Hendrick
(
Tribe : Mohawk )
"Sir William Johnson had ordered some suits of rich
clothing from England. When they were unpacked, the Mohawk
chief Hendrick admired them greatly. Shortly afterward he
told Sir William that he had had a dream in which Sir
William gave him a suit. Sir William took the hint and
presented Hendrick with one of the handsome outfits.
Not long after that when Sir William and Hendrick were
again together, Sir William said that he too had had a
dream. Hendrick asked him what it was. Sir William
explained that he had dreamed that Hendrick had presented
him with a tract of land on the Mohawk River, comprising
about five thousand acres of the most fertile terrain.
Immediately, Hendrick presented the land to Sir William,
remarking as he did so that he would dream no more with
him. 'You dream too hard for me, Sir William,' he
observed."
Mahican
by birth, Hendrick (this is the form of the name most often
seen in English-language sources; he was also known as Tee
Yee Neen Ho Ga Row, Teoniahigarawe, Tiyanoga, White Head,
Hendrick Peters, and King Hendrick) advanced to leadership
among the Mohawks after his adoption into the Wolf clan. He
is notable in history chiefly for his undeviating support
of New York and the British crown against New France. While
still a boy, he adopted Protestant Christianity, and
rejected the solicitations of Jesuit missionaries.
Hendrick became prominent in 1710 as one of the so-called
four kings taken to London by Colonel Francis Nicholson and
Peter Schuyler who hoped that a visit by pro-British
Indians would generate support for an English invasion of
French Canada. The Indians were the sensation of
fashionable society. Dressed in formal costume, they were
presented to Queen Anne and had their portraits painted.
(On a second visit to England in 1740, Hendrick was
received and patronized by King George II.)
The queen donated a silver communion service for a Mohawk
chapel at Fort Hunter, near the predominantly Protestant
Mohawk town of Tiononderoge, and the Society for the
Propagation of the Gospel sent a missionary. But various
factors prevented the projected invasion from taking place.
Among other problems, Hendrick's Mohawk warriors were
double-crossed by the Onondaga chief Teganissorens, who
kept French authorities well informed of the English
military's every mishap.
Not for the first or last time, the Mohawks and the
Onondagas pursued different policies in the course of their
rivalry with each other.
Hendrick rose to special authority after the appointment of
the merchant William Johnson as New York's agent in charge
of Indian affairs. The chief's violently anti-French
attitude fitted Johnson's policies as well. The pair
seduced the Mohawks into a disastrous campaign against
Montreal in 1747. Other Iroquois nations, following the
Onondagas' lead, refused to join this ill-advised raid,
which lost heavily when ambushed by the French and their
Indian allies.
Johnson resigned his provincial post in 1750, but he
continued to profit from trade, and he maintained close
ties with leading Mohawk families, including Hendrick's.
With Johnson out of office, the Mohawks became alienated
from the policies and personnel of New York's
Indian-affairs office. Commissioners in Albany made the
critical decisions, and they were more concerned with
acquiring Mohawk lands than with establishing friendly
relations with Indian people. (Johnson himself picked up
millions of acres of Indian territory, but his methods were
less crude than the commissioners', and he respected the
property of his Mohawk neighbors.)
In 1753, Hendrick led an angry delegation to announce at
Albany that the Covenant Chain alliance, linking the colony
to its Iroquois allies, had been broken. His declaration
made a serious impression on the Lords of Trade and
Plantations in London, who ordered a new interprovincial
treaty in the Crown's own name to redress Hendrick's
grievances and renew the alliance. This new agreement took
place at the Albany Congress of 1754.
Virginia stayed away, and New York's governor, James De
Lancey, was able to seize control of the congress for his
own purposes. The Crown's interests were forgotten. In this
contentious and unsettled atmosphere, Hendrick took the
opportunity to impress the colonial delegates by flaunting
Mohawk leadership of the Iroquois League and denigrating
the Onondagas.
The Albany congress's much-touted scheme of interprovincial
unity proposed by Benjamin Franklin was approved by no
colony and not even considered by the Crown. The most
substantial victors of the congress were William Johnson,
who emerged as the Crown's direct agent in Iroquois
affairs, and Johnson's old ally, Hendrick, now the dominant
chief in the Iroquois League.
Much of the Albany congress's real business took place "in
the bushes"-separately from the formal sessions.
Pennsylvania's Conrad Weiser and Connecticut's John H.
Lydius persuaded an assortment of Iroquois chiefs into
signing deeds for lands in dispute between the two
colonies.
With full knowledge that these procedures violated Iroquois
custom, and in association with signatories who had no
right or authority, Hendrick signed both deeds. His
political motive is not evident. He seems to have been
among the men described by Weiser as "greedy for money." In
due course, the lands thus deeded became the scene of the
Pennamite Wars between Pennsylvania and Connecticut in the
Wyoming Valley of the Susquehanna River.
In 1755, William Johnson was commissioned to campaign
against the French outpost of Fort St.-Frédéric at Crown
Point on Lake George. As before, Hendrick recruited a
Mohawk contingent and led them personally into battle. He
was always renowned for personal bravery, and he had gained
a self-conception of overpowering self-importance. "We are
the six confederate Indian nations," he proclaimed, "the
Heads and Superiors of all Indian nations of the Continent
of America." However, the Lake George battle became greatly
confused, and Hendrick had grown old and fat. When his
horse was killed under him, he was unable to flee and was
himself killed.