Simon Girty: The Man Between Two Worlds

Simon Girty was born near Harrisburg in seventeen forty-one and grew up straddling two cultures that were often at war. As a boy during the French and Indian War he was captured by Seneca warriors and spent several years living among them, long enough to become fluent in their language and steeped in their customs. After his release he settled here with his family and worked as an interpreter at Fort Pitt, serving both the British and American sides.

Then in seventeen seventy-eight, at a pivotal moment in the Revolutionary War on the frontier, he defected to the British. He spent the war years advising British forces and accompanying Native raiding parties against frontier settlements, earning him the name the White Indian and making him one of the most feared and despised figures on the Pennsylvania frontier. He died in Canada in eighteen eighteen, a man who crossed every boundary his era had, and remains deeply controversial to this day.