Hendrick Theyanoguin



Hendrick Theyanoguin (c. 1691 – September 8, 1755), whose name had several spelling variations, was an important Mohawk leader and member of the Bear Clan; he resided at Canajoharie or the Upper Mohawk Castle in colonial New York. He was a Speaker for the Mohawk Council. Hendrick formed a close alliance with Sir William Johnson, the Superintendent of Indian affairs in North America.

Until the late 20th century, Hendrick's biography was conflated with an older Mohawk leader given the same first name in baptism, Hendrick Tejonihokarawa (also known as Hendrick Peters) (c. 1660 – c. 1735). The latter was a member of the Wolf Clan (an important difference, as shown by the historian Barbara Silvertsen) and based in Tionondaga, the Lower Castle, closer to the English base in Albany. He was one of the "four Indian kings" who visited England and Queen Anne in 1710. The English built Fort Hunter in Tionondaga in 1711 with an Anglican mission. The Mohawk village became mostly Christianized early in the eighteenth century.

Biography
Hendrick Theyanoguin was born to a Mohawk woman and a Mohegan man in Westfield, Massachusetts. He was born into his mother's Bear Clan; the Mohawk have a matrilineal kinship system in which the mother's children belong to her clan, and hereditary offices and property are passed through her line. He was baptized Hendrick by Godfridius Dellius of the Dutch Reformed Church in 1692. The English called him Hendrick Peters or King Hendrick.

At some point, Theyanoguin resettled at Canajoharie, a Mohawk town which Europeans called the "Upper Castle", in the Mohawk River valley upriver and west of Schenectady. He became a chief of the Mohawk Bear clan and would have participated in the Mohawk Council. He was not one of the fifty League sachems of the Iroquois Grand Council, made up of representatives of the five tribes (six, when the Tuscarora were admitted in 1722).

Theyanoguin worked to continue the alliance with the English to preserve Mohawk and Iroquois interests in New York. They depended more on diplomacy than warfare, and tried to preserve neutrality during the English-French rivalries and conflicts of the colonial years.

During the French and Indian War (the North American theater of the Seven Years War, 1754-1763), Theyanoguin led a group of Mohawk warriors to accompany William Johnson, the British Superintendent of Indian Affairs, through the Hudson Valley in his expedition to Crown Point.

In 1753 he made a famous and critical speech to the governor of New York saying: "Brother, by and by you will expect to see the Nations (the Six Nations of the Iroquois) down here" (i.e. in New York) and contemporary newspapers and broadsheets made much of the fear of this threat..

Theyanoguin was killed on September 8, 1755, on a mission to stop the southern advance of the French army at the Battle of Lake George.

Sir William Johnson did not establish a mission in Canajoharie until 1769, when he allowed the Indian Castle Church to be built nearby, several years before the American Revolutionary War. Today it has been designated as part of the Mohawk Upper Castle Historic District, a National Historic Landmark.