That Dark and Bloody River

by Allan Eckert

  559. In many of the accounts, Lt. Ashby is mistakenly identified as Lt. Ashley. He was a member of the Eighth Pennsylvania Regiment.

  560. Capt. Downing (and undoubtedly Capt. Munn as well) thought he had killed the Shawnee chief called Half Moon, but he was incorrect. The identity of the subchief is not known, but the Shawnees themselves later admitted that their second Kispokotha war chief under their principal war chief, Shemeneto—Black Snake—,had been killed.

  561. Pvts. John Clark and John Gunsaula were among those who survived the retreat. Later both men emigrated to Kentucky and then successively into Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, where they lived out the remainder of their lives.

  562. Capt. Charles Bilderback, who had led off the massacre of the Moravians at Gnadenhütten three months earlier, survived the campaign and reached home safely.

  563. Some of those wounded later said that had it not been for the attentiveness of Angus McCoy that night, they did not think they would have survived.

  564. Crawford and his party crossed the Sandusky River two miles east of the present city of Bucyrus, close to a spring that later came to be known as McMichael’s Spring but is today known as the Charles Weithman Spring.

  565. The capture of Col. William Crawford and Dr. John Knight occurred in Sections 5 and 8 of, respectively, Jefferson and Jackson townships, Crawford Co., O.

  566. Wingenund’s Village—often referred to as Wingenund’s Camp, to differentiate it from a second Wingenund’s Village, somewhat larger, located more to the north and closer to the Sandusky River—was situated 9.5 miles east of present Bucyrus and a half-mile east-northeast of present Leesville, Crawford Co., O.

  567. One account states that Biggs, traveling alone, got to within four or five miles of the Ohio River when he stumbled into a party of Wyandots returning from committing depredations on the upper Ohio. Biggs allegedly killed two of them before he was himself slain. Since Crawford and Knight saw the scalp of Biggs less than an hour after they had separated, however, the story is evidently incorrect.

  568. The follow-up story of McQueen is rather interesting: Three of the Indians took the Frenchman off somewhere, and he was never heard of again. The lieutenant and Thomas McQueen were taken back to the Wyandot villages on the Sandusky and forced to run a brutal gauntlet, which both managed to survive, but the lieutenant was later burned at the stake. The fate of the Frenchman is unknown, but he was presumed killed. McQueen was compelled to run a number of different gauntlets after this as he was taken from village to village until, as he later put it, “there wasn’t a sound place in my head.” Those beatings were allegedly responsible for his later in life becoming blind and deaf. Finally, at one of the villages, a squaw bought him for a number of deer skins, and he was forced to do slave labor for her for a year. At the end of that time he was taken along when a party of warriors went to Detroit. There he watched for a chance to escape and finally did so, finding refuge at the fort. After the Indians were gone, he managed to get a job in the store of a British trader. Sometime later one of the Girty brothers (possibly James) was attacked at night by two men and severely beaten, and McQueen was blamed as having had a hand in it. He was imprisoned and kept in manacles for three months before finally being paroled, though restricted to the limits of Detroit. In wandering about the town he fell in with four other men similarly paroled—one of them white and three blacks—and together they concocted a plan to escape. During the night they stole a boat and glided down the Detroit River to Lake Erie, planning to come ashore somewhere west of Sandusky Bay and then try to make their way south through Indian territory to Kentucky. When land loomed ahead of them, they made it to the shore and immediately thrust the boat back out into the water to drift away, so as not to draw attention to where they had made landfall. Too late they discovered they had landed on an island (probably one of the present Bass Islands, then known as the Sister Islands), and they were soon recaptured and taken back to Detroit. McQueen was again jailed in chains. A little later he was offered his freedom on condition that he enlist in the British Army, but he refused to do so. When peace was finally declared, he was given his freedom and returned home, only then learning that his brother, Benjamin, had been killed as the army retreated from the Battle of Sandusky. McQueen got married in 1801 and settled in Indiana, where he died shortly after the War of 1812. Three of his sons became Methodist ministers.

  569. This was the only act of cannibalism known to have occurred in the Crawford Campaign.

  570. James Paull made it back to the Ohio without further incident. He engaged in a few more Indian fights after that, though none of consequence. He was subsequently, in 1794, elected sheriff of Fayette Co., Pa. In that capacity, with the aid of a hooded executioner, he hanged the murderer of John Chadwick, who had been beaten to death with a club in his tavern. Chadwick, incidentally, was one of the survivors of the Sandusky Campaign.

