Colonel Crawford: Torture on the Ohio Frontier
This article is companion to a video of the same title:
William Crawford was born in 1722 to Scots-Irish farmers in present-day Berkeley County, Virginia. Little is known of his childhood, but at age 20 he married his first wife, who would eventually die in childbirth- or soon after- Crawford would go on to take another wife, eventually having a total of five children, only four of whom would live into adulthood. In 1749, at age 27, Crawford met 17-year-old George Washington, who had received a commission from the College of William and Mary to survey the just-formed Culpepper County, in Virginia.
Crawford and Washington would go on to survey land together, becoming friends as a much younger George Washington helped Crawford learn the business. Washington and Crawford would see more of each other- In July of 1755, both men survived the slaughter of the Battle of the Monongahela- known also as Braddock’s defeat- which took place when British General Braddock was defeated by the French, Canadians, and Native Americans during their attempt to take Fort Duquesne, and therefore open the Ohio country to the British. The British sustained 977 killed or wounded, and the French would retain control of the Ohio Valley.
Crawford was serving as an ensign at the time, and Washington would be lauded as the "hero of Monongahela" by Virginia Governor Robert Dinwiddie and was given the rank of colonel, in command of the 1,200-man Virginia Regiment. Neither man would ever forget the feeling of defeat that they encountered there along the Monongahela. Crawford went on to serve in Washington’s Virginia Regiment, guarding frontier outposts and settlements against violence at the hands of Native Americans. In 1758, Crawford would be a part of John Forbes’s force that actually DID take Fort Duquesne three years later.
Every 5 years or so a big event seemed to interrupt Crawford’s humble life as a farmer and fur trader at the cabin he raised on Braddock Road in Fayette County, Pennsylvania. In 1763, five years after finally taking Fort Duquesne during the French and Indian War, Crawford would pick up the rifle again to join the fighting in Chief Pontiac’s Rebellion. Another five years later, Crawford returned to work as a land surveyor, helping locate land for settlement amongst the huge tracts opened to the British as a result of the Treaty of Fort Stanwix. He returned to surveying to get an early look at his share of the bounty land that was promised to him and the rest of the old Virginia Regiment by the Governor, for their service under Washington throughout the French and Indian War. In 1770, he and Washington traveled the Ohio River to identify the tract of land and mark it aside as property of their brothers in arms from the Virginia Regiment. They chose an area near Point Pleasant.
The following year, Crawford became a judge, but as fighting once again erupted across the frontier during Lord Dunmore’s War, Crawford was commissioned as a Major. In 1774 he set aside his duties as justice of the peace to practice some Old Testament justice, building a fort and destroying two Mingo villages in retaliation for prior Native raids in Virginia. After the fighting, Crawford once again became a judge and a surveyor.
Crawford answered the call to arms only two years later, in 1776, becoming Colonel of the 7th Virginia. Crawford led the men at the Battle of Long Island and the subsequent retreat across New Jersey, then crossed the Delaware with Washington, fighting at Trenton and Princeton. Eventually, he was transferred to fight along the frontier once again and was present for the treaty of Fort Pitt.
Crawford thought he had retired from military service in 1781. In 1782, a General named William Irvine persuaded him to lead 500 volunteers against the Native villages along the Sandusky River. His son and nephew accompanied him. The expedition would come to a bloody end.
In March of ‘82, 96 Christian Lenape, also known as Deleware people, were massacred at a Moravian missionary village in Gnadenhutten, Ohio. The incident was so horrible that over a hundred years later Theodore Roosevelt called it “a stain on the frontier character that the lapse of time cannot wash away.” Today it is nearly forgotten. Nonetheless, it was fresh on the minds of all in Crawford’s May 1782 expedition.
The expedition was doomed from the start, the tactical disadvantage is really very simple- the British heard about the expedition in advance and rallied 440 men, mostly Delewares, to repel Crawford’s 500. British troops were also among these 440. Crawford had expected to surprise the villages along the Sandusky River, but instead became the target of a surprise ATTACK- the isolated and nearly surrounded Americans fought off and on, indecisively, for two days, growing weaker and weaker while the Delawares called up further reinforcements from their own tribe. The Shawnees and Wyandots also sent braves, who were also angered by the murder of the 96 Christian Delewares.
