Fears of Cowardice
DANIEL BOONE WARNED THE OTHERS THAT AN AMBUSH PROBABLY LAY AHEAD. He knew the Kentucky’s lower Blue Licks by heart. He had hunted and fished on the Licking River. He had “made” salt here. He had even been captured by the Shawnee here. And if he knew one thing about Indians, he knew they did not show themselves without some purpose.
“You see the Indians have shown themselves on the hill beyond the river, loitering, as if to invite pursuit,” he told his fellow frontiersmen that day in August of 1782. What’s more, “There are two ravines there, filled with brush and timber for their protection; it is not wise to heedlessly run into the trap set for us.”
But his caution would be brushed aside as other leaders of his two-hundredman party argued over strategy—and worried about looking like cowards. Even Boone, when it was hinted that he was a coward, is said to have reacted defensively. “If you are determined to go and meet the enemy at this great disadvantage, go on,” he bristled. “I can go as far into an Indian fight as any man.”
Militia Colonel Daniel Boone and his fellow Kentucky frontiersmen of course hoped to run into Indians—Indians and their British or Tory leaders who just days before had attacked Bryan’s Station, forty miles to the southwest, near present-day Lexington. The Kentuckians were in hot pursuit of more than three hundred warriors and their white allies, but even so, it would be best to avoid an ambush. Indeed, it appeared that Tory Captain William Caldwell’s party, including the notorious Simon Girty, deliberately was leaving a well-marked trail for the pursuers to follow.
The leaders of Boone’s group included militia Majors Hugh McGary and Silas Harlan, along with Lieutenant Colonels John Todd and Stephen Trigg, but Major Levi Todd of Fayette County was in overall command as ranking local militia officer. Reinforcements were expected to show up any day, under Benjamin Logan from St. Asaph’s Station. For that reason, Boone had argued that it would be wise to await Logan and his added manpower. But McGary, upset at insinuations that he was a coward, was adamant in urging immediate pursuit. Others went along, arguing that if they waited, the Indians and their leaders could escape.
So it was that the pursuing party set out on August 18, reportedly nearly two hundred militiamen on horses following the well-marked trail of the enemy ahead. When they reached Caldwell’s campsite from the night before, Boone examined the area and said the enemy column could number as many as five hundred. He warned against an ambush, but once again, others were adamant… and again there was that fear of being branded a coward.
As a council of war was held to debate the next step, reported one of the onlooking officers later, “The principal officers appeared to be confused in their councils—each afraid to speak candidly for fear of being suspected for timidity.” In the end, the pursuers rushed on, only hours behind their quarry on a buffalo trace leading to the lower Blue Licks.
Soon after dawn on Monday, August 19, they reached a ridge across from the Blue Licks. This was when they saw, on another ridgetop north of the river, Indians briefly “showing themselves,” as Boone termed it.
The famous woodsman was unable to convince his compatriots to wait for Logan and his reinforcements before proceeding any farther. That failing, he pleaded that they at the very least send a flanking party around behind the likely Indian ambush site just ahead.
Still arguing over their best strategy, the pursuers moved down from their ridge to a ford on the southern side of the Licking River. It was now that Major McGary insinuated that Boone himself was less than a paragon of bravery. After Boone’s retort that he could fight the Indians as well as any man, Major Harlan declared, “We have force enough to whip all the Indians we will find.”
As the argument continued, McGary finally lost all patience, according to one of the onlookers. In a “passion,” he “cursed them for a set of cowards, and swore that as they had come so far for a fight they should have it, and that they should fight or he would disgrace them; that now it should be shown who had courage and who were damn cowards.”
With all that said, McGary “dashed into the river and called upon all who were not cowards to follow him.” Boone then appealed to Levi Todd as overall commander to stop McGary, but the militia officer allegedly replied, “Let them go and we will remain in the rear; and if they are surprised the blame will be on McGary.”
