A Woman of Courage on the West Virginia Frontier (18 page)

This photo of a re-created Wyandot longhouse at Campbellville, Ontario, Canada, shows the interior of the longhouse, where all the clan members within a Wyandot village lived together.
Courtesy of Tom Freda
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Even the colonial farmer Crevecoeur speculated, “It cannot be, therefore, so bad as we generally conceive it to be; there must be in their social bond something singularly captivating and far superior to anything to be boasted among us…There must be something more congenial to our native dispositions than the fictitious society in which we live.”
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Among these people and within this world, Phebe would spend the next three years of her life. She was, for all intents and purposes, a Wyandot and, most likely, a valued family member. However, deep inside, she longed for her old life and for her husband, and she probably dreamed of finding a way home. In the meantime, she persevered, harbored hope and remained resilient. Unbeknownst to her, the way home would appear one day, and it would do so in the form of two of the most legendary American villains of her time.

Chapter 5

Two Traitors

Simon Girty and Alexander McKee

E
XCITEMENT IN THE
V
ILLAGE
: S
IMON
G
IRTY
A
RRIVES

During the three years from late September 1785 until the autumn of 1788, Phebe lived as a Wyandot—working, eating and sleeping with her new adopted family. She likely learned enough of the language to communicate her needs and, perhaps, enough to understand their tales of the world’s creation, with the paradise of Wendake at its heart, as the elders told them during long winter nights in her family’s longhouse. It was not a bad life but certainly not an easy one, in many ways just as harsh as that of a settler on the Allegheny Plateau. Still, she apparently dreamed of returning to Thomas and never gave up hope that he would find her. However, while Thomas maintained the faith that he would see his beloved wife again, in the end, it was Phebe who would have to summon the courage and strength to be the architect of her life’s resurrection.

One day that fall, she noticed an uncommon commotion and excitement in the village. Inquiring as to its cause, she learned that the famous British agent Simon Girty was coming to the village to meet with Darby and the village council about an upcoming meeting of the Indian nations to be held in October at the foot of the Maumee rapids.
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Although Girty is referred to here as “famous,” Americans of the late eighteenth century would have said he was more properly described as “infamous.” Despite this, Phebe decided Girty might be her one hope for a way home.

Simon Girty is, perhaps, one of the least understood figures in American history. A child captive of the Seneca who returned to the white world as a young man, Americans referred to him as the “White Savage,” and his service to the British and Indian nations earned not only their hatred but their fear as well. They saw him as the worst sort of Loyalist Tory: someone who fought for the American cause only to change sides and then, worst of all, become a “renegade” who used his relationship with the Indians to wreak havoc on the frontier. One contemporary referred to him as “a savage in manner and principle, who spent his life in the perpetration of a demoniac vengeance against his countrymen.”
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Girty even inspired tall tales and yarns about the horrors he supposedly perpetrated on innocent settlers that were so awful, parents used them to frighten their children into obedience. As a result, a generation of frontier girls and boys were told that, if they were not good, Simon Girty, the “Fiend of the Frontier,” a “White Beast in human form” or simply “Dirty Girty” would come to snatch them away in the night.
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However, Stephen Vincent Benet gave Girty perhaps his most noteworthy place in American legend with his famous 1937 short story, “The Devil and Daniel Webster.” In that tale, when the Devil calls in the jury that would determine Jabez Stone’s fate, Girty is among the cast of murderers and miscreants who were to hear Stone’s story. Girty is described by Benet as “the renegade, who saw white men burned at the stake and whooped with the Indians to see them burn. His eyes were green, like a catamount’s, and the stains on his hunting shirt did not come from the blood of the deer.”
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Although there are now some modern revisionist works that paint Girty in a far more favorable light, a few recent historians have continued to describe him in a manner that, while not as severe as those above, would still be acceptable to Americans of the late colonial period. One historian who wrote about Girty only nineteen years after Benet stated that Girty was “a cruel, half-savage lout who knew Indians and had a certain skill in forest warfare.” As opposed to the more recent revisionist works that seek to credit Girty with his positive influence on the Indians and anoint him with a strong sense of honesty and integrity, these earlier histories say he was one of “the shiftless, the indolent, the refugees from justice or service, the drifters and failures who found the red man’s society a welcome haven from the competitive bustle and hurry of Eastern civilization.”
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However, as is often the case, the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle, and Girty was no more a great hero than he was a devil.

Nevertheless, whether a hero or a villain, Girty was, without doubt, a force to be reckoned with on the American frontier. By the late eighteenth century, he had developed great diplomatic skills, which he employed effectively among the Native American nations, and he was especially influential with the Shawnee, Miami and Wyandot.
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Furthermore, American officials so feared his abilities in leading the Indians that they once placed a £1,500 bounty on his head, which was an enormous sum of money in the late 1700s.
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Simon Girty is depicted wearing his signature red bandana on his head in this painting by Cecy Rose,
Simon Girty Scouts the Ambush, Ft. Laurens, 1779. Courtesy of the artist
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But Girty was far from alone in his activities. Alexander McKee, the man most closely linked to Girty throughout his adult life, was another American turncoat. McKee was more educated and more sophisticated than the rough-and-tumble Girty, but the two men formed a powerful alliance throughout the American Revolution that was largely responsible for maintaining the British hold on the frontier throughout the war. More importantly to this story, however, the equally famous McKee would also play a role in Phebe’s gamble to find a way back home.

