Girty: The Legend

"John Anderson’s narrative history Renegade is a fascinating and authentic picture of colonial times—it is a piece of Truth. The book describes how racist myths were invented and exploited by white European colonists to dispossess and remove Indians from the land. It is a piece of the Truth that needed to be dug up from a long forgotten past."

– Grandfather Lee Standing Bear Moore (Gadoda Yonv), esteemed elder of the

Manataka American Indian Council and editor of Smoke Signal News

"Not all the pioneers who came from Europe and settled in the colonies were ‘good guys.’ Not all left us a heritage that we can be proud of. One of the worst of our forefathers was Simon Girty, who left us a heritage of racism, fully described in John Anderson’s Renegade."

– Mary Holliman, president, Pocahontas Press, Inc.,

and director of research at Virginia Tech

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GIRTY: The Legend

by

John C. Anderson

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Published by:

John C. Anderson for Smashwords

Girty: The Legend

Copyright 2011 John C. Anderson

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Smashwords Edition License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author’s work.

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Also by John Anderson:

Free Love: Cultivating the Garden of Eden in America

Wages of Gin

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Edited by Whitney Roberts. Cover Design and Image Composition by Jana Rade.

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For Eric, my lost son

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Acknowledgments

If you’ve never heard a writer whine about the loneliness of his profession, you will now. What else could it be when you have to seclude yourself like a schlemiel in an isolated room and peck away at a keyboard for several hours every day, sometimes for years? What else would you call a profession so absorbing and so exciting that you feel a desperate need to tell everyone you know all about what you’re writing, but when you begin you see only blank expressions that say, So? Of course writing is lonely, because you must do it single-handedly. That is, until the book is finished, submitted to your publisher, accepted, and read by an editor. Suddenly, someone else is involved. If that editor is as good and professional as the person who came to my rescue, you are no longer alone. You have an ally, a partner. My editor, Whitney Roberts, was so helpful that I often felt unworthy of her counsel. Thanks also to the British Museum in London, the original source holder of the Haldimand papers that I quote throughout Renegade, and to Nancy Sparks Morrison, who gave me access to the Moore family adventures (her ancestors). Your camaraderie has made a better book than I could ever have produced alone.

I especially thank Grandfather Lee Standing Bear Moore, esteemed elder of the Manataka American Indian Council, for composing the foreword to this book. Manataka is a non-profit society that promotes Indian history and culture. Grandfather was awarded the Silver Star, Bronze Star, Gallantry in Action, and Purple Heart for his service during the Vietnam War. At Manataka, or The Place of Peace, he works to bring people together as brothers and sisters who seek and find healing and guidance as they show reverence and faith in the Great Spirit who dwells in this sacred place at Hot Springs National Park, Arkansas.

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Contents

Foreword

Chapter One: The Monster So Brutal

Chapter Two: The Nature of the New World

Chapter Three: Struggling to Survive

Chapter Four: The First World War

Chapter Five: The Second World War

Chapter Six: Tall Tale Heroes

Chapter Seven: The Year of Sorrow

Chapter Eight: Merciless Savagery

Chapter Nine: Fallen Timbers

Chapter Ten: The Trail’s End

Bibliography

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Renegade

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Foreword

It is said in the stories of the First Nations that a long time ago when the universe was young, only a few worlds, stars, and galaxies existed. One of the first worlds to be created was a million times bigger and brighter than the Sun. Its mass was crystal clear with billions of gleaming translucent facets. This beautiful celestial body was called the Truth World because of its magnificent purity and clarity. The Truth World reigned as master of all the galaxies and universes for many eons.

As time and space slowly grew larger, billions of new stars and worlds were born. Millions of new worlds roamed through space without orbital direction and were erratic and unstable in their movements. Refusing to conform to universal laws of respect for other cosmic bodies, most of the huge renegade worlds blindly flew through space and time and were eventually destroyed or reduced in size from collisions with other planets.

There came a time when the massive renegade planets conspired to destroy the beautiful Truth World by slamming their bodies against the sparkling crystal clear surface from a dozen directions. In one gigantic explosion, the Truth World was no more. Trillions of tiny pieces of the Truth World rained down on the Blue Mother Earth and other planets and stars across the universe.

