A Woman of Courage on the West Virginia Frontier

by Robert N. Thompson

  Although Phebe said she was not allowed to wash at first, a ritual bathing would be the next step in the adoption process. She would have been taken down to the stream near the village where the women of her new longhouse home would plunge her into the water, then wash and rub her severely. As one chief explained to a male captive, this Indian “baptism” was necessary to ensure “every drop of white blood was washed out of your veins.”187

  With the bathing finished, the transformation into Wyandot society was completed by dressing Phebe in Wyandot clothing. For a woman, this meant wearing moccasins on her feet, along with a deerskin cloak, breechclout and skirt, with the latter extending from the waist to partway up the knees. The only exception to this attire would come the following summer, when most Wyandot women left their bodies bare from the waist up.188 One can only imagine what Phebe’s reaction was to that particular custom.

  This mid-eighteenth century drawing depicts the clothing of a Wyandot woman. New York Public Library.

  After that, Phebe would be accepted into her new family, living in the longhouse and working alongside the other women of her adopted lineage. At first, she likely was exposed to brief periods of abuse and hard labor that alternated with periods when she was treated affectionately as a family member.189 Soon, however, as she proved herself worthy, she would be embraced, loved and cared for as though she was a Wyandot by birth.

  Phebe’s life with the Wyandot almost certainly included working in the fields, a task she was familiar with from her life as a settler. While Wyandot men were responsible for clearing the farm fields, once that was complete, all farming activities fell under the authority of the village women, and they performed all the agricultural labor. They loosened the soil with hoes, planted the seeds, pulled weeds and harvested the crops. These crops usually included corn, beans and squash, all of which were grown in the same fields, using cornstalks as poles to support the bean plants. Furthermore, Wyandot women displayed great insight and detailed technical farming knowledge. For example, to combat the danger posed by late spring frosts, they planted their squash seed in bark trays filled with powdered wood, which they kept near the fires in the longhouses. After the seeds had sprouted, they transferred the young plants to the fields.190

  If there were no signs of potential raids by the white militia, women would sometimes leave the village with their children during the early weeks of summer to live in small cabins near the fields. These cabins were essentially smaller versions of the longhouses, and each one belonged to a different lineage. As the warm summer days went by, Phebe and the other women worked hard to keep the fields weeded, as the children made sure any birds or small animals were kept away. In just over three months time, the corn would grow to over six feet high, bearing two or three ears each, with each ear producing between 100 and 650 kernels. In early September, the Wyandot women harvested the corn, pulling the leaves back and bundling the cobs, which were hung from poles under the roof of the longhouse to dry. When dry and ready for storage, the women cleaned and shelled the corn before storing it in large vats.191

  Besides farming, Phebe would have also participated in gathering activities that supplemented the food grown in the fields. Many varieties of berries were collected by the women of the village, with some being dried for use in the winter, as treats for the sick, to add flavor to otherwise bland corn porridge called sagamité and to put into small cakes they baked in ashes. Acorns, which were boiled to remove their inherent bitterness, as well as walnuts and grapes, were also common items on the Wyandot menu.192

  As might be expected, cooking also fell into the Wyandot woman’s list of responsibilities. Again, while this was certainly not an unknown chore to Phebe, some of the items cooked and their unique preparation were probably new to her. Although some summertime meals were cooked outside, most meal preparation took place at the family fireplace inside the longhouse. As with the fireplaces of colonial settlers like Phebe, these hearths were kept active constantly. If a new fire had to be made, it was done by rubbing one stick inside the hollow of another. Despite the fact that the entire extended lineage family lived within the same longhouse, the two daily meals consumed by the Wyandot were always cooked and eaten separately by each nuclear family.193

  Of course, corn was the staple of the Wyandot diet. The corn that had been dried by the Wyandot women of the longhouse was either pounded into flour using a mortar hollowed out of a tree trunk and a pole about six feet long or else ground between two stones. The best and most grit-free flour was produced using the wooden mortar.194

