After Yorktown

by Don Glickstein

  The county militias had to act, and on May 14, they asked Irvine’s permission to assemble a volunteer force. Remembering what happened at Gnadenhütten, Irvine consented but with some “express” conditions: “That they did not mean to extend their settlements nor had anything in view but to harass the enemy with an intention to protect the frontier; and that any conquests they might make should be in behalf and for the United States; that they would be governed by military law as militia; that they must collect such numbers as might probably be successful; and last, that they would equip themselves, and victual at their own expense.”17

  In exchange for this agreement, Irvine gave them “a few flints and a small supply of powder.” To further rein in excesses, Irvine asked that two Continental officers—all he could spare—accompany the group: The first was his aide, Lieutenant John Rose, “a very vigilant, active, brave young gentleman well acquainted with service.” Rose had fled his native Russia after killing a man in a duel. He served at Valley Forge, and rose through the Continental ranks. When the war ended, he would return to Russia, but maintain a correspondence with Irvine and his family until he died. The other officer was a Scottish-born surgeon’s mate, Dr. John Knight, who also served with Washington’s army.18

  To command the force, Irvine took “some pains” to ensure the militia would elect as their leader former Continental colonel William Crawford. The militia took the hint. Crawford would command. But they also elected as second in command the popular militia colonel who had led them to Gnadenhütten, David Williamson.19

  Crawford was not only Washington’s peer—they were both 50—but also Washington’s friend and land agent. They had known each other for more than thirty years through their mutual profession as surveyors. Like Washington, he fought in the Virginia regiment during the Seven Years’ War, but his military career was far less spectacular; it was Washington who, as the Virginia army commander, had promoted Crawford to captain in 1758.

  After serving in frontier posts, Crawford left the army and moved to Pennsylvania, about forty-five miles south of Fort Pitt. He homesteaded, traded with Indians, served as a justice of the peace, did surveying work, and served as Washington’s agent in land speculating. They traveled together on land-scouting missions.

  From 1757 to 1781, Crawford wrote at least twenty-eight letters to Washington; Washington reciprocated with at least thirteen. Most of Crawford’s letters were reports related to Washington’s requests. He bought land for Washington (“Agreeable to your desire, I have bought the Great Meadows from Mr. Harreson . . .”). He kicked out squatters (“I turned six men off in the first of March who had built houses . . .”). He commanded troops who fought against the Cherokee in 1774, and kept Washington informed about the war (“I am now setting out to Fort Pitt at the head of 100 men . . . where we shall watch the motions of the Indians and shall act accordingly”).20

  Washington respected Crawford and told him so. “I shall ever hold in grateful recollection your friendly endeavors to serve me,” he wrote four months before Yorktown. Then Washington returned to business. “Can you tell me how matters stand with respect to my Raccoon Tract? Are the people who live on it still unconvinced of my having a patent for it? . . . I pray you also to be so kind as to let me know how Simpson employs his time—his force—and my mill; he has not that I can hear of rendered any account or paid one farthing for the profits of my mill or share of the plantation since he has been on the land, which is poor encouragement for me to lease my property in his hands.”21

  Irvine’s aide, Rose, had a nuanced view. Crawford, Rose said, was an experienced Indian fighter, “blessed with a constitution that may be called robust” and “inured to fatigue.” In his private life, he was “exceedingly affectionate.” Although “cool in danger” and “personally brave and patient of hardships,” he was “too cautious and frightened of appearances, always calculating the chances against. . . . He wanted to be all in all: By trusting everything to the performance of his own abilities only, everything was but half done, and everybody was disgusted. . . . At a council, he speaks incoherent, proposes matters confusedly, and is incapable of persuading people into his opinion or making use of their weak sides for his purposes. He is somewhat capricious, yet easily and indiscriminately led by people who have once gained an ascendancy over him.”22

  Crawford sided with the Whigs from the start, raising a regiment for Virginia, and commanding Virginian troops as a Continental colonel. He fought in Long Island and crossed the Delaware River with Washington for the battles at Trenton and Princeton. In 1777, Crawford left the Continental army to settle the affairs of two brothers who had recently died. He apologized to Washington, who reluctantly let him go. “I can assure you that it goes much against my inclination to part with a good officer,” Washington said. However, “I regret exceedingly the loss of your two brothers . . .”23

  After attending to family needs, Crawford rejoined and commanded Virginia state troops stationed in the Fort Pitt area in 1778. There, he helped fortify the frontier and skirmished with Indians. After learning of Yorktown, he retired from military service until Irvine persuaded him to lead the expedition against the Indians.

