Paris was signed. They would launch raids with roughly 200 warriors, as seen in the Cherokee–American wars; they could not mobilize enough forces to invade settler areas without the help of allies, most often the Creek. Joseph Brant (also Thayendanegea) of the powerful Mohawk tribe in New York was the most prominent indigenous leader against the Patriot forces. In 1778 and 1780, he led 300 Iroquois warriors and 100 white Loyalists in multiple attacks on small frontier settlements in New York and Pennsylvania, killing many settlers and destroying villages, crops, and stores. In 1779, the Continental Army forced the hostile indigenous people out of upstate New York when Washington sent an army under John Sullivan which destroyed 40 evacuated Iroquois villages in central and western New York. Sullivan systematically burned the empty villages and destroyed about 160,000 bushels of corn that composed the winter food supply. The Battle of Newtown proved decisive, as the Patriots had an advantage of three-to-one, and it ended significant resistance; there was little combat otherwise. Facing starvation and homeless for the winter, the Iroquois fled to Canada. The British resettled them in Ontario, providing land grants as compensation for some of their losses. At the peace conference following the war, the British ceded lands which they did not really control, and which they did not consult about with their indigenous allies during the treaty negotiations. They transferred control to the United States of all the land south of the Great Lakes east of the Mississippi and north of Florida. Calloway concludes: The British did not give up their forts until 1796 in the Ohio country and Illinois country; they kept alive the dream of forming an allied indigenous nation there, which they referred to an "Indian barrier state". That goal was one of the causes of the War of 1812. Black Americans Free blacks in the New England Colonies and Middle Colonies in the North as well as Southern Colonies fought on both sides of the War, but the majority fought for the Patriots. Gary Nash reports that there were about 9,000 black veteran Patriots, counting the Continental Army and Navy, state militia units, privateers, wagoneers in the Army, servants to officers, and spies. Ray Raphael notes that thousands did join the Loyalist cause, but "a far larger number, free as well as slave, tried to further their interests by siding with the patriots." Crispus