Basically, that is what transpired within the hour. All the frontiersmen soon had crossed the river. McGary’s group of about twenty-five moved on in advance of the main party, which followed in three single-file columns proceeding abreast, one of them led by Boone and including his son Israel, then twenty-one. They hadn’t gone quite a mile when, in a ravine, shots and Indian whoops broke the heavy silence.
All but two of the men with McGary went down with the first volley. The Kentuckians behind fired back, but in minutes Trigg and the men in his column were killed, and Todd’s column fell to pieces as well. Only Boone and some of his seventy men were unscathed. Miraculously, McGary survived as well.
The survivors, apparently on foot for the most part, turned and ran for the river ford behind, with the Indians in hot pursuit. Some of the Indians joining in the chase grabbed and mounted horses belonging to the Kentuckians. Said Todd later: “Several attempts were made to rally, but all in vain.”
In all, seventy-seven of the Kentuckians were killed in the wilderness fracas, often called the last battle of the Revolutionary War—the last Indian battle in the Kentucky of today, as well. At least twenty were captured, most of them to be tortured to death or burned at the stake. One of that group who escaped said the odor of a burning human being was “the awfullest smell” he had ever experienced. In all, a sad day for the Kentuckians…a sad day on a very personal level for Daniel Boone, too.
While fleeing the Indians on foot, he stopped to seize a loose horse for his son’s possible escape, but Israel wouldn’t leave his father behind. The younger Boone was then struck by a musket ball and fell into Daniel’s arms, mortally wounded.
With three Indians closely pursuing, Boone tried to run while carrying his son, an impossible task. The unimpeded braves gaining on him by the millisecond, Boone stopped suddenly, turned and shot the closest Indian, then plunged into the nearest thickets before the other two Indians could react. By now, Boone realized that all he could do for Israel was to hide him, which he did. The elder Boone then made his way back to the river, swam across, and rejoined his fellow frontiersmen as they regrouped.
Bolstered by Logan and his force, the Americans returned to the scene a few days later. According to Boone’s own account, it was a grisly scene. “Being reinforced, we returned to bury the dead, and found their bodies strewed every where, cut and mangled in a dreadful manner.” Worse yet, some had been “torn and eaten by wild beasts; those in the river eaten by fishes, all in such a putrefied condition that none could be distinguished from another.”
Nonetheless, Boone was able to recover his son’s body, which he carried back for proper burial at Boone’s Station.
Along the Kentucky frontier, recriminations flew back and forth as various survivors and officials sought to place blame for the debacle. Among the militiamen who survived, meanwhile, many thought they at least had made their enemy pay dearly for his success in the fifteen-minute Battle of Blue Licks—Levi Todd, for one, later said, “The enemy must have suffered considerably.”
As for those themes of courage versus cowardice, on view at the battle site today is a historical marker bearing a few final words from Daniel Boone: “So valiantly did our small party fight, that, to the memory of those who unfortunately fell in the battle, enough of honor cannot be paid.”
Personal Glimpse: Simon Girty
WHEN HE WAS TEN, HIS FATHER WAS KILLED IN A DUEL. WHEN HE WAS FIFTEEN, his family was captured by Delaware and Shawnee Indians allied with the French. His new stepfather was tortured and burned at the stake. The teenager was then sent to live with Seneca Indians in northern New York.
He was with
the Senecas for the next eight years, and he became widely reputed as a hunter swift of foot in summer or winter.
Returned to white society with the end of the French and Indian War, he was reunited with two brothers also raised by Indians. All three became interpreters for traders and the British Indian Department at Pittsburgh.
Of the Girty brothers, though, it was the adopted Seneca Simon who became best known for good relations with their Indian contacts and even influence among the western tribes. “At home” in Pittsburgh, however, he was ostracized by fellow whites. In short order, he was allied with the Virginia interests in a long-smoldering dispute with Pennsylvanians over claims to virgin lands in the Ohio country. Then, on the eve of the Revolution, came Lord Dunmore’s War against the Indians. Simon Girty became a distinguished “frontier scout, spy, soldier, and peace negotiator,” wrote Phillip Hoffman in The American Revolution, 1775–1783.