Today, a few fortunate people may stumble across a tiny little chard of crystal clear Truth and hold it up for everyone to see. They shout, Look! I found Truth!

Yes, indeed a piece of Truth was found, but how does it compare to the whole Truth?

John Anderson’s narrative history Renegade is a fascinating and authentic picture of colonial times—it is a piece of Truth. The book describes how racist myths were invented and exploited by white European colonists to dispossess and remove Indians from the land. It is a piece of the Truth that needed to be dug up from a long forgotten past.

As an indigenous person, I see Truth differently than dominant society. People today largely misunderstand history because they were taught American history using books written by people who view the world from a Eurocentric viewpoint. This tainted history is propagated and supported by the U.S. federal government and organized Christian religions.

We prefer to learn American Indian history from American Indians. Who can tell the stories better? Granted, many worthwhile texts are available from honest and well-intended scholars who attempt to truthfully report the past. We are grateful to John Anderson for the Truth revealed in Renegade.

It’s not that we do not trust versions told by the dominate culture, though there are many examples of our history erroneously reported or deliberately altered to fit the invader’s own views. Anderson’s book is a welcome exception. His Truth lets us see a past most historians fail to report.

The history taught to dominant society is woefully lacking in Spirit. Our stories are filled with Spirit because it gives them meaning and purpose. One must see a man’s heart to know him. It is seldom we read versions of our history that touch the heart and inspire our children. Few public and private schools today teach real American Indian history. Less than a handful teach it from the Indian perspective. Why? The telling of stories is the essence of our culture. We must respect our ancestors and learn their stories to keep our ways alive for the sake of our children’s children. We encourage schools to emphasize American Indian history written from the Indian perspective. Is there nothing to learn from American Indian sciences of ecology, botany, astronomy, math, or medicine? Is there nothing to learn from American Indian art, poetry, music, and dance? Is there nothing to learn from our deep and enduring philosophy?

Yes, it is true white European colonists, their governments, and churches all conspired to create racist myths to justify genocide against Indians. Anderson details the systematic destruction of peaceable indigenous people for the sake of greed and power.

Indian people suffered crimes of unspeakable horrors no less comparable to the Jewish Holocaust of the twentieth century, the Russian Pogroms of the eighteenth century, and the Spanish Pogroms of the fourteenth century.

Sadly, the U.S. government quietly continues a tradition of genocide today through various bureaucratic programs. For example, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) administers a commodities food program that systematically poisons indigenous people by giving them the highest rate of diabetes in the world today. The BIA permits liquor stores on reservations against the objections of tribal elders. The list is long and the people continue to suffer.

Welcome to the Circle

American Indians have traditionally, for thousands of years, welcomed newcomers into their circles. History is full of examples of this abiding respect and honoring of all people.

It is not only out of respect and courtesy that we extend our hands. We know the Creator made everything on the Earth Mother different, and we celebrate the great diversity of life in our ceremonies and in our daily walk.

Every leaf on every tree across the entire planet is different from the other. Every stone in the world is different from any other. Every drop of water, every snowflake, and every animal is created differently from its brothers and sisters. Since the beginning of man’s time on earth, no human has had the same fingerprints or DNA. The American Indian fully recognizes and celebrates the Truth that the nature of Creation is diversity.

In every language of the American Indian there is an expression we say when greeting or departing, We are One. The Lakota say, Mitakuye Oyasin! (We are One). We often say to each other, We are of the five-fingered race. The intent here is not only to instill in our children’s children that all men are related, but that all things on the Mother Earth are related. We are One.

There are many other examples of spiritual belief, ceremony, and customs among our people that attest to our strong belief in the ideals of freedom and equality of all people and all manner of things.

Even the most accomplished scholars would be hard pressed to provide evidence of Indian discrimination against any race, creed, religion, or nationality. It simply is not in our minds or hearts. Therefore, we are a bit perplexed at how or why anyone, anywhere in the world, would discriminate against others. Hate against any religion or race is beyond our understanding.

Many people across the world do not realize that a great deal of our culture has been adopted by Americans. The American form of democratic self-rule government based on freedom for all came directly from the constitution of the Six Nations of the Iroquois. Thousands of places across America are named in honor of our people. Millions of non-American Indian people in the U.S. support our culture. Today, Americans love and accept us.

