The Condemned Man: Simon Kenton

White men who had spent time with Native tribes, either as captives, traders or in-laws, were valued as guides, trackers, interpreters, scouts and other necessary functions in the frontier.  Sometimes known as "White Indians", or considered know the skills of a hunter and outdoor survivor as well as Natives did, they were legends in their own time.  Daniel Boone, who had been captured briefly by the Shawnee, was reckoned at the time to be the best.  Simon Kenton (1755-1836) was considered his only equal or a close second.

Simon was born in 1755 in what is now Prince William, now Fauquier County, Virginia, of Scottish and Welsh ancestry.  When he was sixteen, he and another young man got into a fight over a girl.  Simon believed he'd killed his adversary, and the only thing he could do to save himself from a rope was to escape into the wilderness of what is now West Virginia and Ohio.  He used the name Simon Butler for years as a disguise, until he learned that his erstwhile victim had survived the fight with no harm done.  During Lord Dunmore's War, in 1774, he saved Boone's life during a battle with the Shawnee and the two became friends.  In 1775, Kenton was captured by the Shawnee and put through several days of running the gauntlet.  Simon Girty, realizing that this torture was a prelude to death, convinced the Shawnee to spare Kenton's life.  In Allan Eckerts' book, The Frontiersmen, he does this through a speech at a counsel meeting.  Likely, there was some extensive trading and calling in favors on Girty's part.  The two men became friends for life.

Later, the Shawnee captured Kenton again.  This time either George Drouillard, a mixed-race Shawnee who later became a guide for Lewis and Clark, stepped into save Kenton's life.  Or, according to some sources, it was George's father Pierre, a noted trader in his own right.  Or, George got word to Simon or James Girty.  However it was, Kenton earned the grudging respect of the Shawnee, who called him Cutahota, meaning, Condemned Man.  His skills earned Kenton a position as a guide to George Rogers Clark's expedition to take Fort Sackville/Vincennes in 1778.  He also served as a scout for Mad Anthony Wayne in 1794 during the Northwest Indian War in 1794.  Throughout his travels in Ohio, Kenton had scouted land near the Mad River, between present-day Urbana and Springfield, Ohio.  He later led a group of families from Kentucky to begin settlement of the area in 1799.

In 1810 Kenton moved to Urbana and was made a brigadier-general in the Ohio militia.  During the War of 1812, as American forces invaded Amherstberg, Ontario, across the river from Detroit, he had a chance to repay his old friend, Simon Girty, who had fled Detroit several years earlier and taken refuge in Canada.  American forces were aware that Girty, whose name was just as odious at the time as Benedict Arnold, lived near Amherstberg and were bent on a lynching.  Girty had fled to the safety of the Grand River Reserve, but his daughter-in-law Monica had remained at the family farm.  They would have burned the farm down around her had not Kenton stepped in and talked them out of it.  He served as both a scout and officer in the militia during the Battle of the Thames.  After the battle, when American commander William Henry Harrison toured the battlefield, he asked Kenton to identify the body of Tecumseh.  Likely Tecumseh's body wasn't present or Harrison, who had met Tecumseh on at least two occasions, would've seen it and known who it was.  Kenton was aware that souvenir hunters wanted pieces of the body as souvenirs, so identified another warrior as Tecumseh and left it at that.

After the War, he retired to Ohio.  He died in New Jerusalem, present-day Logan County.  His remains were buried there, but later moved to Urbana.   He has a large number of descendants today.