Canada learned of this plot, led by Aaron Burr and George Clinton, to overthrow British rule and to create a republican state to join the United States. September 1802, the planned date of invasion, passed uneventfully and the plot evaporated. In January 1801, Brant was interviewed by an American minister, the Reverend Elkanah Holmes about the history of the Iroquois. A notable aspect of Brant's answers about the origins of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy was that refrained from any mention of the supernatural or Hiawatha, and Wathatotarho is less of a villain than other accounts have him. The American historian Douglas Boyce wrote Brant's answers which portrayed the genesis of the Iroquois Confederacy as due to rational statesmanship on the part of the chiefs instead of the workings of magic suggested that either Brant was ignoring the supernatural aspects of the story in order to appeal to a white audience or that alternatively that white American and Canadian ethnologists, anthropologists, and historians have played up the emphasis on the supernatural in the story of the birth of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy in order to depict the Haudenosaunee as a primitive and irrational people. In 1804, Brant sent his agent and friend John Norton to London to meet lobby various British politicians to allow the Haudenosaunee to sell their land directly along the Grand, and to remind them that Brant had fought for the Crown in the American Revolutionary War. Brant's old friend, the Duke of Northumberland, whom he had known since 1775, had after meeting Norton, raised the issue of the Haudenosaunee land dispute in the House of Lords, saying the Crown should have treated Brant better. Claus, who felt threatened by Norton's mission, organized a meeting at Buffalo Creek of various Seneca chiefs to denounce Brant, and announced he was now removed from office. As Brant was not a chief, it was not clear from what position he was being removed from, and furthermore only clan mothers could depose a chief, so under Haudenosaunee traditions and laws, the ruling of chiefs at Buffalo Creek was not binding. Brant organized a meeting of the clan mothers living along the banks of the Grand River who affirmed their confidence in Brant to represent them. Claus had organized another meeting of the Seneca chiefs at Fort George to again denounce Brant and to claim that Norton was only a white man playing an Indian.