As the tide of rebellion against British policies turned into armed conflict, Girty started out “an enthusiastic American Patriot.” He served the cause as a messenger, emissary, and spy, repeatedly sent out among the tribes in the lonely wilderness.
Still, raids by Indians aligned with the British rocked the frontier—in some circles, distrust and suspicion were attached to anyone thought to be “soft” on Indians. “Returning from another solo mission to the Senecas—his own adopted tribe—and narrowly escaping after they had taken him prisoner for an American spy,” said Hoffman, “Girty reached Fort Pitt, only to find he had been fired.”
Resigning his commission in the Continental Army, he joined the Pittsburgh militia as a lieutenant. With the arrival of a new commander for the war on the frontier, however, he was arrested, his old associations with suspected Loyalists (and the Indians) an obvious reason. The charges against him soon dropped, Girty was with the Pittsburgh militia when the new frontier commander, General Edward Hand, mounted a drive against hostile Indians in early 1778, apparently failed to find any, then allowed his frustrated men to turn their wrath on a “few innocent old men, some women and a child, all of whom were at peace with America.”
It was only a few weeks later that Girty, trader Matthew Elliott, and Alexander McKee, former assistant deputy for Indian Affairs, went over to the enemy at Detroit. Quickly granted a colonel’s rank, McKee was placed in charge of Indian operations for the British, while the well-known Girty “was hired by the Indian Department to incite, arm, provision and join the Indians at war.” Soon his two brothers, James and George, joined him.
But it was Simon who rose to the fore—this time becoming known among his former countrymen as the worst kind of monster, villain, traitor, and murderer imaginable. He was hated, notes Hoffman, “both as a traitor to his country and to his race.” He accordingly “was blamed for every attack and accused of the most outrageous and barbaric crimes.” The new state of Pennsylvania convicted him of treason in absentia and put a price on his head.
In the years of often horrifying frontier warfare that followed, Simon Girty undoubtedly fought alongside the Indians, saw atrocities committed and, fairly or unfairly, was associated with them. According to Hoffman’s account, Girty at first sought out military targets, had asked his superiors in Detroit to urge restraint upon the Indians, and had rescued various prisoners from death at the hands of their Indian captors. “No less than 21 American captives, both men and women, claimed Simon saved them from torture or gave them aid.”
Even so, he became known as “a sadistic, bloodthirsty ‘White Savage’” throughout the frontier. Indeed, for the two centuries following his death in Canada in 1818, “Simon was cast as the villain of American books, articles, folk songs, plays and films.”
One major reason, said Hoffman, was an unfortunate incident on the frontier in June 1782 that followed the capture of American Colonel William Crawford by Indians of various tribes. Infuriated by an earlier American-staged massacre of neutral Christian Indians in the vicinity, Crawford’s captors condemned him to death at the stake, Hoffman relates.
“The colonel asked for Girty, whom he had known for years, and begged his help. Simon promised he would do his best. Unfortunately, Crawford was a captive of Delawares, with whom Girty had little influence. Simon argued strongly for Crawford’s life but was finally rebuked and threatened with death himself.”
Girty tried to talk Crawford into a secret escape plan, but the colonel turned down that offer. The next morning, “Crawford was stripped, tortured for hours, and then slowly burned to death.”
Here the grim story becomes complicated by two conflicting eyewitness reports. One witness, said Hoffman, “later stated that Girty departed the village before the execution to avoid watching his friend’s agony.” But Dr. John Knight, an onlooker who escaped later, said that Girty “had done nothing to save Crawford and had even laughed cruelly when the colonel begged him to shoot him through the heart to end his misery.”
Although Knight’s version of events “differed completely from a number of other reports by witnesses,” his was the story that was told and retold throughout America. Already badly besmirched, Girty’s name was absolutely blackened from then on.