  571. One account, apparently somewhat romanticized, states that the young Virginia private, Thomas Heady, actually escaped the ambush but accidentally blundered into a party of Wyandots a few hours later and engaged in a fierce hand-to-hand struggle with them, during which he suffered a tomahawk gash on his upper leg. He was then taken to the New Half King’s Town at present Smithville, Wyandot Co., O.

  572. Joshua Collins, who had been brought to Monakaduto’s Town the day before, had indeed been forced to run a gauntlet there, along with half a dozen other captives, one of whom had faltered in his run and was beaten to death. Collins was held at the town for three days and then taken 40 miles down the Sandusky to the British trading post at Lower Sandusky, on the site of the present city of Fremont, Sandusky Co., O. There he was sold to a party of British Rangers returning to Detroit. Held prisoner at Detroit for a time and questioned considerably about the recent campaign against the Sandusky Towns and the state of frontier defense on the Ohio, he was finally transported overland through Canada to New York, arriving there on December 4, 1782. There he was held for a short while longer before finally being turned over to the Americans at Dobbs Ferry on the Hudson River in a prisoner exchange. From there he continued home on foot and arrived there on January 23, 1783.

  573. Michael Walters and Christopher Coffman were awakened by their eight Chippewa captors before dawn the next morning and taken to Lower Sandusky (present Fremont), but as they approached the town, they came to the gauntlet area, where a painted post stood at one end. At once fearful their prisoners would be taken from them and made to run the gauntlet here—and perhaps be killed—the Chippewas detoured away from the town, giving it a very wide berth, and returned to the river where it enters Sandusky Bay well below the town. They then camped until a bateau was brought to transport them all to Detroit. For some reason not disclosed to the captives, the Chippewas, as they neared Detroit, decided not to stop there but continued up the Detroit River, through Lake St. Clair, up the St. Clair River to the foot of Lake Huron and then along the Michigan coastline all the way up to the Mackinac Strait, where on June 18 they reached the British post called Michilimackinac. Here the Chippewas finally accepted a ransom from Lt. Gov. Patrick Sinclair and turned their prisoners over to him. Sinclair questioned the pair extensively and learned all the details of the American invasion against the Sandusky Towns—how and where the army had rendezvoused, the scope of its supplies and weapons, how and by whom it was officered and the details of the defeat by the Indians and British Rangers; all of which Sinclair wrote into a report which he sent to Gov.-Gen. Frederick Haldimand. The two men told him the expedition had been established by direction of Gen. Irvine of Fort Pitt, who commanded the Thirteenth Virginia Regiment, although that was not quite accurate since the Thirteenth Virginia no longer existed. In 1778 the Virginia Line was reduced, and the Thirteenth Regiment became the Ninth Regiment. Later, on February 12, 1781, a reorganization of Virginia Continental troops was made, and the Ninth Regiment received the new designation of Seventh Virginia Regiment. After being held three months at Michilimackinac, Walter
s and Coffman were taken to Montreal via Detroit, Fort Erie, Fort Niagara and Carleton Island, finally reaching their destination with other American prisoners from Detroit on October 28, where they were jailed. Both Walters and Coffman were eventually freed in a prisoner exchange two years later. Coffman got back first. Walters went home via Lake Champlain, Crown Point, Ticonderoga, Saratoga, Albany, Allentown and Harris Ferry (present Harrisburg, Pa.). He subsequently received the largest amount of back pay collected by any soldier of the Crawford Army, £102.

  574. This fork in the trail was located some seven miles east of present Upper Sandusky, a quarter-mile east of the roadside rest area on U.S. Route 30.

