A Woman of Courage on the West Virginia Frontier (19 page)

McKee was actually far more than merely familiar with the ways of the woodland Indians—he was “a fully participating and fully accepted member of Ohio Country Indian society.”
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The Shawnee of the Scioto River region considered him a member of their community, a man both admired and trusted, who spoke their language, respected their customs and observed their rituals. Given these abilities, it is not surprising that Johnson recognized McKee’s talents and brought him into the service of the Crown. In the years that followed up to the beginning of the American Revolution, McKee would serve Johnson and the British government as an interpreter and low-level diplomatic envoy under the tutelage of the veteran agent George Croghan. When Croghan retired in 1771, Johnson appointed McKee to replace Croghan as Indian agent and director of the Indian Department Commissary at Fort Pitt.
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Moreover, as the years passed and McKee’s responsibilities grew, his life and career became inexorably linked with those of Simon Girty.

While Simon’s sudden departure from life with the Seneca was a jarring experience, he managed his return to the white world better than one might have thought possible. Shortly after his arrival at Fort Pitt, he was reunited with his brothers James, who had been released by the Shawnee, and Thomas, who had been living near the fort since his rescue from the Delaware. More importantly, he quickly found employment. Alexander McKee knew he could use a man who spoke nine different Indian languages, and besides, he found Girty to be “cheerful, energetic, and perceptive.”
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In addition to his language skills, young Girty was also highly knowledgeable in the many cultural nuances, political structures, spiritual rituals, clan relationships and daily community lives of most of the Native American tribes of the Allegheny Plateau and the Ohio Country beyond. As a result, McKee made Simon Girty an employee of the British Indian Department.

With the end of the war with the French, Fort Pitt’s value as a trading center quickly grew, and within months of the Treaty of Paris, ambitious traders flocked there, anxious to expand their operations down the Ohio and even into the mysterious
Kenhtake
(Kentucky) wilderness. One of these traders was George Morgan, a young man of twenty-four years and partner in the Philadelphia mercantile firm of Baynton, Wharton and Morgan. Morgan’s ambitious plan involved moving goods by wagon from his firm’s warehouse in Philadelphia to Fort Pitt for storage and then distributing them to the Indian nations downstream on the Ohio and Mississippi in exchange for furs. In addition, Morgan planned to have the men he sent downriver also hunt buffalo, bringing the buffalo meat back to Fort Pitt salted in sealed containers for sale to both the British army in America and colonial outposts in the Caribbean.
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To accomplish this task, Morgan needed men familiar with the Indians and capable of surviving in the wilderness. They must be able to communicate with the Indians of various nations, shoot well enough to hunt and, if required, fight their way out of any confrontations with Native Americans who might not like the fact that these whites were intruding on their hunting grounds. The idea of going farther west and living the life of what became known as the “long hunter” excited Girty, so with McKee’s approval, he took leave of his position in the Indian Department and signed on with George Morgan. Assigned by Morgan as a boat foreman, he left Fort Pitt in June 1768 on a trading and hunting expedition that headed down the Ohio for the Cumberland River in northwestern Kentucky.
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This blockhouse in present-day Pittsburgh is one of the few remaining remnants of the bustling eighteenth-century commercial and military center at Fort Pitt.
Library of Congress
.

All went well for Girty’s party until they were about two hundred miles up the Cumberland near the current site of Carthage, Tennessee. The expedition beached their boats on the riverbank, and the long hunters made camp. A few men tended to the campsite as the others set off to hunt in two groups, one of which included Girty. Not far from the camp, a party of about thirty Shawnee warriors ambushed Girty and his companions. The hunters had no choice but to make a run for it, and Girty took off into the forest. He soon crossed a meadow and took cover in the trees beyond, where he waited to fire on his pursuers. When the first Shawnee appeared, Girty killed him with a single shot, and the others decided to give up the chase. As far as anyone knows, this was the first man Girty had killed, and it is ironic that it was an Indian.
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Girty headed back for the camp, where he found the rest of the expedition’s members dead and the boats smashed. He then headed downstream, walking along the river looking for another expedition team led by Joseph Hollingshead, which was following his own up the Cumberland. Girty hoped to warn Hollingshead about the Shawnee and then make his way back to the company’s base of operations near Kaskaskia in the Illinois country. He was successful, and Hollingshead’s party avoided the Shawnee. George Morgan was very grateful for his actions, writing to his partners in Philadelphia on July 20 to say, “He is a Lad Who is particularly attch’d [
sic
] to me otherwise he would not have come here to give me this intelligence but would have proceeded to Fort Pitt. Mr. Hollingshead will give you his character.”
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After he was almost killed and scalped by the Shawnee, Girty decided to abandon his fledgling career as a long hunter, returning to Alexander McKee at Fort Pitt and resuming his interpreter duties. In the years that followed, Girty proved himself invaluable to McKee, the Indians and the British government. As his reputation grew, McKee sent him out on his own to deliver official messages and diplomatic conference invitations to the council longhouses of the distant Indian tribes. However, at the same time, Girty developed a reputation as a drinker and brawler, which likely concerned McKee and his British colonial superiors. Although some earlier historians seem to have overstated this aspect of Girty’s character, it appears to be a charge that is not entirely undeserved.

As he got older, Simon Girty grew into the sort of man who became unhappy if life was too tranquil. He became what we might now call a “man of action,” someone easily bored by the routine, the ordinary. Those who knew him at the time refer to him as “active, jocular, and outspoken”
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as well as someone who quickly moved to physical aggression, especially if he had been drinking. One thing, however, is certain: no one who encountered Simon Girty ever remembered him as dull or uninteresting. Whoever he truly was, Girty seems to have been a man who dominated a room from the moment he walked in and someone people never forgot encountering.

