Tonti was a Huron Indian. The son of a French father and a Huron mother, he was left with a lifelong hatred of the British after the French and Indian War. In 1777, he and Ongwata took in the fugitive Patriots Tom Dobb, Ned Dobb, and Merle Miller as they ran from the British and Mohawk. The Hurons cauterized Ned Dobb's bleeding lash wounds on his feet and helped him recover over the next several months before joining the colonists in fighting for the Continental Army in the American Revolutionary War, fighting at the Siege of Yorktown. After the war, Tonti recommended that the Dobbs settle in upstate New York.