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The Battle of BLANKET HILL |
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The information I'm sending here is a condensed (by yours truly) version of the events as described in two books: Indiana County 175th Anniversary by Clarence D. Stephenson (1978) and History of Armstrong County, Pennsylvania by Robert Walter Smith (1883). This is a long post, but it would have been 2 or 3 times longer without condensing it. The Delaware Indian (part of the Iroquois Confederacy or Six Nations) town of Kittanning was the largest in the region and was the base of many attacks against settlers on the Pennsylvania frontier. At this time (1750s), these settlers were almost exclusively Scotch-Irish and German. In the late spring and summer of 1756, a force of about 300 men, comprising most of the Second Battalion of the Pennsylvania Regiment, was raised under the command of Lt. Col. John Armstrong at Ft. Shirley (now Shirleysburg, Huntingdon County, Pennsylvania). Seven companies, commanded by Armstrong, Capt. Hance Hamilton, Capt. Hugh Mercer ( a medical doctor), Capt. Edward Ward, Capt. John Potter, Capt. John Steel (a minister), and Capt. George Armstrong (John's brother), set out from the fort on August 30, 1756 along the Kittanning Path. By Sunday, September 5, they had reached the crossing of the Kittanning and Venango Paths (these were well-used Indian trails) within 50 miles of Kittanning. After encamping, one officer, along with a guide and two soldiers, went ahead to reconnoiter at Kittanning. The names of two of these men may have been Thomas Burke and James Chalmers. Unlike the British regulars in Braddock's disastrous campaign a year earlier, most of these men were frontiersmen and seasoned woodsmen. One of them, John Baker, who Armstrong considered "our best Assistant", had been captured near Ft. Shirley the year before and taken to Kittanning, but escaped. On September 6, the force passed through what is now the town of Indiana, Indiana County, Pennsylvania. They camped that night at an area called Two Licks or Salt Springs and it was there that Armstrong ordered the men to scaffold (hang high in the trees) everything that they could not carry on their backs. After nightfall on September 7, as the troop approached Kittanning, an advance scout brought word of a fire along the path. The troop retreated about 100 perches (This is somewhere between 100 miles and 100 inches) and the scout continued his report. He told Armstrong that there were only three or four Indians around the fire, a report which later proved to be disastrously incorrect. Lt. James Hogg, with the scout and a small group of soldiers, was ordered to watch the Indians near the fire and attack at the break of day, cutting them off from Kittanning if possible. The main body of the force then continued toward Kittanning, leaving their horses, blankets, and haversacks with Hogg. They soon reached the Allegheny River about 100 perches below Kittanning. They attacked the town, which consisted mostly of bark huts and log cabins, at dawn. The surprise strike killed about 30 or 40 Indians and 30 Indian cabins were burned. The chief of the village was a particularly fearsome warrior whose English name was Capt. Jacobs. It was reported that he personally killed 14 of Armstrong's men during the attack, but he was eventually killed himself. A soldier named John Ferguson is credited with braving the intense gunfire to set fire to Capt. Jacobs' cabin after Armstrong was wounded by a shot from it. Apparently the Indians had stored numerous barrels of gunpowder in and under their cabins (enough, in their own words, "to fight a war of ten years"), and as the soldiers set fire to the buildings to force the Indians out, the powder began to explode. Patterson's History of the Backwoods (quoted here, but I'm not familiar with it) claims that the explosion of the magazine under Capt. Jacobs' house could be heard at Ft. Duquesne, about 50 miles away. One explosion was so fierce that the thigh and leg of one Indian, along with the body of a three-year-old child, were blown so high in the air that they went out of sight before falling into an adjacent cornfield. As the battle was nearing its completion and the Indians were killed or driven off, Armstrong became aware (from English prisoners liberated during the fight) that the force of Indians around the fire on the previous night was not 3 or 4 men, but closer to 24. He immediately set out to help Lt. Hogg when he realized that he had left him greatly outnumbered. Hogg's troop of about 12 men had attacked the Indians as directed and were routed by the superior number. Three of his men were killed and the rest ran off, leaving Hogg, who was wounded twice and had killed 3 Indians himself, behind. He was found after the fight by some "deserters" from Capt. Mercer's company, hiding in a thicket. In an apparent effort to help him, they began to drag him out of the woods, until they encountered 4 Indians, at which point they also ran off, leaving Hogg to fight alone. One of these men was killed as he fled and Hogg was wounded again, this time in the stomach. Somehow Hogg, even in his wounded condition, was able to grab a horse that had gotten loose from the fight and ride it seven miles toward Kittanning before his injuries overcame him and he died. Because of the many blankets that were left behind on the hillside when Hogg's force scattered, the area became known as Blanket Hill. Although Armstrong's mission successfully destroyed Kittanning, many of his men were killed or injured because of the Blanket Hill incident. And because of the disarray resulting from the Blanket Hill attack, many of the men from his troop became lost during the return to Ft. Shirley. Interestingly, a few of them straggled in weeks later, saying that they had subsisted on nothing but rattlesnakes and ginseng. |