Billy Caldwell - Early Life and Education

Early Life and Education

Soon after the American Revolutionary War, Billy Caldwell, Jr. was born in 1782 in a Mohawk refugee camp near Fort Niagara to a Mohawk woman who was the daughter of a chief Rising Sun. As the Mohawk had a matrilineal kinship system, Billy was born into his mother's clan and gained his status in the tribe from her people. His father was William Caldwell, a Scots-Irish immigrant who came to North America in 1773 and served as a Loyalist soldier in the war. Living first in Virginia, in 1774 his father had fought as an officer with Lord Dunmore and was wounded. After recovering, he went to Fort Niagara in New York, where he fought with the partisan Butler's Rangers against Patriot colonists in New York and Pennsylvania.

After the war, Caldwell abandoned Billy and his mother, moving to the Detroit area. He resettled as a Loyalist in Upper Canada, where he was granted land by the British Crown. In addition to clearing land for his own farm, he helped develop the town of Amherstburg, in present-day Ontario. Billy and his mother moved with most of the Mohawk to a reserve in Upper Canada, on land granted by the Crown to their allies, the nations of the Iroquois Confederacy.

In 1783, the senior Caldwell married Suzanne Baby (daughter of Jacques Baby dit Dupéron), of French-Canadian descent. They eventually had eight children together. In 1789, when Billy was seven, his father took the boy to live with him and his Canadian wife, who wanted to rear him in the Catholic faith. Billy was given a basic Anglo-Canadian education and became Cathholic. Living with his father's family, Billy learned to speak both English and French, after having grown up learning the Iroquoian Mohawk with his mother and her people. Although Billy worked on his father's farm as he was growing up, he wanted a different life.