Montour family
Because of the Iroquois practice of reckoning descent through the female line, the family is known as "Montour" after the matriarch.
According to her own account: she was born in Canada, whereof her father (who was a French gentleman) had been Governor; under whose administration the then Five Nations of Indians had made war against the French, and the Hurons and that government (whom we term the French Indians, from espousing their part against the English, and living in Canada) and that, in the war, she was taken by some of the Five Nations’ warriors, being then about ten years of age, and by them was carried away into their country, where she was habited and brought up in the same manner as their children.
[2] She was apparently married three times, the last to an Oneida man named Carondawanna (Karontowá:nen—Big Tree).
He later took the English name "Robert Hunter" after the Governor of New York, whom he met at the Albany Conference of 1711.
Her skills were highly valued such that in 1719 the Commissioners for Indian Affairs in Albany decreed that she should receive "a man's pay.
[6] They resided at a village called on a 1759 map "French Margaret's Town" (Wenschpochkechung), on the west branch of the Susquehanna at the mouth of Lycoming Creek (now Williamsport, Pennsylvania).
The couple had at least five children: Like her mother, Margaret Montour attended treaty conferences and often interpreted.
[5]: p.79 Her home was a large village at the head of Seneca Lake, New York called Shequaga,[7] or Catherine's Town.
She was fluent in "English, French, Mohawk (her mother tongue), Wyandot [Huron], Ottawa, Chippewa, Shawnese, and Delaware.
He was married to a daughter of the Seneca chief Sayenqueraghta, known as "Old King" or "Old Smoke,"[11] and Cayuga wife.
He is reputed to have died in September 1780, in Painted Post, New York of wounds received in the Sugarloaf Massacre at Little Nescopeck Creek, Pennsylvania.
He fought on the British side in the American Revolution until 1778, when he was imprisoned in Detroit by Henry Hamilton for helping some prisoners escape.
