Wars develop warriors, and give an opportunity to the brave to display their heroism. Had there been no American Revolution, Washington would probably have remained a quiet farmer on his estates, unknown to fame; and had not war been the most glorious occupation in which men could engage, thousands of others would have gone down to the grave unhonored and unsung. With the Iroquois, war and oratory being the only fields of distinction, it is only the lives of orators and warriors that we have to record, in writing Indian history. Cornplanter was scarcely less famous than Brandt, as his feet were, all his life, upon the war-path. The year of his birth cannot be ascertained with accuracy, but must have been as early as 1735. Like Farmer’s Brother, he was in the battle which ended so disastrously for the British in Braddock’s defeat, in 1755; and to the Indians alone the French owed all their victories, in the “old French war,” as in an Indian country, with the primitive inhabitants so numerous as they were then, he who secured their alliance, must be morally certain of securing victory. Allowing Cornplanter to have been twenty years old at that time, and he could scarcely have been younger, his birthday was three years later than that of Washington. His father was a white man, and his mother an Indian of the Seneca nation, and his birthplace Conewango, in the valley of the Genesee River. There is very little for me to relate of him, though he lived more than a hundred years, and was ever on the alert, because I cannot follow him to the battle ground, and he lived in a time when it was thought little else was worth relating concerning a great man, except his great deeds. In a speech which he once wrote to the Governor of Pennsylvania, he says of himself: “When I was a child, I played with the butterfly, the grasshopper, and the frogs; and as I grew up, I began to pay some attention, and play with the Indian boys in the neighborhood; they took notice of my skin being a different color from theirs, and spoke about it. I inquired of my mother the cause, and she told me that my father was a resident in Albany. I still ate my food out of a bark dish. I grew up to be a young man, and married me a wife, and I had no kettle or gun. I then knew where my father lived, and went to see him, and found he was a white man, and spoke the English language. He gave me food while I was at his house, but when I started to return home, he gave me no provisions to eat on the way. He gave me neither kettle nor gun.” It was the fate of all those who had as much white as red blood in their veins, to be rejected by the white parent; and they therefore had no alternative but to wed themselves to Indian customs, and be Indians in name, if not in reality. This sometimes infused a bitterness into their spirits, and made them doubly ferocious, when called to defend themselves against white enemies.