  575. John Leith, an American originally from Leith, Scotland, had been taken captive by the Indians many years before while engaged in the Indian trade. Though not adopted into a tribe, he was given the name of John Titt, and because of his trading abilities and the fairness with which he had always treated the Indians, he had been permitted to continue trading among them, with British goods, while still their prisoner. He eventually married an American woman—Sally Lowery—a widow, who had been taken captive with her son some years before and who then lived as a captive in a neighboring Delaware village. Since the couple were captives of different tribes, they were not permitted to live together, but they visited each other frequently. Over two hundred of their descendants still live in Wyandot and Crawford counties in Ohio. Leith had small trading posts on the Sandusky River at Lower Sandusky (present Fremont) and at present Tiffin, but the store just east of the gauntlet ground and just south of the Smithville Church, adjacent to the New Half King’s Town, was the principal post. Years before the Battle of Sandusky, he had attempted to start another trading post on the Muskingum at Goschachgunk (present Coshocton) but was attacked by Mingo and Wyandot marauders and lost 14 packhorse loads of furs to them. Leith eventually escaped his captivity and resumed his life on the American frontier.

  576. One account states that Crawford offered Girty $30,000 to save him; others, probably more reliably, say the amount Crawford first offered was $1,000.

  577. No further details are known respecting the ultimate fate of Ens. William Crawford, apart from the fact that the Shawnees there reported that several captives taken from Col. Crawford’s army were burned at the stake. Ens. Crawford, never heard of again, is assumed to have been one of these.

  578. Contrary to the legend that has grown up around Simon Girty as the arch-renegade who delighted in torturing prisoners, he strove far beyond what might have been expected in his efforts to save Crawford’s life; even, as will be seen, to the point of ultimately putting his own life in jeopardy. His efforts to save Crawford were extensive and fully corroborated by Mrs. Valentine McCormick, wife of the proprietor of McCormick’s Trading Post at the New Half King’s Town, who personally witnessed what he did. Most histories of Crawford’s campaign, his capture and execution have, unfortunately, been led astray by what was long considered the foremost history of these events as portrayed by Consul Wilshire Butterfield in his book, An Historical Account of the Expedition Against Sandusky Under William Crawford in 1782; with Biographical Sketches, Personal Reminiscences and Descriptions of Interesting Localities, including, also, Details of the Disastrous Retreat, the Barbarities of the Savages and the Awful Death of Colonel Crawford by Torture (Cincinnati, 1873). Sadly, Butter-field’s history of the campaign must be largely discounted, since he was himself strongly influenced by a highly prejudiced account of these events attributed to Dr. John Knight and entitled Dr. Knight’s Narrative, which was, in fact, written and edited by Hugh H. Brackenridge, who interviewed Dr. Knight at his bedside and grossly distorted what Knight told him. He was equally prejudicial in respect to John Slover’s Narrative. Brackenridge made no secret of the fact that he positively detested the Indians and that he deliberately set about to paint Simon Girty as the most villainously cruel and loathsome renegade who ever lived. Anything Brackenridge encountered that showed Girty capable of compassion was omitted or deliberately altered to Girty’s detriment. Prior to becoming involved with Dr. Knight, Brackenridge had for some time published a Philadelphia political journal, in which his anti-Indian leanings were clearly exposed. Indians were consistently referred to as savages or monsters or worse in his writings, and in his editorial observations, included with both the John Slover and John Knight narratives, he refers to the native people as those “animals vulgarly called Indians.” He emphatically claimed that white men could not deal with Indians in any respect because of the cruelty and fierceness of the latter, that such Indians had no rights whatever to the land they occupied and that, in fact, all western lands belonged only to those who cultivated them in accordance to the dictates of God as they appeared in the Bible. Simon Girty’s wife, Catherine, often stated emphatically in later years that Dr. Knight’s narrative was “either utterly untrue or greatly exaggerated.”

  579. The springs where they drank were the ones previously noted in present downtown Upper Sandusky, Wyandot Co., O. The path they followed northward was essentially that taken by present State Routes 57 and 63. The trail upon which they turned off to the northwest was encountered at approximately the site of the present Wyandot County Fairgrounds.

  580. Having left the area of the present Wyandot County Fairgrounds, the party traveled a little west of due northwest, and in a mile the trail angled more directly due west and followed the route presently taken by State Route 199. The unnamed Delaware village was located a short distance northeast of the site of the present village of Lovell, Wyandot Co., O.