Intolerance

Does the great oak tree belittle the majestic elm tree because it looks differently? Are they both not rooted into the Earth Mother? Do they both breathe the same air and drink the same waters? Like the wise standing ones, we continually lift our arms in thankful prayer for the many gifts the Creator has provided—and we do not question where the air or water comes from—in the same way we do not question where the waters of ancient wisdom come from, because they are gifts of the Creator and do not belong to any certain race of people. It makes no difference where the water and air of learning come from, because they all have but the One Source. In the same way we must tolerate, accept, show compassion for, and love all Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, Christians, and all other religious faiths, including those with no religious beliefs. We must love all our brothers and sisters of all races.

Sometimes we have a fantasy that there should be 6.7 billion religions and 6.7 billion governments in the world. In this fantasy, all humans would be forced to accept all others.

Forgiving

American Indians are not angry with the descendants of Europeans who caused much suffering among our people. Why? It is true the Europeans came like a mighty flood to sweep across our lands, drowning our people. It is true Europeans came like a terrible tornado that killed everything in its path. But, like a flood of water that washes away homes, sacred places, food, and buries our children, we cannot be angry with the water. The water is made by the Creator of All Things. We cannot be angry at the wind that brings the terrible storms that blow away our homes, sacred places, food, and grandparents. The wind is made by the Creator of All Things. We cannot be angry with anything made by the Great Mystery. And therefore, we cannot be angry at Europeans or their American descendants.

The Greatest Lesson

As humans we must learn from the animals, birds, fish, and all other manner of life. They do not hate, discriminate, or attempt to exterminate each other. If our children are to live in a world of peace, we must learn and practice tolerance, acceptance, compassion, and love for one another.

We do detest hate-mongers and those who cause war against people because of their religious beliefs. We also detest power-hungry capitalists who manipulate military forces across the globe. We detest mega-international corporations who rape natural resources simply to make profits. We detest those who preach hate, because it is they who seek power over others. When you are told to hate another race, religion, country or person that is different from your own, you become a pawn of those few people who want power and money.

We can make the world a better place for all things of Creation. It is our dream that one day, all of humanity will join hands across the globe in one gigantic circle, lift our eyes to the Creator of All Things, and give thanks for the many blessings we enjoy. Let us sing together!

It is the Truth that John Anderson in his book Renegade gives to us all. His work is an important piece in rebuilding the great shining Truth World.

We have spoken.

Grandfather Lee Standing Bear Moore (Gadoda Yonv), esteemed elder of the Manataka American Indian Council and editor of Smoke Signal News

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Chapter One

The Monster So Brutal

Let me remind you only of the witch-hunts of the middle ages, the horrors of the French revolution, or the genocide of the American Indians … in such periods there are always only a very few who do not succumb. But when it is all over, everyone, horrified, asks ‘for heaven’s sake, how could I?’ — Albert Speer, writing from prison in 1953

There was a time when the name Simon Girty made grown men tremble and children behave. It was vilified in stories told around campfires and fireplaces throughout Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Ohio. By the end of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, thanks to cheap novels and bad movies, it was a name known everywhere. The man who bore it was known as a monster of cruelty, a depraved, wicked wretch, and a whirlwind of fury, desperation and barbarity. Today, Simon Girty’s name is almost unknown.

I first saw Girty’s image when I was a boy turning the pages of my grandfather’s leather-bound book about Indians, frontiersmen, pioneers, and railroaders. The past is nothing more than the stories told about it, and this book told electrifying tales. Plus, it was filled with illustrations to thrill any boy—mutilated pioneer women and children, leering braves and squaws gripping tomahawks and bloody scalps, railroad workers pinned by arrows alongside the tracks they’d just laid, cabins smoldering, wagon trains circled and destroyed. The book was published in the 1880s, about the time my grandfather was born. That book may have been his most cherished possession. He wasn’t a reader, so it may have been his only book. My grandfather loved all things Indian. Born at the height of the myth of the American West, he worked for the Buffalo Bill Show as a boy. He unpacked and hoisted tents. He tore them down again at show’s end. He shoveled up horse and buffalo manure. My grandfather said he’d met a lot of Indians on the job, and that’s where his great affection for them was formed.

