Visitors to the home of John Brant, chief of the Six Nations, found him a charming host who spoke perfect English and dressed in the latest London fashion, except for beaded moccasins. James Buchanan, British consul general in New York, who expected to find a family of painted savages sitting about a cook fire in their wigwam, was astonished, as he wrote, to discover Brant and his sisters ready to enter any English drawing room.

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The mother of John Brant was Catherine, widow Joseph Brant the famous Thayendanegea, war captain and chief of the Iroquois Confederacy, or Six Nations, during the Revolution. Catherine, eldest daughter of the head of the Turtle clan, the first in rank in the Mohawk nation, had the honor of selecting one of her sons to be chief. She picked John, her fourth and youngest, who had been born on September 24, 1794.

Like his father, John had strong loyalty to the Crown and led his warriors against the United States in the War of 1812. He later lived with his sister Elizabeth in grand English style on Lake Ontario. Ironically, his mother had returned to her native village "and resumed the customs of her fathers."

In 1821, young Brant, following in the footsteps of his famous father, traveled to London to argue the authenticity of his land claims before Parliament. His strongest supporter was the Duke of Northumberland. Their ties were traditional; when Joseph Brant had visited London to see King George in 1776 the elder duke had been his friend and sponsor before the royal court.

During his visit to England John wrote to Thomas Campbell, the nineteenth-century poet, asking him to correct his celebrated "Gertrude of Wyoming," which calumnized Thayendanegea as a blood-thirsty slayer of innocents at the massacre of Wyoming. Historical evidence had proved Brant was not present at the tragedy.

Campbell later admitted in a magazine article that he had been mistaken and lamely described his Brant as a fictional character. Chief Justice John Marshall, however, refused to correct the second edition of his The Life of George Washington, published in 1834, despite John Brant's letters and pleas.

In 1821, Brant was elected as a member of the Canadian provincial parliament for the county of Haldimand, which included many Mohawk. Landowners contested the election on the grounds that the Indians were not actually landowners and the seat was vacated. During the campaign to regain the seat, both Brant and his political opponent died of cholera.

After her brother's death Elizabeth Brant married William Johnson Kerr, a grandson of Sir William, and for a time it seemed that the great colonial dynasty that began with Molly Brant, Joseph's sister, and Johnson, the great Empire Builder, would continue. The last survivor of the Brant children, Catherine B. Johnson, died in 1867.