  581. This trail from the east was the direct route from the New Half King’s Town and McCormick’s and Leith’s trading posts on the Sandusky River at present Smithville to the principal Delaware village, Pimoacan’s Town—also called Pipe’s Town—on Tymochtee Creek. The place where this trail intersected the trail the Delawares and their captives was on was approximately a half-mile east of the present drive-in theater on State Route 199, nine-tenths of a mile northwest of present Lovell, Wyandot Co., O., the intersection itself the same distance due north of present Lovell.

  582. In his narrative, Knight is alleged to have said that at this time Girty berated him sharply and called him a “damned rascal,” but there is sufficient reason to believe that this remark was arbitrarily inserted by Hugh H. Brackenridge, Knight’s extremely prejudiced editor. Brackenridge wrote down all of Knight’s recollections at his bedside and later edited and published the popular and very widely circulated Dr. Knight’s Narrative, which is replete with falsehoods and exaggerations and laid the foundation for Simon Girty being branded as the cruelest and most dastardly renegade of all time. In fact, Girty’s attempt to save Crawford was not an isolated incident based on an old friendship; numerous well-documented accounts show that Girty consistently, where possible, helped American captives in a variety of ways, ranging from providing them with food, clothing and medical attention to saving them from execution.

  583. Tarhe’s Town was located at the site of the present village of Zanesfield, Logan Co., O., on the upper reaches of the Mad River, four and a half miles upstream from the Shawnee principal village of Wapatomica. Buckangehela’s Town was located at the mouth of present Buckangehela’s Creek, where it enters the upper Great Miami River at the site of the present village of Degraff, also in Logan Co.

  584. The exact location of this site where Col. Crawford was burned was for many scores of years a matter of conjecture. In the early 1980s historian Parker B. Brown began an intensive investigation to locate definitively the exact site. Through an incredible feat of research extending over several years and through a number of states, Brown little by little zeroed in on the location and finally established the site beyond any further doubt. The process of his remarkable historical detective work is fully laid out in an article he wrote that appeared in The Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine, vol. 68, no. 1 (January 1985), under the title “The Search for the Colonel William Crawford Burn Site: An Inv
estigative Report.” Mr. Brown must be highly commended for his diligent and painstaking research into this matter. A monument was erected at a spot near the burn site (which was thought to be exactly on the burn site when erected) in 1877 and was dedicated on August 30 of that year. It is reached by going east on County Road 29 for one half-mile from the present village of Crawford, Wyandot Co., O. At this point a gravel drive goes due north 1,100 feet and terminates 200 feet south of the right bank of Tymochtee Creek at the Crawford Burn Site Monument. Upon this monument is the inscription: “In memory of Colonel Crawford who was burnt by the Indians in this valley June 11, A.D. 1782.” The precise burn site, however, has been established by Mr. Brown’s exhaustive research as being 600 feet south and just a little west of the monument, on the west side of the gravel road where, heading south, it makes a slight curve to the east. There is a structure on the site, as indicated on the U.S. Geological Survey 7.5-minute topographical McCutchenville Quadrangle, R13E, T1S, Section 26. The statements of five other captives who were on hand at the time of Crawford’s death coincide very closely and go far to refute the account attributed to Dr. Knight by Hugh H. Brackenridge. Those statements are to be found in the Draper Papers as follows: Elizabeth Turner McCormick (DD-S-17/191-192, 204-205), Cornelius Quick (DD-E-10/146-147, 155-158), Stephen Chilton (DD-CC-11/264-268), Ambrose White (DD-CC-12/126-127) and Joseph Jackson (DD-C-11/62).

  585. Knight’s account says in respect to this moment: “Girty then came up to me and bade me prepare for death. He said, however, I was not to die at this place, but to be burnt at the Shawnese towns. He swore by gawd I need not expect to escape death, but should suffer it in all its extremities. He then observed, that some prisoners had given him to understand, that if our people had had him, they would not hurt him; for his part, he said, he did not believe it, but desired to know my opinion of the matter, but being at that time in great anguish and distress for the torments the Colonel was suffering before my eyes, as well as the expectation of undergoing the same fate in two days, I made little or no answer. He expressed a great deal of ill will for Colonel Gibson, and said he was one of his greatest enemies, and more to the same purpose, to all which I paid little attention.” No other account of the events at Crawford’s execution mentions any such exchange, and it is suspected of being another editorial doctoring of the facts or, more likely, a fabrication inserted by Brackenridge as additional character assassination of Simon Girty.