My grandfather also told me that the term Native American was a misnomer—America never had natives. Clovis people had come into North America from Asia by way of the Siberian–Alaskan land bridge, but mitochondrial DNA from human coprolite discovered in south central Oregon and reported on in the May 2008 issue of Science Magazine were 1,000 years older than any evidence of Clovis migrants. These human artifacts date back to the Ice Age, when the continental land bridge was impossible to cross. Humans apparently arrived at least 13,500 years ago. No matter who came first or how, by foot or by boat, they were not native to America. Therefore, although it may not now be considered politically correct, I refer to them throughout this book as Indians, not Native Americans. My grandfather claimed that Americans of his generation appreciated the crude but simple character of the Indian. Back then, Indian nobility and fidelity were recognized, he said. I showed him the illustration of the menacing Simon Girty. The debasement and sufferings of America’s native people at the bloody hands of this pale-faced killer were well known, he said. He told me what he knew about Girty.

Girty had turned the Indians into a viable threat against white society and ensured the necessity of their destruction. The Indians were innocent aboriginals who, if left alone in the wilderness and protected by a secure border, would have lived peacefully with their white neighbors. But the clever, malevolent white renegade had tricked them into evil. The Indians were as much the victims of Girty as the men, women, and children Girty killed and scalped. It was because of Girty and other white renegades like him that the wild Indian was no more.

Blaming Simon Girty for the passing of the red man disguised what really brought about the destruction of the American Indian—white European contagious diseases, forced removal, murder, and neglect. The North American Indian population was reduced by almost 98 percent from an estimated 12 million in 1500 to only 237,000 in 1900. Contagious diseases caused 90 percent of these deaths. The most lethal pathogen was smallpox. Over the centuries, Europeans had gained immunity to this disease, thanks to the domesticated animals that carried it. Smallpox made several tribes extinct. Other killers delivered by white Europeans were measles, influenza, whooping cough, diphtheria, typhus, bubonic plague, cholera, and scarlet fever. In return, America’s first inhabitants introduced the new arrivals to yellow fever.

During the late 1600s into the early 1700s, English traders from the Virginia and Carolina colonies did a thriving business buying, branding, and selling young Indian slaves. Catholic missions on the Spanish Florida/Georgia frontier were established to Christianize the Indians. They proved to be a valuable source of slaves. The Christian neophytes were easy to kidnap for later sale. Many Indian tribes engaged in the slavery trade, including Cherokees and Creeks. Some historians claim that English traders in the Carolinas seized between 10,000 and 12,000 mission Indians and sold them into slavery in the West Indies.

A human population is said to be decimated when one in ten of its members is killed. In 1348, more than one-third of European humanity was wiped out by the Black Plague. Despite this destruction, the European population recovered. The American Indian population has slowly recovered too, but certainly not anywhere near the numbers estimated before the arrival of white Europeans. The U.S. Census 2000 showed the American Indian population, including Alaskan natives, to be 2.5 million, or 0.9 percent of the total U.S. population of 281.4 million. Does the decimation of the Indians by whites represent genocide?

Many historians have disputed the charge of a holocaust or genocide, claiming that the estimate of the Indian population at the time of the white European arrival has been greatly exaggerated. Ethnologist James Mooney wrote in 1928 that the North American Indian population was only 1,152,950 in all tribal areas north of Mexico at the time of the arrival of Europeans. But in 1983, anthropologist Henry Dobyns estimated the aboriginal population of North America at 18 million and of the United States alone at 10 million. No one disputes the fact that only 237,000 were left alive in 1900.

By the provisions of the convention of the United Nations in December of 1948, genocide is defined as: any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, and includes five types of criminal actions: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and forcibly transferring children of one group to another group.

Historians claim that Christopher Columbus coined the term Indian for the indigenous people he found in what he assumed was the East Indies in his futile search for India. Grandfather Lee Standing Bear Moore, esteemed elder of the Manataka (Place of Peace) American Indian Council and editor of Smoke Signal News, told me that the word Indian does not in fact derive from Columbus’ mistaken belief that he had reached India. India was known as Hindustan in 1492, Grandfather Bear said; therefore, the word India did not then exist. The word Indian comes from Columbus’ description of the people he found here. As an Italian, his Spanish was faulty, so in his written accounts, the explorer called the native people he discovered in the New World una gente in Dios, meaning a people in God. In God. In Dios. Indians. According to Grandfather Bear, Indian is a perfectly noble and respectable word.

