Simon Girty, the frontier’s most hated interpreter

In 1756, during the French and Indian War, he and his brothers James and George were captured and carried to Kittanning, and the boys were divided up: Simon went to the Seneca, James to the Shawnee, and George to the Delaware. Simon was adopted by a Seneca family, became fluent in Seneca, and learned several other Native languages, which made him valuable for years afterward as an interpreter and hunter around Fort Pitt.

Disillusioned with the Patriot cause, he left Pittsburgh in March 1778 with Alexander McKee and reached Detroit in April, where Lt. Gov. Henry Hamilton hired him as an interpreter for the British Indian Department. Kentuckians knew him best from August 1782, when he, McKee, and Matthew Elliott came south with Capt. William Caldwell’s Butler’s Rangers and about 300 Shawnee warriors under Blue Jacket to attack Bryan Station, east of present Lexington. Kentucky tradition remembers Girty calling on the fort to surrender; the stockade held, and Caldwell lifted the siege after two days.

Colonel John Todd’s militia pursued, and on August 19 Caldwell’s force, waiting in the ravines at the Blue Licks, killed 77 Kentuckians, Todd among them. Girty served the Indian Department as an interpreter for years after the war (accounts differ on when he left it) and died in 1818 on land the British had granted him at the mouth of the Detroit River in Upper Canada.

The map pin is the Bryan Station siege site, which has its own story here.