Brady's Bend: Frontier Scout Country

This dramatic loop of the Allegheny River takes its name from Captain Samuel Brady, born in seventeen fifty-six and one of the most celebrated frontier scouts of the Revolutionary era. Brady grew up in western Pennsylvania and became a ranger renowned for wilderness survival and deep knowledge of the forest. In June of seventeen seventy-nine, in what was then Seneca territory, he led a force here in response to the killing of a settler woman and her four children and the capture of two more children as prisoners.

His party located a group of seven Native men, both Seneca and Munsee, killed their leader, and freed the two captive children. Brady became the subject of countless legends in the years after, some heroic, some disputed by historians. He died in seventeen ninety-five, and the bend of the river has carried his name ever since.