The outbreak of Dunmore’s War and the political activities that led to it created dilemmas for both Girty and McKee. First, Lord Dunmore’s move to claim all of western Pennsylvania as part of Virginia placed anyone in the service of the British government in an awkward position. As the Virginia faction in the region gained power and changed the name of Fort Pitt to Fort Dunmore, McKee elected to stand by and watch matters carefully, attempting political neutrality, while Girty chose to fully support Lord Dunmore and the Virginians. At first glance, this appears to have been an odd stance for Girty to take, as the Virginia governor and his supporters advocated seizing Indian lands, and he operated in close coordination with powerful land speculators.

During his time as a long hunter, Girty had come to see the speculators as a threat to both the frontier life he loved and, more so, to his friends, the Seneca. However, in this particular case, Girty was clearly doing the bidding of his surrogate father and mentor, the Seneca chief, Guyasuta. The immediate target of Lord Dunmore and the army he assembled was the lands of the Shawnee, an avowed enemy of the Seneca and the other tribes of the Six Nation Confederacy. Therefore, Guyasuta and his fellow members of the confederacy chose not only to stay out of the fight but also to do all they could to allow Lord Dunmore to destroy the Shawnee.
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So, as McKee and the Indian Department worked feverishly to prevent a war, his loyal lieutenant, Girty, supported the forces determined to start one. However, once the war began, the British government felt compelled to support Lord Dunmore, and McKee assigned Girty to Dunmore’s forces, where his skills could clearly be put to great use.

In fact, when the brief conflict reached its climax, Girty played a critical role. To affect a peace, Lord Dunmore needed Chief Logan of the Mingo to be an active member of the peace process. Since the murder of Logan’s family served as the flashpoint for the war, the governor desperately wanted Logan to either come to Camp Charlotte for the treaty conference or at least send his blessings. Lord Dunmore decided to have Simon Girty go to Logan’s village and speak to him. He selected Girty for this important mission not only because of Girty’s reputation as a diplomat to the Indians but also because Girty had actually met Logan during his time with the Seneca.
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The trip would be perilous, as it required an extended trip though Shawnee and Mingo lands. Girty chose two men to go with him, Joseph Nicholson and Simon Kenton. The three men successfully made it to Logan’s village, and once Logan recognized Girty, he agreed to speak with him. Although Logan would not accept Dunmore’s invitation to come to Camp Charlotte, he said that he wanted to send a message to the governor and the other chiefs, which he slowly and deliberately dictated to Girty in English. When Girty returned and delivered the message, Lord Dunmore had it transcribed and read several times to those at the conference. Logan’s sad, eloquent words had great influence on those assembled at Camp Charlotte and became famous thereafter as “Logan’s Lament”:

I appeal to any white man to say if he ever entered Logan’s cabin hungry, and I gave him not meat; if he ever came cold and naked, and I gave him not clothing. During the course of the last long and bloody war, Logan remained idle in his tent, an advocate for peace. Nay, such was my love for the whites, that those of my own country pointed at me as they passed, and said, “Logan is the friend of the white man.” I had even thought to live with you, but for the injuries of one man. Colonel Cresap the last spring, in cold blood, and unprovoked, cut off all the relatives of Logan; not sparing even my women and children. There runs not a drop of my blood in the veins of any human creature. This called on me for revenge. I have sought it. I have killed many. I have fully glutted my vengeance. For my country, I rejoice at the beams of peace. Yet, do not harbour the thought that mine is the joy of fear. Logan never felt fear. He will not turn on his heel to save his life. Who is there to mourn for Logan? Not one
.
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With the war concluded, Girty was promoted to the rank of second lieutenant in the militia, and his reputation in the American frontier community stood at its highest point.
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However, within months, as the American independence movement blossomed, Lord Dunmore and his Loyalist supporters were driven from office in disgrace, and Fort Dunmore became Fort Pitt once more, as Pennsylvania reclaimed its lost territory. Given his association with Dunmore, Simon Girty was seen as a potential Tory and, as such, a man not to be trusted.

Once American officials began moving into the roles abandoned by British officers, the Continental Congress appointed Richard Butler, a Philadelphia merchant, to the post of Indian agent at what the Americans now began calling Pittsburgh. Butler maintained a passionate hatred for the Indians but, perhaps, not as deep a hatred as he held for “Injun lovers” and suspected Loyalists, descriptions that fit both Girty and McKee. However, as 1775 passed, both men continued their work, and Girty was given assignments in both July and October to carry messages from the Congress to the Six Nations. These messages urged the Six Nations to remain neutral in any coming conflict with Great Britain and assured the Indians that, should the colonies win their independence, they would still respect the Ohio River as the boundary protecting Indian lands.
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As 1776 began, however, things did not go so well for McKee. In February, he received a dispatch from the British Indian Department official responsible for affairs along the Niagara frontier asking McKee to come to Fort Niagara. “Your knowledge in Indian affairs, your hitherto undoubted zeal for his Majesty’s service, and the duty you owe to your government,” said the officer, made McKee’s attendance “absolutely necessary.” More so, the officer requested McKee provide intelligence on American activities, telling him, “I expect you will be kind enough to inform of anything worth notice that you may know respecting the proceedings of the Rebels your way.”
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Unfortunately, Richard Butler and other Patriot members of the local Committee of Safety learned about the message and arrived at McKee’s home demanding to see the dispatch, which the Indian agent showed to them. Upon reading it, Butler and the others decided to place McKee on parole, writing in the committee’s proceedings: