After Yorktown

by Don Glickstein

  Knight’s account of the Crawford-Girty conversation—as distorted by Brackenridge—made Girty infamous.44

  “I asked the colonel [Crawford] if he had seen Mr. Girty. He told me he had, and that Girty had promised to do everything in his power for him, but that the Indians were very much enraged against the prisoners.” Soon after, according to the narrative, the Delawares tomahawked and scalped four other prisoners. While Crawford and Knight watched, Indian women and boys tomahawked another five. They severed one dead man’s head, “and the Indians kicked it about upon the ground.”

  Now, it was just the two of them on a forced march, finally stopping by a campfire. “When we were come to the fire, the colonel was stripped naked, ordered to sit down by the fire, and then they beat him with sticks and their fists. Presently after, I was treated in the same manner. They then tied a rope to the foot of a post about fifteen feet high, bound the colonel’s hands behind his back and fastened the rope to the ligature between his wrists. . . . The colonel then called to Girty and asked if they intended to burn him. Girty answered, yes. The colonel said he would take it all patiently.”

  Knight watched Crawford’s ensuing torture: punctured with burning sticks, hot coals rubbed in his wounds, forced to walk on fire. “In the midst of these extreme tortures, he called Simon Girty and begged of him to shoot him, but Girty making no answer, he called to him again. Girty, then, by way of derision, told the colonel he had no gun, at the same time turning about to an Indian who was behind him, laughed heartily, and by all his gestures seemed delighted at the horrid scene.” The torture, including scalping alive, lasted another two hours. At one point, Girty, according to the narrative, approached Knight and told him he would suffer the same fate, but in a Shawnee town.

  Both British and Whig accounts agree that the Knight-Brackenridge account of Crawford’s torture was accurate. Caldwell, although not on the scene, reported to DePeyster in Detroit that the rebel officers “have suffered much,” and that Crawford “died like a hero, and never changed countenance.”45

  Where the accounts disagree is Girty’s role. Other prisoners who escaped or were released, agents and rangers, Indian oral tradition, and Girty himself differ with Knight-Brackenridge.

  DePeyster said an Indian agent on the scene—presumably Girty—used “every means” to save his life. Irvine told Washington that Girty ignored Crawford’s plea to put him out of his misery, but he made no mention of Girty gloating or laughing. Another Whig officer said Girty didn’t have a gun with him.46 A female prisoner and eyewitness told her son years later that “Girty really did everything that a mortal man could to save Crawford,” offering Indians his black slave, horse, rifle, and wampum in exchange for his life. “Girty shed tears while witnessing Crawford’s agonies at the stake and ever after always spoke of Crawford in the tenderest terms as a particular friend,” the woman said. Another eyewitness, a thirteen-year-old boy, confirmed in 1849 that Girty tried to buy Crawford’s life, but was threatened with his own life if he didn’t stop trying. “Say one more word, and I will make another stake to burn you,” another account quoted the chief. When the torture began, and Crawford asked Girty to shoot him, Girty replied that he dare not, and he left the scene rather than watch. Indian tradition says that a chief responded to Girty’s pleas by saying “if Crawford had been his own father, he could not have saved him.” In his later years, Girty himself said he tried to intercede, and he remained in friendly contact with Crawford’s son, John.47

  Two days after Crawford’s death, on June 13, Knight was able to strike an escort to a Shawnee town and escape. Another prisoner, the guide John Stover, escaped by freeing himself from buffalo-hide ropes and stealing a horse.

  Crawford wasn’t the first person who was tortured to death—on both sides—but both British and Whigs reacted strongly. DePeyster, who had been trying to suppress torture among his Indian allies, told an Indian agent to threaten the chiefs that if they persisted, “I shall be under the necessity of recalling the [British and Loyalist] troops.” He told his superior, General Frederick Haldimand, that he had worked hard to cool the Indian reaction to Gnadenhütten, but it didn’t help when the rebels declared they intended to “exterminate the whole Wyandot tribe, not by words only, but even by exposing effigies left hanging by the heels in every encampment.” Haldimand, in turn, told Carleton that he regretted the cruelty not only on a personal level, but because “it awakens in the Indians that barbarity to prisoners which the unwearied efforts of his Majesty’s ministers had totally extinguished.”48