  The Indian towns around Upper Sandusky, Ohio, were about two hundred miles west of Fort Pitt. Most residents were Wyandots (also called Hurons), but the alliances with other nations—Delawares, Shawnees, Mingos—meant the towns were cosmopolitan.

  The 480 militia took about nine days to travel from their assembly point forty-five miles west of Fort Pitt to the towns. Their horses “tired under their heavy loads in those enormous hills and swamps we had to cross,” Rose said.24

  Two days after they left, Indian scouts spotted them. Reports of the expedition already had reached the British commander 125 miles away in Detroit, Major Arent Schuyler DePeyster. He sent reinforcements under Loyalist captain William Caldwell. Caldwell’s seventy rangers and forty-four Indians joined about one hundred fifty Wyandots to await Crawford.25

  On Tuesday, June 4, 1782, Crawford reached the Upper Sandusky region, but because the villages had changed location over time, they had trouble locating the main town. “We continued our march about five miles farther on through an almost continued glade, and halted in the skirts of a piece of woods,” Rose said. There, most militia voted to call off the mission, being “discouraged by the scarcity of their provisions, and that there was not the least sign of any cultivation or habitation, nor of cattle or horses.”26

  In the early afternoon, Caldwell, the rangers, and Indians attacked. Caldwell’s second in command, Lieutenant John Tierney (also spelled Turney), later described the rebel army taking cover in trees where they “had every advantage of us as to situation of ground. . . . The battle was very hot till night, which put a stop to firing. Both parties kept their ground all night.” Rose’s account was similar. “A hot firing was kept up until sunset. . . . We were very much distressed on this ground for the want of water, and discovered at last a puddle of rainwater at the foot of an old turned-up tree.” A militiaman said the fighting was “the play of human destruction. . . . A number of our men got wounded, some badly, and some fell to rise no more.” By day’s end, the Whigs had lost five men, one of them scalped, and sixteen were wounded. Only two enemy Indian scalps were taken, Rose said.27

  The next day, “firing began at sunrise and continued all day at long. The enemy’s intention was, evidently, to cause us to waste our ammunition,” Rose said. The British believed they had the rebels pinned down. “At daybreak, we again commenced firing which we kept up pretty briskly till we found the enemy did not wish to oppose us again,” Tierney said. “However, we kept firing at them whenever they dared show themselves. They made two attempts to sally but were repulsed with loss.” More important for the British and Indians were the arrival of one hundred forty Shawnee reinforcements during the day.28

  That night, Crawford’s council of war agreed their situation was dire. They would try to slip through the enemy lines and retr
eat. By daybreak, three hundred of the original four hundred eighty militia had escaped across the Sandusky River. Many had been killed. Others were missing. Tierney was frustrated. His men “had got the enemy surrounded, but through some mistake of the Indians, there was one pass left unguarded through which they made their escape.” Worse, he and Caldwell didn’t learn of the escape until the morning.

  Caldwell ordered a pursuit. “The enemy was mostly on horseback. Some of the Indians who had horses followed and overtook them, killed a number, and it was owing to nothing but the country’s being very clear that any of them escaped,” Tierney said. During the Chase, Caldwell was wounded in both legs. He left the field.