When Columbus started killing and enslaving these people of the New World, the word genocide was not in the lexicon. Nor was there a name for it when our white European ancestors stole or coerced 98 percent of North America from the people who occupied it before Columbus. There was no Frantz Fanon alive at the time to analyze the effects of racism and colonization, to expose how the separate domains of settler and native exploit the native, rob the native’s land, and deaden the souls of both settler and native. Even without a Fanon, white Europeans knew that their colonial western border was not naturally (or supernaturally) ordained. They were well aware that the border was organized through coercion to benefit them and disadvantage the Indians. So they invented creative stories to justify their theft of the continent. These myths would also serve to explain our present-day control over the remaining 2 percent of the land that Indians are told they own. Simon Girty’s life was turned into one of these useful myths.

Wild West stories excused an American government that broke every single one of the 350 treaties signed with the American Indians. The government took their land by force and drove them into unwanted and unusable plots of land called reservations. The territory that was supposedly reserved for their use is actually federal property over which the Indians have only limited sovereignty. Today, there are more than 550 tribes, but there are only 300 reservations in the United States; they represent 2.2 percent of the total area of the nation. Some tribes live on more than one reservation. Many others have none. We use this same process to hide away our criminals: we house them in remote, hard-to-find places we call prisons. Out of sight is out of mind.

In the fifteenth century, when Europeans were first introduced to Indians, these exotic people of the forest were noble red men. By the eighteenth century, they had become savages. Genocide begins when we dehumanize the objects we intend to exterminate. Separate is never equal. The settlers first sought to domesticate Indians in order to assume dominion over them. In Virginia, Indians were seen as potential slave labor. William Penn alone pledged to live with them as neighbors and friends. 

As they tried in vain to make Indians look and behave like white Europeans, the settlers desensitized themselves to Indian suffering. If you see your enemy as an animal, it’s not so difficult to kill him. After all, animals are a lower life form fated for exploitation and slaughter. God wills their destruction for the better good. When the majority accepts the deliberate and systematic destruction of an ethnic, religious, or national group, society’s leaders and popular figures tend to go along. In the nineteenth century, L. Frank Baum, creator of The Wizard of Oz, William Dean Howells, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, the father of the Supreme Court justice, were all staunch advocates for the extermination of the Indian.

Among American Indians, their annihilation is known as the 500 year war and the world’s longest holocaust. Some historians define what was done to the Indian as a silent genocide, the ultimate goal being to cause people to become so ashamed of their culture that they cease to admit, even to themselves, that they are anything other than part of the majority. When they lose their culture, a people no longer exist as a group, and the goal of silent genocide has been accomplished.

Adolf Hitler, a wallpaper hanger by trade before becoming history’s most prolific mass murderer, liked to read popular American and British history, and he loved Hollywood cowboy movies. He attributed his concept of concentration camps as well as the practicality of genocide to those pastimes. He admired America’s destruction of the Indians. To his inner circle, Hitler often praised the efficiency of the American extermination of its Indian population by starvation, disease, and slaughter.

My grandfather’s book reported that Girty’s most infamous act was committed when he turned his back on an old American acquaintance, Colonel William Crawford, and watched in great amusement as the colonel was slowly tortured and roasted. This obscenity is documented later in the book. That true story is the cornerstone of one of the most pervasive myths of the nineteenth century—the degenerative saga of Simon Girty, the infamous frontier renegade and so-called white savage.

The graphic account of the colonel’s death after two hours of torture is just one example of the remarkable brutality that characterized the partisan war fought in the Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Kentucky backcountry and along the western frontier from Maine to Georgia during the American Revolution. Americans documented almost nothing about their tit-for-tat raids on Indian towns and villages. Of the Indians killed along the wilderness frontier, most were women, old men, and children. Many were easy targets who had been converted to Christianity by Moravian missionaries. These Indians thought they were thus saved by God from white vengeance.

