Hugh McGary, the Blue Licks Hothead

Irish-born Hugh McGary (1744–1806) brought his family to Kentucky in 1775 with Daniel Boone (opens in a new tab)'s party and settled near Fort Harrod. Around 1779 he and his stepson James Ray built McGary's Station on his 400-acre settlement at Shawnee Springs, in today's Mercer County. Contemporaries described him as hot-tempered and quarrelsome; in 1781 a Mercer County court convicted him of taking bets on Sunday horse races.

On August 19, 1782, McGary was a major in the Kentucky militia at Blue Licks. Boone urged caution at the Licking ford, but the militia crossed and walked into an ambush. A later tradition says McGary spurred into the ford shouting, "Them that ain't cowards follow me" (HistoryNet (opens in a new tab)); it comes from recollections gathered decades afterward and is not in Boone's own 1782 or 1784 accounts. In the rout, about seventy Kentuckians died in minutes, including Col. John Todd and Israel Boone.

Four years later, on Benjamin Logan's 1786 raid on the Shawnee towns in Ohio, McGary killed the Shawnee chief Moluntha after Moluntha had surrendered. A court-martial found him guilty of conduct unbecoming an officer and suspended him from command for a year.

Kentucky today

McGary's Station is stop #65 on the James Harrod Trust's rural Mercer County driving tour, on Warwick Road near Harrodsburg.