  Among the missing Whigs: Crawford. The new commander, Williamson, reported the news to Irvine: “We were reduced to the necessity of making a forced march through their [enemy’s] lines in the night, much in disorder . . .” As for Crawford, “we can give no account of since the night of the retreat.” (After the war, Williamson was elected county sheriff, but his business investments were generally unsuccessful, and he died a pauper.)29

  Rose elaborated. “We proceeded with as much speed as possible through the plains, wanting to gain the woods, fearful of the enemy’s horse.” Once in the woods, “a good many deserted us, who mostly lost themselves in the woods. . . . We marched unremittingly through a severe rain,” not stopping until about 1 A.M. on June 7, “when we found it absolutely impossible to keep or find so narrow a path in these thickets.” The chase continued at dawn. Those who had stayed with Williamson and Rose soon heard the Indians and found they had “scalped a boy of ours who, with two others, remained behind to bake bread.” It was their last encounter with the enemy, but the way back to Fort Pitt would be difficult. The nights were frosty, and there was rain. “The men were kept together with the utmost difficulty and began to break off in small parties pushing ahead.” They crossed the Ohio River to relative safety on June 12 and 13.30

  But where were Crawford, and Irvine’s surgeon, John Knight?

  Separated from the main militia body during the chaotic breakout, they and six others escaped the encirclement. But instead of catching up with their companions, Delaware Indians caught up with them on June 7. Crawford knew immediately that they were in danger: The Delawares were kin of the Gnadenhütten Moravians.31

  A Delaware chief who had known Crawford before the war told him that he would have to suffer for Williamson’s actions at Gnadenhütten. “You have placed yourself in a situation which puts it out of my power and that of others of your friends to do anything for you . . . by joining yourself to that execrable man, Williamson, and his party.”32

  The narrative of what happened in the ensuing days comes largely from an account Knight later dictated to a lawyer from a sick bed. The lawyer, Hugh H. Brackenridge, embellished the narrative and distorted facts. In 1987, a historian compared it with other eyewitness accounts and concluded that Brackenridge “rewrote history.”33 But Brackenridge published his version of Knight’s account in 1783. It framed American perception of the events for two centuries.

  The Indians took their prisoners—additional ones having been captured—to various Delaware and Shawnee towns, separating them, bringing them together again, sometimes forcing them to run gauntlets, sometimes killing and scalping them. Eleven prisoners, including Crawford and Knight, found themselves back in one of the Upper Sandusky towns on June 10.

  At this point, Crawford “was very desirous to see a certain Simon Girty, 41, who lived with the Indians,” Knight’s narrative said. Crawford hoped that Girty, a Loyalist he had fought with during Dunmore’s War in 1774, would be able to intervene.34

  Frontier propaganda and American historians portrayed Girty in much the same way they portrayed Walter Butler:

  “Simon Girty acts wickedly. . . . As brutal, depraved, and wicked a wretch as ever lived”—Moravian missionary, 1779.35

  “He was a monster. No famished tiger ever sought the blood of a victim with more unrelenting rapacity than Girty sought the blood of a white man”—Kentucky governor, 1840.36

  “The horrors attributed to Girty, or immediately associated with his name, exceed the horrors of even savage barbarity. To his bloody imagination the tomahawk and scalping knife were both the toys of war, and the slaughter of captives, without distinction of age and sex, the merest matter of course. His delight was in the prolonged torture of the sufferer, and the frenzied cruelty of the Indians, whom he knew only too well how to excite. . . . He seemed marked from his infancy to be the scourge of the frontier”—historian, 1882.37

  “The white savage . . . the deaths head of the frontier. The mention of his name alone created terror in any household; in every pioneer’s cabin, it made the children cry out in fear and paled the cheeks of the stoutest-hearted wife”—novelist, 1903.38

  Girty’s reputation for cruelty grew from his being a traitor, not just to his country but also, in Whig perception, to his race. He was born in central Pennsylvania. His father, Simon Sr., was a packhorse driver and Indian trader who had been killed in a drunken brawl with an Indian named Fish (according to nineteenth-century accounts) or in a drunken duel with a bondservant (a late-twentieth-century account and family tradition). Simon Jr.’s mother remarried in 1753 to John Turner. During the Seven Years’ War, Delaware Indians captured the Girty family—the two parents and their five sons. Assuming that Turner was responsible for their friend Simon Sr.’s death, the Indians tortured him, then burned him at the stake. Justice satisfied, the Indians adopted the family—Simon Jr. by the Senecas in the Iroquois nation, other brothers by Shawnees and Delawares. Pursuers rescued one brother. The Girtys lived with the Indians for three to five years, when they were reunited after the war ended.39