The vilification of Simon Girty grew out of the American frontier experience. As soon as the story of Crawford’s torture began to disseminate in the 1780s and 1790s, Girty’s name became synonymous with savagery and monstrosity. Like his contemporary Daniel Boone, Girty became a legend in his own lifetime. Unlike Boone, Simon Girty did not shape his own legend. Although his spelling was poor, Boone was literate, and he was a born storyteller. He created his own myth. Girty was illiterate and a man of few words.

Girty was perfectly aware of the hatred his countrymen felt for him. Popular writers and historians branded him as the great villain of the nineteenth century, the mass murderer of America’s Appalachian frontier. As far as we know, even Girty never said a good word about himself. He relished his ill repute.

In his groundbreaking work Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860, Richard Slotkin defines the parameters of myth as a narrative which concentrates in a single, dramatized experience the whole history of a people in their land. Slotkin writes that American mythology was created along the frontier, where experience and hardship combined to forge a distinct American identity. This identity was expressed during the nineteenth century in popular stories and books like my grandfather’s. They branded the frontier hero as a larger-than-life archetype whose exploits and experiences embodied the spirit and power of the nation.

What patriotic American man or boy wouldn’t identify with Daniel Boone, Indian fighter and trailblazing frontiersman, or with Johnny Appleseed, spreader of the seeds of white decency, health, and wealth through the wilderness? Boone actually hated fighting and probably killed only one Indian in his long life. He also refused to wear a coonskin cap; he said they were too heavy, especially when wet. He preferred a stylish beaver hat.

Boone first became an American icon with the publication of John Filson’s The Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucke. Filson’s book presents Boone as the man who single-handedly forces white, European civilization on the perilous wilderness. Boone employs musket and blade to impose this great transformation. Violence is the only way to convert the savage wilderness into civilization and the wild brutes that inhabit it into enlightened human beings.

America’s first major novelist and mythmaker, James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851), created his characters and stories from oral folklore. The Last of the Mohicans (1826), The Pathfinder (1840), The Deerslayer (1841), and his other novels—he wrote more than thirty—introduce the archetypical frontiersman, Indian fighter, and Indian. His characters became instant American myths. To the devotees of folklore, these myths are sacred.

For the first time, great numbers of Americans could read about the adventures of the loner who drifts through the perilous wilderness, saving white settlers from the clutches of murderous Indians before returning to the lonely woods. In real life, his name was Daniel Boone. In Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, his name is Natty Bumppo. Natty is out to save worthy settlers, his two honorable Indian pals, and the wilderness of 1740s New York itself from treacherous Indians and encroaching white civilization. He chooses to deliberately lead a solitary existence, pitting his strength and wits against the mighty forces of nature.

Then there were the Indian killers of New York State, men such as Tom Quick, Tim Murphy, Nat Foster, and Nick Stoner. Tom Quick died in 1795 or 1796 while Cooper was still a boy, but the others lived far enough into the nineteenth century to have been known by him. His Indian fighters never killed without provocation. The Indians may have murdered settlers’ wives and children. Yet, like Hawkeye from Last of the Mohicans, the white woodsmen never killed for revenge. The Indians killed for retribution because it was their creed. The Moravian missionaries taught Cooper that revenge was not an honorable motive for a heroic white man. Only a white man who has turned into an Indian could kill to settle a score.

After the frontiersman and the Indian fighter, Cooper described the Indian himself as a definite folk type. Sometimes Cooper’s Indians seem to have been schooled by John G. Heckewelder, the Moravian missionary you will read about in this book. Consider Chingachgook and Uncas of Last of the Mohicans fame. Others, such as Magua, are terrifying products of nature. Cooper described his Indians in The Last of the Mohicans:

Few men exhibit greater diversity, or, if we may so express it, greater antithesis of character than the native warrior of North America. In war, he is daring, boastful, cunning, ruthless, self-denying, and self-devoted; in peace, just, generous, hospitable, revengeful, superstitious, modest, and commonly chaste.

In The Birth of Tragedy published in 1872, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that the dual forces of Dionysius and Apollo present in Greek tragedy existed in all life situations. True tragedy could only be produced by revealing the tension between them. He used the names Apollonian and Dionysian for the two opposing forces. Apollo, the sun god, represented light, clarity, conformity, and form, whereas Dionysus, the wine god, represented free will and ecstasy. Life is a constant struggle between these two primary forces. In America’s frontier mythology, Apollo is Daniel Boone and Dionysius is Simon Girty and his Indian brothers and sisters.