  Notwithstanding his superiors’ concern about torture, Caldwell put his army’s accomplishment into perspective. As near as he could determine, two hundred fifty enemy soldiers were killed or wounded. “Our loss is very inconsiderable”: one white man killed, one wounded (Caldwell himself); four Indians killed, eight wounded.49

  On the other side, Washington wrote Irvine, “I cannot but regret the misfortune and, more especially, for the loss of Col. Crawford, for whom I had a very great regard.”50

  Irvine told Benjamin Lincoln—now secretary of war—that the settlers and militia “think their only safety depends on the total destruction of all the Indian settlements within 200 miles; this, it is true, they are taught by dear-bought experience.” Less than a year later, Irvine proposed a final solution: “Nothing short of a total extirpation of all the western tribes of Indians, or at least driving them over the Mississippi and the lakes, will ensure peace.”51

  Before the Whigs could bring the war back to the enemy, the Indians struck again, this time, thirty-five miles east of Fort Pitt. Hannastown (or Hanna’s Town) was a relatively new settlement, founded in 1773, but it had become a county seat. (Now reconstructed as a county park, it is just north of Greensburg, Pennsylvania, named in 1785 after Nathanael Greene.) At the settlement’s hub was a fort, well built and considered a safe shelter from attacks.52

  A little more than a month after Crawford’s defeat, a passerby saw about one hundred Indians and warned the settlers working in the fields. “The whole reaping party ran for the town, each one intent upon his own safety,” an eyewitness said. “Fathers seeking for their wives and children, and children calling for their parents and friends, and all hurrying in a state of consternation to the fort.”53

  The Indians—Senecas led by Kayashuta—and Loyalist rangers arrived in mid-afternoon on July 13, found the homes deserted, and started looting and burning the buildings—as Whig expeditions had done to Indian towns. Then, they attacked the fort, commanded by Captain Michael Huffnagle.

  “If you consider our situation, with only 20 of the inhabitants, 17 guns, and very little ammunition to stand the attack in the manner we did, you will say that the people behaved bravely,” Huffnagle told Irvine. The attack was “very severe until after dark when they left us. The inhabitants here are in a very distressed situation having lost all their property but what clothing they had on.” As for Huffnagle himself, “I have lost what little property I had here,” but he saved the county records, which had been moved to the fort. Two settlers were wounded, but throughout the area, the Indians killed or captured twenty, took a large number of horses, and killed about one hundred livestock, “burning and destroying as they went along.”54

  19. Ambush at Blue Licks

  LOYALIST CALDWELL, WOUNDED IN BOTH LEGS AT CRAWFORD’S defeat, recovered quickly. By August 1782, he was “determined to pay the enemy a visit with as many Indians as would follow me.”1

  Caldwell was born in northern Ireland in the 1750s. As a teenager or in his early twenties, he immigrated to Virginia, and soon after joined the Virginia army to fight in Dunmore’s War; Indians wounded him near Fort Pitt. When the revolution started, he stayed loyal to the Crown, and was wounded again in fighting around Norfolk, Virginia, in 1776. When their position proved indefensible, the Loyalists evacuated. By early 1777, Caldwell was at Fort Niagara, where he was named a captain in the Loyalist rangers led by John Butler, Walter’s father.2


  In the ensuing years, Caldwell was “a very active partisan,” Niagara’s commander said. On the Pennsylvania frontier in July 1778, a joint Indian-ranger force he helped command attacked Wyoming Valley, where six thousand mostly Whig settlers had encroached on Indian lands and harassed Tory settlers. Whig historians called it a “massacre.” They said about three hundred militia and Continentals were killed, and rebel propaganda told of Tories refusing to give quarter, and Indians burning prisoners alive and killing babies. John Butler, however, reported that no civilians were killed: “Not a single person was hurt except such as were in arms. To these, in truth, the Indians gave no quarter.” Caldwell did order the execution of two rangers who had snuck away to visit their families; he considered this desertion, and it put the rest of the rangers at risk of discovery by the enemy.3

