They were the first of the Loyalists to arm and organize
themselves. In the summer of 1775 Colonel Allan Maclean,
a Scottish officer in the English army, aided by Colonel
Guy Johnson, a brother-in-law of Sir John Johnson, raised
a regiment in the Mohawk valley known as the Royal Highland
Emigrants, which he took to Canada, and which did good
service against the American invaders under Montgomery
in the autumn of the same year. In the spring of 1776
Sir John Johnson received word that the revolutionary
authorities had determined on his arrest, and he was
compelled to flee from Johnson Hall to Canada. With him
he took three hundred of his Scottish dependants; and he
was followed by the Mohawk Indians under their famous
chief, Joseph Brant. In Canada Johnson received a colonel's
commission to raise two Loyalist battalions of five
hundred men each, to be known as the King's Royal Regiment
of New York. The full complement was soon made up from
the numbers of Loyalists who flocked across the border
from other counties of northern New York; and Sir John
Johnson's 'Royal Greens,' as they were commonly called,
were in the thick of nearly every border foray from that
time until the end of the war. It was by these men that
the north shore of the St Lawrence river, between Montreal
and Kingston, was mainly settled. As the tide of refugees
swelled, other regiments were formed. Colonel John Butler,
one of Sir John Johnson's right-hand men, organized his
Loyal Rangers, a body of irregular troops who adopted,
with modifications, the Indian method of warfare. It was
against this corps that some of the most serious charges
of brutality and bloodthirstiness were made by American