Crawford was separated from the main body of his volunteers during a confused nighttime retreat on the night on June 6th, but he reconnected with a small party and started to cut East towards the Ohio River. After a day and a half to two days, Crawford and his small band were captured by Deleware and taken back to the Sandusky River. Along the way, the party made their intentions plain by capturing and immediately killing other members of the still retreating party.
By June 10th, Crawford and the surviving members of his party were certain that they too would be killed, but that they were being saved for something far worse.
John Knight was a member of Crawford’s original 500 men, and witness to his torture and death. Knight would be saved by the Deleware as a gift to the Shawnee. The Deleware taunted Knight with promises that Crawford’s fate would be repeated on him once the Shawnee had their fun. Knight escaped, cut hard and fast for the Ohio River, and slipped out of the Frontier. He would publish his first-hand account of Crawford’s death not long after.
“When we were come to the fire the colonel was stripped naked, ordered to sit down by the fire, and then they beat him with sticks and their fists. Presently after I was treated in the same manner. Then then tied a rope to the foot of a post about fifteen feet high, bound the colonel’s hands behind his back and fastened the rope to the ligature between his wrists. The rope was long enough either for him to sit down or walk round the post once or twice and return the same way…The Indian men then took up their guns and shot powder into the colonel’s body, from his feet as far up as his neck. I think not less than seventy loads were discharged upon his naked body. They then crowded about him, and to the best of my observation, cut off his ears: when the throng had dispersed a little I saw the blood running from both sides of his head in consequence thereof.”
“The fire was about six or seven yards from the post to which the colonel was tied: it was made of small hickory poles, burnt quite through in the middle, each of the poles remaining about six feet in length. Three or four Indians by turns would take up, individually, one of these burning pieces of wood and apply it to his naked body, already burnt black with the powder. These tormentors presented themselves on every side of him, so that which ever way he ran round the post they met him with burning poles. Some of the squaws took boards upon which they would put a quantity of burning coals and hot embers and throw on him, so that in a short time he had nothing but coals of fire and hot ashes to walk upon.”
Knight continues to recount Crawford bearing his punishments with “manly fortitude” as the torture dragged on for hours. Crawford was scalped, beaten, burned, and eventually seemed to slip out of consciousness, though still upright and moving, he seemed to experience some kind of sensory overload. It was at that point that Knight was hauled off and Crawford was finally submitted to burning at the stake.
George Washington penned a letter to William Irvine, on August 6th, 1782. In it, he seemed to recognize that Crawford’s death irrevocably changed the intensity of the war.
He wrote, “I lament the failure of the former Expedition—and am particularly affected with the disastrous fate of Colonel Crawford—no other than the extremest Tortures which could be inflicted by the Savages could, I think, have been expected, by those who were unhappy enough to fall into their Hands, especially under the present Exasperation of their Minds, for the Treatment given their Moravian friends. For this reason, no person should at this Time, suffer himself to fall alive into the hands of the Indians.” War in Ohio, from this point forward, would be a fight to the death.
Crawford’s violent death has been attributed to anger over many Frontier brutalities. It’s important to relate that both white men and Native Americans committed horrible atrocities on one another during the struggle for this land. No matter the immediate cause, Crawford has remained a reminder of the brutalities sustained and perpetrated by the White settlers, who would eventually win out. This monument stands as a reminder of both Crawford’s death and the greater picture of atrocity and violence that shrouded Ohio for so long.
In 1877 the Pioneer Association of Wyandot County erected a monument near this site. In 1982, the site of Crawford’s execution was added to the National Register of Historic Places. Commemorative monuments are typically ineligible for National Register listing, and sites such as the Crawford Burn Site Monument can qualify only if the markers themselves have become historically significant- this monument has gained local significance as the point of picnics, field trips, and battles with electricity companies to keep their machinery far from the site. This place carries a feeling of almost holy ground- the sort of place where people lower their voices and slip away from reality to contemplate events that still influence us today. The Ohio Historical Society also has a marker nearby. Schools, counties in Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, and a replica cabin have all been named after Crawford.
The actual burn site is said to be a little ways from the site of my filming on private property. To me, this place is significant because it reminds Ohioans of today about the struggles of our past, and brings interest to a period that has nearly slipped away from the minds of the average American.
