peaked dormers on the building’s east side facing downtown Albany. “That’s my question,” said Stuart Lehman, curatorial and visitor services specialist at the Capitol for the state Office of General Services, the agency that operates and maintains state properties across New York. So why is a sculpture of him perched in a prominent place on the exterior of the New York state Capitol? It wasn’t his first victory over the rebellious colonials and it wouldn’t be his last. The man who led the victors that day 243 years ago was Thayendanegea, a Mohawk war chief and British army officer known more commonly as Joseph Brant. Due to the remote, rugged location, it would be decades before anyone ventured to the battle site to collect any skeletal remains that could be found and buried.
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