Curiously, death by burning runs throughout the stories of Apollo and Dionysius in Greek mythology. The mother of Dionysius, Semele, was burned to death. Apollo’s lover and son were both turned to ash. You will soon see that death by fire blazes through the Simon Girty myth, too.

In Greek mythology, whoever ventured beyond the human sphere was destroyed by divine fire. Apollo and Dionysius were usually found struggling against each other on the human and divine borderline of what is acceptable. As Roberto Calasso has written in The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony:

Beyond the limit laid down of what is acceptable, burns the fire. Apollo and Dionysius are often found along the edges of that borderline, on the divine side and the human; they provoke that back-and-forth in men, that desire to go beyond oneself, which we seem to cling to even more than to our humanity, even more than to life itself. And sometimes this dangerous game rebounds on the two gods who play it.

For two centuries, the Indians burned captured white intruders in their divine fires in hopes of driving their survivors back to Europe. The borders were dangerous places. It was going to take America’s Boones to beat the frontier’s Girtys into civilized human beings. And it was going to take a bunch of Boones to transform the savage wilderness into a safe, urban, industrial landscape. The mythical Daniel Boone never won a complete victory over the mythical forces of darkness in America, and he never managed to take Girty’s scalp.

Both Girty and Boone toiled in the violent wilderness. When Girty turned off the path of civilization and chose the trail of the Indian, he betrayed his race. In so doing, he became a willful traitor to every American Apollonian principal. No matter what his real life may have been like, Girty was perceived as the white savage who would do everything in his satanic power to destroy white culture. The wilderness was dark, menacing, sinister, and dangerous. Beware: Cross the border and you too could be corrupted into a wretched monster so brutal, deprived, and wicked. Or you could end up roasted over an open fire.

The man most responsible for the inception of the Girty myth was Hugh Henry Brackenridge, frontier lawyer, author, and social critic. A Princeton classmate of James Madison in 1771, Brackenridge was the first to tell the tragic tale of Colonel Crawford’s sufferings at the hands of Indians under the encouragement of the depraved Girty. Brackenridge had a low regard for the trappings of frontier society. He spent most of his professional life chastising the decadent morality of frontier communities. He implored the federal and state governments to restrain the frontier’s excessive democracy.

Brackenridge lived in the tiny frontier community of Pittsburgh in the 1780s. That’s where he first encountered the name Simon Girty in 1782. After their escape from the Indians, Dr. Knight and John Slover returned to Fort Pitt to tell Brackenridge their story about Crawford’s torture and death. The result was a short tract titled Narratives of a Late Expedition against the Indians, with an Account of the Barbarous Execution of Col. Crawford and the Wonderful Escape of Dr. Knight and John Slover from Captivity. It appeared in the Philadelphia-based Freeman’s Journal or the North-American Intelligencer in the spring of 1783. The account was re-released as a separate pamphlet in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh in 1786.

Brackenridge wanted his Crawford story to answer a good end by impressing upon the eastern hierarchy the destructive state of affairs along the frontier. More specifically, he hoped to show the rest of America what have been the sufferings of some of her citizens by the hands of the Indian. He wrote:

As they [the Indians] still continue their murders on our frontiers, these narratives may be serviceable to induce our government to take some effectual steps to chastise and suppress them [the Indians]; as from hence, they will see that the nature of an Indian is fierce and cruel, and that an extirpation of them would be useful to the world, and honorable to those who can effect it.

Brackenridge’s defamation of the Indians and particularly of Girty demonstrates the fear with which he regarded the corrupting influence of the frontier. His vision of American society was idyllic. Brackenridge believed that the emerging frontier communities could be easily swallowed up by Indian culture. America would then be destroyed.

Although Indians have the shapes of men and may be of the human species … in their present state they approach nearer the character of devils. He considered them animals vulgarly styled. Nevertheless, they had the inherent supernatural power to corrupt the innocence of white society and subvert it to savagery. This belief was based upon his judgment of civilized Indians who had been educated in white society, given Anglican names, and baptized into European religions. Brackenridge claimed to "not know one of