G
IRTY AND
M
C
K
EE

In 1741, Simon Girty was born on the frontier in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, to his father, also named Simon, and his mother, Mary. The elder Simon was an Irish immigrant and fur trader who worked the woodlands between western Pennsylvania and the Ohio River, exchanging the English powder, pots, rum and blankets he packed onto his horses with the Indians for beaver pelts and deerskins. It was a lucrative business but also a dangerous one. The competition with French traders was fierce, and one had to fear them far more than the Indians. Simon Sr. was considered an honest man by the Indians with whom he dealt, and he maintained an especially good relationship with the Delaware. As a result, Simon, his older brother, Thomas, and younger brothers, James and George, grew up with Indians of various nations and tribes regularly in their midst. At times, Indian delegations making their way to Fort Duquesne for treaty conferences would stop at the Girty farm, where they would be welcomed with a place to rest, eat and drink. Young Simon enjoyed these visits immensely, and he would wander among these visitors, fascinated by their clothes and the strange languages they spoke. To him, these were friends, rather than people to be feared.
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However, in 1750, the perilous nature of fur trading on the frontier claimed Girty’s father when the elder Simon was killed during an altercation with a drunk, leaving Mary alone to manage the farm with her four boys. But a few years later, a neighboring farmer named John Turner came calling on Mary Girty, and in 1754, he married her, becoming Simon’s stepfather. Turner seems to have been a good man who treated his stepsons as his own, but the harmony in the new family was interrupted by the outbreak of the French and Indian War. With much of the conflict focused on western Pennsylvania, raids by Indians and their French allies became common, leading John Turner and the other settlers to build a refuge fort near their farm, which they named Fort Granville.

In late July 1756, as Indian raids increased near the newly built fort, Simon and the rest of his family forted up along with many families from the nearby area. After a few days, the immediate threat appeared to have diminished, and most of the militia and settlers left the fort to work their fields. However, John Turner and his family stayed at Fort Granville, along with about twenty-four militiamen. Most thought that the danger had passed, but in fact, a worse threat was just over the horizon. On August 2, a force of fifty-five French soldiers and more than one hundred Delaware warriors emerged from the forest to attack the fort. The small militia force managed to hold out for twenty-four hours but eventually was forced to agree to a French demand for surrender in exchange for quarter.
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Simon and the other captives were first marched to Fort Duquesne, but once there, they learned the French commander was rewarding the Delaware by giving them all the white captives to do with as they pleased. The Delaware, in turn, marched them to their nearby village of Kittanning on the Allegheny River, where they decided to torture and kill John Turner, who was burned at the stake as Mary and the boys helplessly looked on. As for the rest of the Turner family, the Delaware gave Mary and her infant son by John Turner to a band of Shawnee, while the four Girty brothers remained with them. However, a few weeks after Mary’s departure, British forces suddenly attacked the Delaware camp. They rescued Thomas Girty, but Simon, James and George were forced to flee with the surviving Delaware. Shortly thereafter, the Delaware decided to keep George while trading James to a group of Shawnee and giving Simon to the Seneca.
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The Seneca adopted the fifteen-year-old Simon, and like Phebe, he was first required to run a gauntlet. However, his was more daunting than hers would be. Stripped naked, he ran past men, women and boys, all lined up to beat him as he tried to reach the objective. Despite receiving often brutal blows, the teenager made it to the end, where he was lifted onto the shoulders of two Seneca warriors amidst the joyous cheers and shouts of the villagers. His new clan mothers then washed him, dressed him in Seneca clothing and sent him to begin his apprenticeship as a Seneca hunter and warrior. As Simon experienced the peaceful, harmonious existence that characterized village life, he also displayed a natural gift for languages, quickly becoming fluent in Seneca and Delaware, as well as the dialects spoken by the tribes of other neighboring nations. Before long, he was sufficiently skilled in these languages to act as an interpreter for the tribe.
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However, once the war between France and Great Britain had concluded, Simon’s time with the Seneca came to an end.

In the fall of 1764, after eight years living with the Seneca, Simon was returned to British hands at Fort Pitt under the terms of the peace agreement. Now twenty-three years old and a stocky, strong young man, he was devastated by this development. Simon saw himself as a Seneca warrior and someone who had earned the right to live among them. The Seneca chief, Guyasuta, to whom Simon had virtually become a son, took Simon directly to see Sir William Johnson, the British superintendent of Indian Affairs. When they arrived, Simon was first introduced to Johnson and then to his twenty-nine-year-old deputy superintendent, Alexander McKee. Although they might not have recognized one another immediately, it quickly became apparent that they had once been acquainted as children.
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Alexander McKee was the son of Thomas McKee, who had been the elder Simon Girty’s business partner. As a result, Simon and Alexander had known one another as boys. McKee’s mother, also named Mary, spent her youth as a captive of the Shawnee until rescued by Thomas McKee. They married sometime later, and Alexander was their first child. Beyond that, little is known about his childhood. We do know, however, that he learned to speak fluent Shawnee and had the kind of knowledge of Indian customs and traditions that only someone who had spent much time among them might acquire. Further, whatever formal education McKee received was far superior to that typical of his contemporaries, as the historical record of his writings show a highly legible script, good spelling and cogent composition. As a result, by the time he was a young man, Alexander McKee was able to adroitly function in two worlds, that of British colonial society as well as that of the Indian nations.
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