b'For those tribes just west of the Appalachians and along the Ohio River, the situation was a precarious - and desperate one. To begin with, the Shawnee, the Mingo, the Delaware, and the rest had originally cast their lot with the French during the French and Indian Wars. Although they had lost, the British proved to be fairly benevolent towards them, and assured them through the Quebec Act of 1774, that colonial settlers would not be allowed to move past the Appalachians and stake claims to Indian land. So when the Revolution came, and the settlers began to encroach on tribal lands in a very belligerent and violent fashion, the Indians retaliated, and some very hard and horrific fighting occurred on the frontier. Although George Rogers Clark, in his valiant march on Vincennes in the Illinois territory, was able to claim much of the territory for the colonies, the war in the Ohio Valley and Kentucky was to-and-fro, a war of burned cabins, tomahawked settlers, massacres of Indians, innocent or not, and an occasional American defeat - even after Yorktown.Outside of continuous fighting in the South, the year 1782 was a comparatively peaceful one in the 13 colonies as the peace commissioners hammered out the final treaties of the Revolution in Paris.BLOOD ON THE FRONTIERIn the Ohio Valley and Kentucky, responding to outrages on the frontier, 160 militiamen defied a Continental Army order, marched into a village of peaceful, Moravian Christian Delaware Indians in the settlement of Gnadenhutten on the Pennsylvania-Ohio frontier, rounded up all of the inhabitants, herded them into two buildings. They accused them of committing the frontier atrocities even though there was not a shred of evidence that they had been involved, in fact, quite the contrary, allowed them to pray overnight, and proceeded to slaughter all 100 peaceful Indians the next morning, including women and children, set fire to the buildings, burning alive anyone who survived the massacred, and then marched away (Hogeland, William, Autumn of the Black Snake, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2017, p.83).The massacre of the innocent, peaceful Delaware at Gnadenhutten sickened many colonists, including George Washington, but it inflamed the frontier, with tribal leaders and their Tory allies vowing revenge. And revenge was not long in coming.Two months after the Gnadenhutten massacre, in May 1782, Colonel William Crawford assembled a force of 500 militiamen at Fort Pitt (Pittsburgh) to march on the Indian encampments on the Sandusky River, 60 miles north of Toledo and situated just below the Great Lakes. Crawford, 60, and a longtime friend of George Washington\'s had come out of retirement to command this unruly force. He was a reluctant participant, but having heard of the Gnadenhutten massacre and upon finding out that Colonel David Williamson, the instigator of the massacre would lead the expedition, Crawford chose to assume command in the hope that he would be able to restrain the bloodthirsty militia from committing further atrocities. Instead, Crawford himself became the tortured and burned-at-the-stake atrocity victim.At first, Crawford made steady progress on the way to Sandusky, hoping to achieve the element of surprise but his command was discovered shortly after they left Fort Pitt by none other than Simon Girty. Girty alerted the Indian tribes in the region of the American advance. British forces responded by sending 140 Tory Rangers under William Caldwell, who had been involved with Butler\'s Rangers on the Niagara frontier earlier in the Revolution, to team up with the tribes, already swarming through the forests to move on the unsuspecting Crawford. The Indians - over 500 Mingo, Shawnee, Delaware - encountered Crawford first, on the Upper Sandusky on June 4, 1782. After hours of vicious fighting in the woods, the Americans drove off the Indians and wounded Caldwell. The surprise was lost, supplies were running out, and as Crawford and his officers met to decide what to do next, the 140 Tories under Caldwell, Girty, and Elliott moved in to virtually surround the Americans. Crawford ordered retreat the next day, a retreat that quickly became chaotic as nightfall approached. Crawford, his son-in-law, and his nephew decided General Sir Rogerto stay behind, trying to ensure that every American who could get away did so. That decision proved to Hale Sheaffe be fatal to him and his relatives. About 300 or so of the Americans reached safety, ironically led by the same Williamson who initiated the Gnandenhutten massacre. Crawford and his relatives were captured by the Indians. The elderly Crawford was tortured to death, tied to a stake, and as Girty looked on, burned alive. The same fate met his son-in-law and nephew.The Crawford massacre wasn\'t the only cross Americans on the Ohio-Kentucky frontier had to bear in 1782. Just months later, on August 19th, a vicious fool of a Kentucky militia officer named Hugh McGary chose to charge a Shawnee village on the Blue Licks with under 200 men against the advice of the savvy Daniel Boone who urged him to proceed cautiously. McGary launched a reckless charge straight into a perfectly laid ambush set by a force of 350 British regulars, Loyalists and Indians commanded by William Caldwell and Simon Girty, fresh from annihilating the Crawford expedition. Boone told his command "We are all slaughtered men" (Wikipedia entry) and most were. Among the scores of Kentucky militia killed that day was Boone\'s 23-year-old son Israel. After seeing he could do nothing for his dead son, Boone rallied continued on page 46ArizonaRealCountry.com November 2020 45'