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William Johnson’s godson and Pauline’s great-grandfather—was as loyal to the British Crown as Molly Brant, and like her, he suffered for it. In the late 1780s, Jacob, then about thirty years old, was one of 448 Mohawks, alongside about 1,200 other Iroquois, who followed Molly Brant’s younger brother, Joseph, and fled north to escape the American revolutionaries. A long, sad line of Iroquois, bearing as many of their possessions as they could, slowly snaked out of the Mohawk Valley towards those territories that the British had managed to hold on to. In a flotilla of small boats, the Indians crossed the Niagara River. But the example of Sir William Johnson lived on: the British Crown gave the same generous welcome to these refugees as it had given to Molly Brant. A huge tract of land had been purchased from the Mississauga people and was now granted to “His Majesty’s faithful allies…the Mohawk Nation and such other of the Six Nations as wish to settle in that quarter to take possession of and…enjoy for ever.” The Grand River grant to the SixNations consisted of nearly 570,000 acres (230,000 hectares) of prime agricultural land; twelve miles (nineteen kilometres) wide, it stretched from the source to the mouth of the river.
    Over the next hundred years, the Six Nations Reserve provided a solid economic base for the 1,700 Iroquois who had elected to move north. (Another 4,000 had made peace with the Americans and stayed in the Mohawk Valley.) Since the original grant was far more extensive than the Iroquois required, it gradually dwindled in size. Joseph Brant sold chunks of it to raise funds for his followers; the British government bought more acres to ensure land development by European settlers. But the Iroquois never forgot that the reserve was their reward for military services rendered rather than their ancestral hunting ground. The King had treated them the same way as he had treated others on whose military services the British depended. Other Loyalists from the American colonies who arrived in the 1780s, and British officers who had been pensioned off after the end of the Napoleonic Wars in Europe in 1815, were also offered free land in Upper Canada as a reward for services rendered.
    Little is known of Jacob Johnson’s years in Upper Canada, other than the fact that in 1792 he became the father of a boy, whom he named John after the only legitimate son of his godfather, Sir William Johnson. But John Johnson, Pauline’s grandfather, was an important figure in her childhood. In the military tradition of the Mohawk people, he became a fierce warrior in defence of British interests. He was only twenty when he followed Joseph Brant into battle during the War of 1812 and fought the ragtag American army at Queenston Heights, Lundy’s Lane and Stoney Creek. John Johnson never flinched from taking enemy lives or from risking his own, and in later years his grandchildren loved to hear of his exploits. “Have you killed many men, grandfather?” Pauline, as a child, would ask as she leaned against the old man’s knee. With a toothless grin, he would reply, “No, not many, baby, not many, only four or five.” His youthful bravery verged on recklessness. His grandchildren’s favourite tale concerned the time when, under cover of darkness, he and another young man from the reserve silently paddled across the swiftly flowing Niagara River, crept ashore on the American side and set fire to the ramshackle lakesidetown in which enemy troops were billeted. Amongst his contemporaries in the Six Nations on the Grand River Reserve, he was known as the man who razed Buffalo.
    John Johnson had a certain aura about him that both his own people and the British recognized. The colonial government, always eager to cultivate its Indian allies, was smart enough to see that it could use this wiry young warrior to cement ties with the Iroquois. The Johnson family had no special standing on the reserve, but the British pushed