  On the New York frontier two months later, Caldwell reported he attacked several settlements, destroying rebel grain, burning their buildings, and driving off “a great many cows and oxen, horses and mares. The oxen were all large New England cattle, kept on the flats for the use of the Continental troops.”4

  During these years, Caldwell led his men on missions throughout the frontier, from near Schenectady to Detroit. He even went on a spy mission to Philadelphia. Now, in August 1782, he wanted to strike a blow at the rebels where they had formed a “white wedge in the heart of Indian America”—Kentucky.5

  The whites came to fertile, rolling green country south of the Ohio River, west of Virginia, past the Appalachians. They came on the promise of a 1768 treaty between the Iroquois and British, in which the Iroquois ceded to the land they didn’t own: Shawnee and Cherokee land.

  A land agent and speculator named Daniel Boone and a party of hunters crossed into Shawnee territory in 1769. The Shawnees caught them, confiscated their furs and weapons, and sent them home. Again and again, Boone returned, first with his own family, then with more settlers. The Shawnees called them “crazy people [who] want to shove us off our land entirely.” They complained to the British that their land was “covered with white people.” William Johnson, in turn, reported to London that the settlers “generally set out with a general prejudice against all Indians, and the young Indian warriors or hunters are too often inclined to retaliate.”6

  Boone was one of many easterners who explored and settled Kentucky, then a Virginia county. He had been a twenty-one-year-old teamster on the disastrous Braddock expedition against the French and Indian allies in 1755. When the revolution began twenty years later, he was an agent for a land-speculation company that bought wilderness from the Cherokees and sold it to settlers. It was a disputed sale: The Cherokees disavowed it, saying company officials lied to them about the nature of the sale. Johnson’s counterpart in the southern colonies, John Stuart, suggested the title might be fraudulent—a common practice, he said.7

  Boone became a legendary figure, largely because of a best-selling book, the 1784 ghostwritten autobiography whose author interviewed Boone but took liberties with and romanticized the details. Lord Byron memorialized him in Don Juan in 1822 as the “backwoodsman of Kentucky.” He was probably an inspiration for James Fenimore Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans and other Leatherstocking tales. In the mid-twentieth century, his legend inspired a six-year, 165-episode run of a television show called Daniel Boone, which continues in reruns in the twenty-first century.

  The legends were based on an eventful life. Boone found a way to Kentucky through the Appalachians by discovering the Cumberland Gap, and helped build the Wilderness Road through the mountains. Indians killed his brother, two of his sons, and captured one of his daughters. The Shawnees captured Boone himself and adopted him; he later escaped to fight them. In 1781, the British captured and released him. He served as a militia lieutenant colonel, legislator, sheriff, government surveyor, tavern owner, land speculator, and bear hunter. He was court-martialed for collaborating with the British, but acquitted. At one point, he was one of the wealthiest men in Kentucky, but he lost his money and his land. Boone would continue to fight Indians after the war, make peace with them, and work for prisoner releases. He would flee creditors for Missouri, and die in 1820 in his son’s home.

  One contemporary described Boone as understated: “He was solid in mind as well as in body, never frivolous, thoughtless, or agitated, but was always quiet, meditative, and impressive, unpretentious, kind, and friendly in his manner.” Nathan Boone, one of his sons, said he was about five feet eight with “moderately” black hair, blue eyes, and fair skin. The self-description in his autobiography talked about his hard life. “Many dark and sleepless nights have I spent, separated from the cheerful society of men, scorched by the summer’s sun, and pinched by the winter’s cold, an instrument ordained to settle the wilderness.”8

  Indians, supported by and sometimes accompanied by the British and Loyalist rangers, unrelentingly attacked Kentucky settlements.