  Although the Wyandot prepared a variety of dishes, much of their cuisine revolved around a few essential items. Their most common food was the sagamité, which they made by boiling cornmeal in water. They would add a little variety to this otherwise dull dish by including bits of fish, meat or squash. Fish, either whole or cleaned, were boiled for a brief period, then pounded into a mash and returned to the pot to complete cooking, with no attempt made to remove the bones, scales and entrails. During special feasts, Wyandot women would prepare a thick corn soup and serve it with fat or oil poured over it. They also cooked a soup made from roasted kernels of corn mixed with beans, as well as another from andohi. The latter was regarded as a delicacy, consisting of immature ears of corn fermented for several months in a stagnant pool of water.195

  The Wyandot also made unleavened bread, cooked under the ashes of the longhouse fires. The bread dough was first rolled into cakes a few inches long and often included dried fruit and small bits of deer fat. The cakes were then either wrapped in fresh corn leaves for baking or placed directly into the ashes. When using the latter cooking method, the bread was washed before it was eaten. In the summer, the women also made a special bread from fresh corn, which they first masticated and then pounded in a large mortar. The resulting soft paste was wrapped in corn leaves and baked.196

  While all this might not have seemed too alien to Phebe, cleanliness and general meal decorum was probably something to which she had to become accustomed. First, the Wyandot did not wash their hands before eating. However, if their hands became greasy during the meal, they might wipe them on their hair or the fur of a nearby dog. In addition, they seldom cleaned their cooking and eating utensils, although each person appears to have had his or her own spoon and bowl. Finally, it was considered completely appropriate to belch without inhibition during meals.197

  The women of the longhouse were also tasked with gathering and splitting all the firewood required for cooking and heating. The best wood was usually available after a winter storm knocked any dead limbs from trees. During two days in March or April, the women from each village would help one another collect all the wood needed for the following year, which they tied in faggots and carried back to the village on tumplines.

  Lastly, Phebe and the other women were responsible for maintaining the interior of the longhouse. This could be a daunting job given that anywhere from eight to ten families lived in the longhouse, with each family having its own sleeping area and a hearth they shared with one other family. As a result, the space inside became quite confining, especially during the long winters. The women would regularly sweep the houses but the presence of smoke, dogs, vermin and young children who openly urinated on the floors made cleanliness a great challenge. Despite the care taken to ensure a dry wood supply that was smoke-free, smoke was still produced and not all of it escaped as planned through the holes in the longhouse roof. As a result, eye diseases were common, and many of the elderly members of the tribe became blind in their later years. Large numbers of dogs also roamed freely inside the houses, knocking over and often breaking cooking pots and then helping themselves to whatever food they might be able to reach in the process. It is not surprising, therefore, that mice, lice and fleas were also a common problem.198

  The longhouses were somewhat Spartan in their furnishings. Sheets of bark, supplemented in the winter by a large leather hide or blanket, covered the doorways. Simple mats served as
both seats and mattresses, and each person had his or her own. When spread out, a mat designated that person’s place in the longhouse. Benches usually ran along either side of the house, and most work was performed either sitting or squatting. Fire was an omnipresent danger, so the Wyandot placed their most valued possessions in boxes and buried them in shallow pits both inside and outside the longhouse.199

  Nevertheless, the longhouse was more than merely shelter to the Wyandot. For each clan lineage, it was the center of their family, a place shared with generosity despite the confining space, where harmony and peace was the rule. In many ways, despite the fact that it certainly was not an easy life, Wyandot society provided what could be an almost idyllic existence. One female settler who spent much of her adult life as an adopted Iroquois would later write, “Their lives were a continual round of pleasures. Their wants were few, and easily satisfied; their cares were only for to-day; the bounds of their calculations for future comfort not extending to the incalculable uncertainties of to-morrow. If peace ever dwelt with men, it was in former times, in the recesses from war, amongst what are now termed ‘barbarians.’”200

  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.

  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.”201

  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

  EXCITEMENT IN THE VILLAGE: SIMON GIRTY ARRIVES

  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.202 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.”203

  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.204 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.”205

  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.”206 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.207 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.208

  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.

  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.

  GIRTY AND MCKEE

  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, a
nd 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.209

  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.210