"Perhaps,"--says the distinguished author just quoted,--"the annals of
history cannot furnish a more conspicuous instance of the triumph and
power of oratory, in a barbarous nation, devoted to superstition, and
looking up to the accuser as a delegated minister of the Almighty."
[Footnote: Governor Clinton's Historical Discourse.]
The victory which Red Jacket thus achieved recoiled heavily on
Cornplanter, and gave him a blow, from which he never afterward fully
recovered. He retired to his reservation, on the waters of the Alleghany
river, within the boundaries of Pennsylvania, where he devoted himself,
during the remainder of his long life, to the elevation and improvement of
his people. He did not, after the example of his great rival Red Jacket,
spurn the improvements of civilization, but engaged in agriculture after
the example of the whites, and welcomed to his abode the teachers of
christianity, and himself openly avowed his belief in its doctrines.
Cornplanter was a native of Ca-na-wan-gus, on the Genesee river, a half
breed, the son of an Indian trader, from the valley of the Mohawk, a white
man named John O'Bail. Of his early life little is known further than he
himself intimated, in a letter written long afterward, to the governor of
Pennsylvania:--In which he said,--"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; and
they took notice of my skin, being a different color from theirs and spoke
about it.
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