  Major Hugh McGary, chairman of the committee that governed Kentucky County, pleaded with Virginia governor Patrick Henry in 1777 for military help: “We are surrounded with enemies on every side; every day increases their numbers. To retreat from the place where our all is centered would be little preferable to death. Our fort is already filled with widows and orphans; their necessities call upon us daily for supplies.”9

  By June 1782, the Indians and British had conducted successful raids for nearly a year and a half, with feeble response from the Whig settlers. From the falls of the Ohio—Louisville—a militia colonel pleaded for help. “The savages . . . are constantly ravaging the most interior parts of the county, which makes it impossible for any one settlement to assist another. . . . Your exertions on this occasion may possibly save our families from the hands of merciless savages.”10

  After an attack on a small fort one hundred miles from Louisville, Boone said the situation was “more and more alarming; several stations [forts] which had lately been erected in the county were continually infested with savages, stealing their horses and killing men at every opportunity.” Moreover, Simon Girty and other Tories were inciting Indians to “execute every diabolical scheme.”11

  On August 15, Caldwell would begin to make matters worse. He had assembled an army of three hundred men—thirty to sixty rangers, including the brothers Simon and George Girty, two Indian agents, and Indians from Wyandot, Cherokee, Shawnee, Delaware, and other nations. Their goal was the destruction of Bryan’s Station, a fort near what is now Lexington. They didn’t arrive undetected, however, and when Caldwell appeared before the fort, the settlers had already taken refuge behind the palisade.

  Seeing this, Caldwell tried to “draw them out by sending up a small party to try to take a prisoner and show themselves.” Girty led the small party, but the Indians “were in too great a hurry,” and the bulk of the attack force appeared, reinforcing the garrison’s decision to stay behind their walls. The Whigs killed five attackers and wounded two, Caldwell reported. Boone’s autobiography said otherwise: The enemy “furiously assaulted the garrison, which was happily prepared to oppose them,” resulting in thirty rangers and Indians killed, while the settlers lost four men.12

  Knowing rebel reinforcements were on the way, Caldwell called off the siege the next day. Wind prevented him from burning more than three adjacent homes as he retreated, but his army did “considerable damage,” destroying three hundred hogs, one hundred fifty cattle, sheep, potatoes, corn, and hemp. They camped about twenty miles north. There, about one hundred Indians left.

  Caldwell reached a more defensible position on August 17. It was near a spring and salt lick—the Blue Lick—forty-five miles northwest of Bryan’s Station, surrounded by water on three sides on a loop of the middle fork of the Licking River—a “remarkable bend” of the river, as Boone described it.13

  There, Caldwell laid a trap. “We encamped near an advantageous hill,” said a British Indian agent, “and expecting the enemy would pursue, determined here to wait for them.”14

  The enemy had every intenti
on of pursuing. More than one hundred eighty militia from Boone’s Station (Boonesborough), Harrodsburg, and Lexington joined the Bryan’s Station men to plan their action. They debated whether to wait for several hundred reinforcements known to be on the way, but decided they couldn’t wait, and started their chase on the eighteenth. They divided into three divisions led by Colonel John Todd as overall commander, Boone, and Colonel Stephen Trigg. McGary—who had asked the governor for more troops in 1777—was part of the officers’ council of war.

  McGary, 38, had emigrated with his family from Ireland as a youth. During the Seven Years’ War, he worked as a teamster. After the war, he settled on the North Carolina frontier near Boone. With Boone and other settlers, he brought his family to Kentucky in 1775. Two years later, he was elected chairman of Kentucky County. As the frontier war intensified, he led militia raids against Indians, and was commissioned a major in the state militia in 1781.15

  About 7:30 A.M. on the 19th, Caldwell learned from scouts that the enemy was approaching. From across the river, the Whigs saw several Indians on a hill. What happened next is unclear. Some reports say Boone urged the militia to wait for reinforcements, but McGary yelled for all non-cowards to attack, and led a chaotic charge across the river. “The conduct of our officers is by some censured and charged with want of prudence in attacking at any rate,” Colonel Todd’s brother and participant, Levi, said. Another officer complained about “the vain and seditious expressions of a Major McGary. How much more harm than good can one fool do?” The rumors about his rashness were so pervasive that after the battle, McGary demanded a formal hearing for which no record survives.16

  The official accounts by Boone and others don’t mention McGary, other than that he led the center column. Regardless of McGary’s role, the battle was a Whig disaster, and the militia were in “the utmost confusion, each viewing the other with that consternation foreboding destruction.”17