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A Timeline for Simon Girty, the only true White American Revolutionary

1741. Girty is born. Simon Girty was the son of an Irish immigrant who settled in Eastern Pennsylvania. Simon Girty is his father's name, and Mary Newton is his mother's name. The son of a packhorse driver employed in the fur trade, Simon Girty's mother made their home at Chambers Mills, on the east side of the Susquehanna, above Harrisburg, now Dauphin county, Pennsylvania. Here Simon Girty, the second son, was born.

1749. The Girtys move to Sherman's Creek. There were four of the Girty sons—Thomas, Simon, James and George. Then later, there was a half brother, John Turner. In 1749 the family removed to Sherman's Creek, in Perry county, along with a number of other settlers, to engage in farming. But the Indians regarded this as an unauthorized encroachment upon their lands, and they protested to the government. Evidently this protest was accounted well-grounded, for the authorities forcibly expelled the settlers and burned the houses they had built.

1750 or 1751. Simon Girty's father, “Simon Girty”, an Irish immigrant and an Indian Trader, was killed in a duel in 1750. Or maybe Simon Girty's father was killed in 1751 in a drunken frolic by an Indian called “The Fish” in Chamber Mills, over a land dispute. There's conflicting reports of the slaying of Simon Girty's biological father.

1753-1755. Mary Newton, Simon Girty's mother, married John Turner, who had been a boarder in the family. John Turner took his crew, his new family back to the Sherman's Creek valley in 1755, and here all fell into the hands of Indians when the latter captured and destroyed Fort Granville there on the Juniata.

1755. By the time Girty was fourteen his family had moved to Sherman's Creek in eastern Pennsylvania. During the French and Indian War, the Girtys, fearful of attack, sought refuge in Fort Granville. In 1755, a combined army of French soldiers and their native allies captured the fort, taking several British colonists captive including Simon Girty. He was first taken to Kittanning, a town belonging to the Delaware natives, but he eventually found himself in the hands of the Seneca natives who took him to the Ohio Country. There, he was adopted into the Seneca tribe. Girty seemed to enjoy his new surroundings, spending his late teens learning the language and customs of the Senecas.

1756. The Burning of John Turner at the Stake. During the French and Indian War, Simon, his three brothers, his half-brother, his mother and his step-father were taken by French-led Shawnee and Delaware forces who captured Fort Granville. Following the capture of the entire Girty family by Indians during the French & Indian War in America, his step-father, John Turner, was burned at the stake before Simon's eyes in 1756 at the Delaware village of Kittanning. All were brought over the mountains to Kittanning. The Indians recognized John Turner as one who had injured their race, so in retaliation they sacrificed him at the stake. Gordon's " History of Pennsylvania " says they tied him to a blackened post, made a great fire, danced around him, heated gun barrels red hot and run them through his body, and after three hours of such torture scalped him alive. Then a native American revolutionary held up to him a boy who gave him the finishing stroke with a tomahawk. A month later, English militia under the command of William Armstrong attacked Kittanning, and Thomas Girty, the eldest of the Girty brothers was liberated. Thomas had been a captive for only 40 days. The rest of the family remained in Indian hands and was separated and given to different tribes. James Girty was adopted into a Shawnee tribe. George Girty was adopted into a Delaware tribe. Simon Girty was taken by western Senecas to a village near Lake Erie’s east shore, where he was adopted into the Iroquois League, and trained as an interpreter.

1756-1764. Simon Girty spent the next eight years living with a Seneca tribe in the Ohio Country. Simon Girty had become fully assimilated with the Seneca and preferred their way of life. He proved adept at learning different native languages and dialects and became skilled as an orator. This facility, together with his ability to quickly memorize speeches, would serve him well in his later work as an interpreter and guide first for the American colonists and eventually as an agent for the British Indian Department.

1758. General John Forbes captures a major French outpost in the Ohio Country: Fort Duquesne.

1759. Their French allies having yielded to the British, the Senecas signed a peace agreement with the English in 1759 and agreed to return all captives. The natives returned Simon Girty to his mother in Pittsburgh, and he spent the next several years as a struggling farmer. The next decade of his life was spent living among the Seneca of northwestern Pennsylvania. By then, Simon Girty had come to love the Indian way of life, and, at one point, served as bodyguard to Seneca Indian Chief Guyasuta. He also served as an interpreter for traders seeking furs from the Delaware natives in western Pennsylvania.

1764. All three Girty brothers were brought back from the woods when the French had been expelled from the country, and English domination had become assured. Simon Girty returned from life among the Senecas in 1764, at which time he was fluent in eleven native languages.

1774. Simon Girty helped Lord Dunmore in Lord Dunmore's War as a scout and interpreter.

1775. Simon Girty, the frontiersman, the white savage, helped General James Wood in 1775 in negotiations with the Shawnee natives, the Seneca natives, the Delaware natives, and the Wyandot natives.

1776. The American Revolutionary War for Independence. At the outbreak of the American Revolution, Simon Girty sided with the imperialist revolutionaries.

1777. September. Simon Girty is charged with treason by the Americans. Simon Girty did not like the structure of military life and frequently clashed with his superiors. In September 1777, Girty was arrested, and charged with treason for supposedly helping plan the seizure of Fort Pitt. The conspirators reportedly hoped to massacre the fort's residents and then turn it over to the British. U.S. authorities eventually acquitted Girty, but his desire to help the U.S. had evaporated.

1778. Simon Girty participates in General Hand's “squaw campaign” of 1778, and is disgusted with fighting for the Americans afterwards. Simon Girty saw the squaw campaign murder lots of innocent natives.

1778. March 28. Simon Girty leaves Fort Pitt, and offers his services to the British military in Detroit. James Girty, brother of Simon, was then with the Shawnees on the Scioto, having been sent from Fort Pitt by the American authorities on a futile peace embassy. He had been raised among the Shawnees, was a natural savage, and at once joined his brother and the other tories. For 16 years Capt. McKee, Mathew Elliott and the Girtys, were the merciless scourges of the border. They were the instigators and leaders of many Indian raids, continuing their hostility until long after the close of the revolutionary war.

1779. October 1. Simon Girty and Alexander McKee, another Scots-Irish Loyalist, with the aid of a large force of Native Americans, attacked and killed American forces in present-day Kentucky, who were returning from an expedition to New Orleans. The ambush occurred near Dayton, Kentucky, across the Ohio River from Cincinnati, Ohio. Only a handful of the Americans survived, among them Colonel John Campbell and Captain Robert Benham.

1782. March 8. The Gnadenhutten massacre. Also known as the Moravian massacre, as the wholesale slaughter of 96 Christian Lenape (Delaware) natives by colonial American militia from Pennsylvania on March 8, 1782 at the Moravian missionary village of Gnadenhutten, Ohio.

1782. June 11. Butcher William Crawford burned at the Stake. Girty was present, and jolly, and laughing, merrily, during the ritual torture, and execution of William Crawford by the Lenape (Delaware) war chief Captain Pipe, in retaliation against the Gnadenhutten massacre. William Irvine was the man who convinced Crawford to come out of retirement, for “one last savage barbaric hoorah”, which turned into the failed Sandusky River campaign.

1786. August 29. Shay's Rebellion, in central and western Massachusetts, begins.

1790-1794. Simon Girty fought, and was a major instigator, in the the General Native American War.


1818. At 77 years of age, Simon Girty was increasingly infirm with arthritis and had failing eyesight. Simon Girty returned to his farm after the war, and died in 1818, completely blind, in Canada.

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