Nothing can ever extenuate the conduct of England in keeping in her employ and service such men as Alexander McKee, Matthew Elliott and Simon Girty. The chief rendezvous of the tribes after the revolution was at Detroit. Here were located a British garrison and a British Indian agency. This agency, while guarding the trade in peltries, also kept its eye on the fleets that descended the Ohio, on the growing settlements of Kentucky, and warned the Indians against American encroachment. In 1778, and while the revolution was in progress, the missionary John Heckewelder, noted the arrival at Goschochking on the Muskingum, of three renegades and fugitives from Pittsburg. They were McKee, Elliott and Girty. McKee and Elliott had both been traders among the Indians and understood their language. All three had deserted the American cause and were flying into the arms of the British. They told the Delawares and Wyandots, "That it was the determination of the American people to kill and destroy the whole Indian race, be they friends or foes, and possess themselves of their country; and that, at this time, while they were embodying themselves for the purpose, they were preparing fine sounding speeches to deceive them, that they might with more safety fall upon and murder them. That now was the time, and the only time, for all nations to rise, and turn out to a man against these intruders, and not even suffer them to cross the Ohio, but fall upon them where they should find them; which if not done without delay, their country would be lost to them forever." The same men were now inculcating the same doctrines at Detroit. They pointed out to the Indians that the Americans were bent on extinguishing all their council fires with the best blood of the nations; that despite all their fair promises and pretensions, the Americans cared nothing for the tribes, but only for their lands. That England by her treaty had not ceded a foot of the Indian territory to the United States. That all the treaties thus far concluded with the tribes by the Americans, were one-sided and unfair, made at the American forts, and at the cannon's mouth. A powerful figure now arose among the savages of the north. Joseph Brant was a principal chief of the Mohawk tribe of the Six Nations of New York. His sister Molly was the acknowledged wife of the famous British Indian superintendent, Sir William Johnson. In his youth he had been sent by Johnson to Doctor Wheelock's charity school at Lebanon, Connecticut, where he learned to speak and write English and acquired some knowledge of history and literature. In the war of the revolution the Mohawks sided with England, and Brant was given a colonel's commission. He remained after the war a pensioner of the British government, and General Arthur St. Clair is authority for the statement that he received an annual stipend of four hundred pounds sterling.