Frontiersman: Simon Girty

We've already run across him in several earlier posts but he's such a key figure on the frontier that it's time to give him a post of his own.  Simon Girty (1741-1818), was born in what is now Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.  His father was Scotch-Irish and the Canadian Biographical dictionary gives the family name as most likely Garrity.  Early biographers of Simon paint his father as a drunkard and a wife-beater who set a bad example for his four sons, but Simon's most current biographer refutes this, indicating that Simon and his father were close.

Girty, Sr., was an Indian trader and Natives were a common sight around the Girty home.  Around 1750, Girty, Sr., got into a duel with another trader and was killed, leaving Simon's mother Mary to raise four boys and run a farm on her own.  Mary remarried in 1753 to her late husband's friend and possibly a relative, John Turner.  Early biographers point to him as also being an abusive drunkard but there is no evidence to support this.  Mary's son, John, Jr., was born in 1754.  Then Simon's world blew apart again.  In 1755, as the French and Indian War began, Shawnee raided the Girty-Turner farmstead and took the entire family prisoner.  John, Sr., as an adult male, was killed automatically.  Simon, his older brother Thomas, and his two younger brothers, James and George, were spared, but the three older boys were made to run the gauntlet before being separated.  Simon's performance at this so impressed the Shawnee and Seneca that he was taken in by a war leader, Guyasuta, whom we've already run across, as well.

Guyasuta adopted Girty as his own son, raising him as befit a Seneca warrior.  Simon used his time with the Seneca to learn the languages and customs of several Northeastern Woodlands tribes.  In 1764, after Pontiac's Rebellion, the British demanded that all White captives be ransomed.  Guyasuta released Simon at Fort Pitt.  Simon would've sneaked back to the Seneca had he not been reunited with James and George, his two younger brothers.  Thomas, the eldest, had escaped and returned to White society years earlier and John, Jr. was ransomed along with his mother.  James, George and Simon traded on their skills with languages and as guides and hunters to make a living in what was to them now an alien society.

Simon was the best at interpreting.  He was present at the negotiations for the Treaty of Fort Stanwix in 1768, and transmitted Logan's remarks at the end of Lord Dunmore's War.  At the beginning of the Revolution he sided with the Colonists, angering Guyasuta, with whom he still kept in contact.  As the War progressed and he saw how Natives were being treated, he defected to the British.  As he wasn't in a military unit, it was a defection and not desertion, as is sometimes claimed.  He became an employee of the British Indian Department with the rank and pay of captain. 

Though he's accused of instigating Native raids on settlements and other atrocities, many Whites captured by Natives owed their lives to him.  Children who didn't seem to be adjusting to Native life caught his eye and he would work a deal to arrange a ransom, sometimes trading his own property.  The kids he turned over to the British, to be reunited with families if possible.  He also spared the life of an American scout and frontiersman named Simon Kenton, talking the Shawnee out of killing him on two separate occasions.  Unfortunately, he was not able to redeem William Crawford and that execution would be a mark against Girty forever, as was his treatment of missionaries whom he ran out of Ohio Territory more than once.  His problem with missionaries was two-fold.  He believed that many of them were secret American spies and facilitators, he was right.  He also believed that they were robbing their Native converts of their way of life, right again. 

As the Revolution wound down, in 1784, Simon spotted a pretty young woman who'd been captured by the Delaware.  He ransomed her, proposed, and took her to Fort Detroit at her request for a religious marriage in her mother's presence.  Catherine Malotte Girty would bear her husband five children and endure much separation from him during the Northwest Indian War, 1785-1795.  As he grew older, Simon began to drink more heavily.  While he might have developed a dependence on alcohol just due to its availability, there might have been more.  He was beginning to suffer arthritis, had frequent headaches, and was described as having unpredictable moods.  The drinking and long separations took their toll on his marriage.  Catherine left him, dividing her time between Detroit and Simon's land in Amherstberg, Ontario.  There is no evidence that she left because of domestic abuse.

After the end of the Northwest War in 1795, Simon was laid off by the Indian Department, though called back whenever they were shorthanded.  As arthritis, depression and drinking took their toll, He was used less and less.  While White society marginalized him, Natives, particularly the Mohawk and Shawnee, continue to consider him a friend.  When Tecumseh passed through Amherstberg in 1813, he sought Simon out.  Simon did not participate in the War of 1812, though his son Thomas died by heat exhaustion helping a wounded British soldier off a battlefield. 

When American forces crossed from Detroit to Amherstberg Simon was forced to evacuate his farm and found shelter with Mohawks at the Grand River Reserve.  His daughter-in-law, Thomas' widow, stayed to run the farm.  While she was pleading with the soldiers not to burn down the only home for herself and her expectant child an older man intervened.  It was Simon Kenton, who repaid his old friend Girty for saving his life.  Monica gave birth to a baby girl and they welcomed Simon home.

Catherine realized the Simon was failing fast and needed help as his eyesight failed, his arthritis and gout increased and drinking was the only pain relief available.  Simon lived out his remaining days on his farm in Canada, blind, crippled and forgotten by all except his family and a few Mohawk friends who were present at his bedside when he died.