According to historian Hoffman, however, “Exhaustive research into Girty’s life, involving years of reviewing unpublished holographic materials, many of which were either omitted on purpose or simply missed by earlier biographers, leads one to the conclusion that Girty is not deserving of the reputation that has plagued him all these years.”
His real problem, suggested Hoffman, was early American “racism.” His real sin, trying to achieve a balance between his two worlds of Indian and white. Whatever the true underlying facts, Girty emerged from the frontier wars of the Revolution a fighter…with his Indian allies, with the British, and sometimes both. Thus he led the Wyandots in the mixed force that defeated Governor Arthur St. Clair of the American Northwest Territory in 1791. He was with the tribes in their own defeat by Anthony Wayne at Fallen Timbers in 1795. Disillusioned, turning to drink, and failing in health, he removed to his farm in Canada when the British gave up their Detroit base to the Americans in 1796.
Taking up quarters with friendly Mohawks on the Grand River after hearing of an assassination threat during the War of 1812, he later returned to his farm in 1815, blind by this time. Dying there three years later, he left a wife who, like himself, had been a white captive raised by Indians from age fourteen to seventeen…at which point, in 1784, she had been found and rescued by Simon Girty himself.
Odds and Ends
ODD MOMENTS SEEN, HEARD, OR EXPERIENCED ON THE ROAD TO REVOLUTION:
It may be apocryphal, but two of George Washington’s companions in his campaign travels through New Jersey the summer of 1778 later said he did stop one day to visit an unfortunate hydrocephalic near Passaic Falls. Known far and wide as a sort of freak, the unhappy Peter Van Winkle “had a head so enormous that it needed a framework on the back of his chair to support it,” said an openly skeptical John Tebbel in his book George Washington’s America. Further, this unfortunate “could not be moved without help.” Washington supposedly asked the man about his politics. Was he Whig or Tory?
“Well, it do not take an active part on either side,” he replied, “it” apparently a reference to his huge head.
Peter’s nephew Peter G. Van Winkle later would become a U.S. senator from West Virginia after growing up “in a stone house at the foot of Bank Street, in Paterson, New Jersey, a house that was later the Passaic Hotel.”
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That awful winter of 1779–1780 the Continental Army spent in Morristown, New Jersey, supposedly the worst of the century, had its odd or light moments. But how to classify the story of Miss Temperance Wick’s outing on her handsome horse one day?
While she was certainly an object of more than passing interest among some men of the army, it was her horse that others really coveted. In the Revolutionary period, a good horse in that neighborhood was known to have commanded a price of $20,000 in devalued
Continental dollars. Still, there was no excusing the conduct of those Continentals who interrupted her ride on Jockey Hollow Road one day.
“She was pursued and surrounded by several soldiers who claimed her horse for use of the army,” wrote Anne Hollingsworth Wharton in her 1897 biography, Martha Washington.
But for this “fearless rider,” no real problem. She simply whirled her steed about and set off at hot speed for home, a farm at the end of Jockey Hollow Road. She “so outdistanced her pursuers” that she had time to reach her home, dismount, and carefully lead her horse out of sight. That meant taking the mount through the kitchen and parlor to a bedroom in the rear of the house.
The pursuing soldiers rode up moments later, but search as they would, they couldn’t find Miss Wick’s fine horse—“no indiscreet neigh or whinny revealing his presence in ‘my lady’s chamber,’ where he remained undisturbed until the troops had left the neighborhood.”
***
A kind gesture…or psychological Trojan horse?
That was the issue George Washington dealt with after the widow of a British officer attempted to use a flag of truce to send an ailing Mrs. Washington a box of “Necessary Articles for her recovery.” It was a Martha to Martha gift at that. But would there be invisible strings attached?
Background: Martha Washington, while staying at her husband’s quarters at New Windsor, New York, in May of 1778, came down with a gallbladder attack. She suffered abdominal pain, biliousness, and jaundice. She was laid low for a solid month.
General Washington mentioned her illness in a letter dispatched May 31 with three others, including a note from Martha herself. They were intercepted by the British.
Best Little Stories from the American Revolution Page 42