  The family lived near Fort Pitt. Girty, knowing Iroquois, Delaware, and Shawnee dialects by then, worked as an interpreter and Indian trader. At one point, he was indicted for a misdemeanor related to a Pennsylvania–Virginia border dispute—he supported Virginia’s claims. During Dunmore’s War, he enlisted in the Virginia army as a scout and interpreter, and likely first met Crawford then. When the revolution began, he again enlisted with Virginia and was commissioned as a 2nd lieutenant in the rebel army. His first mission was diplomatic: He served as a guide and interpreter in Virginia’s efforts to keep Ohio Valley Indians neutral. He continued to serve the Whigs in other negotiations.

  Girty hoped to be commissioned as a captain in the Continental army. To further that, he recruited men in the Fort Pitt area in early 1777. The Whigs rewarded him only with another 2nd lieutenancy; he resigned from the army in August. Suspected of disloyalty, the Whigs arrested him, but he was acquitted after a hearing. The army held no grudge, and used Girty as a messenger to Senecas living in Pennsylvania. He returned from the mission to warn the Fort Pitt commander that the Senecas were on a war footing; they wouldn’t be neutral. In early 1778, Girty guided a Whig expedition into Indian country; the so-called “Squaw War” resulted in the deaths of just one Indian man, three women, and one boy.40

  About this time, Girty signed over land he owned in western Pennsylvania to his half-brother, John Turner Jr. Then, Girty and six others changed sides. (Turner and brother Thomas Girty remained Whigs, while the other brothers, George and James, fought for the British, sometimes with Simon.) For the rest of the war, Girty served as a British liaison to Indians, often living with them, interpreting at conferences, participating in raids, and serving as a scout and guide for rangers. If he commanded troops, it was rare; British officers led most joint Indian-Loyalist raids.41

  At times, Girty seemed to be omnipresent, and from the settlers’ perspective mythologically evil, condoning, if not conducting, torture and executions. In southwest Pennsylvania, northwest Virginia, and throughout Kentucky, Girty’s name became a “household word of terror.” The raids were violent, but the Indians respected Girty enough to accept his intervention on behalf of many prisoners. Some Whigs defended him. One captured acquaintance recalled: “H
e flung his arms around me and cried like a child. . . . He made a speech to the Indians—he could speak the Indian tongue, and knew how to speak—and told them if they meant to do him a favor, they must do it now and save my life.” In 1780, he was with Indians who captured two Kentucky forts and took three hundred captives; he helped save their lives. William K. Beall, an American taken prisoner in the War of 1812, said he talked with many people who knew Girty personally: “People here say that Simon Girty was beneficial to Americans prisoners during the Indian wars; that he often gave all he had to get them their liberty and frequently risked his life to save them from the Indians inhuman tortures; and that there are many Americans in Canada to attest the truth of it.” Some historians speculate that many of the cruelties attributed to Simon Girty were actually committed by his Loyalist “savage brothers.”42

  He was, however, a frontiersman, “deeply bronzed by exposure,” shaped by harsh conditions, and often harsh himself. “He was cruel as were most of the backwoodsmen of his time; but he was not wantonly cruel,” a Canadian historian concluded. Those who knew Girty said he had large or piercing black eyes, and despite a heavy frame, was agile and strong. A British captain said in 1779 that Girty was “one of the most useful, disinterested friends in this department that the government has.” The next year, the same captain said he was “useless.” Missionaries said he plied Indians, even Moravian Indians, with alcohol. In Native American oral tradition, far from being renegade and traitor to his race, he was a hero, a clever and kind man who fought “settler terrorism.” Yet he could have violent disagreements. In August 1781, while on a raid with Mohawk captain Joseph Brant, Girty said Brant’s exploits were exaggerated, and Brant lied about them. The two were reportedly drunk, and Brant slashed at Girty’s forehead with a sword. Girty took nearly six months to recover.43