Custer’s Last Messenger: Battle of the Little Bighorn

 

Giovanni Martini was born in the winter of 1851-52 in southern Italy and abandoned at an orphanage on January 28, 1852.  He immigrated to the United States in 1873, working as a laborer in New York City.  One year later he enlisted in the United States Army under the name John Martin.

By 1876 Martini was attached to the U.S. Seventh Cavalry under the command of George Armstrong Custer.  On the morning of June 25, 1876, Martini was temporarily assigned to serve as one of Custer's three bugler-orderlies. On that day at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, five companies of the U.S. Seventh Cavalry, under the direct command of George Armstrong Custer were wiped out.  Martini survived.  General Alfred Terry later said to him, “Well, you are a lucky man.”

As the attack unfolded and Custer first viewed the enormous size of the village he gave his orderly, Martini, a verbal message for Captain Benteen to bring his battalion forward with the pack train containing the reserve ammunition as quickly as possible. Adjutant Cooke stopped Martini and scribbled a written message to reinforce Custer's order to Benteen.  Cooke apparently felt Martini, who had a thick Italian accent, needed a written message to clarify Custer's order. Cooke's scribbled message read:

“Benteen, Come on.  Big village. Be quick. Bring packs.  P.S. Bring packs.”

Martini started back on the trail in search of Captain Benteen.  He met Boston Custer riding to join the command. Martini was later fired on by Indians who wounded his horse in the hip. 

Martini rode on and met Benteen.  According to Martini, Benteen asked: "Where is General Custer?" Martini said: "About 3 miles from here." Benteen said, "Is Custer being attacked or not?" and Martini said: "Yes, he is being attacked" and said no more. Benteen was later to testify that Martini told him that the Indians were skedaddling.  Martini told later chroniclers that he did not tell Benteen ... that the Indians were skedaddling.  Some say that Benteen prevaricated after the battle, others say that remembering many years after the battle an old and feeble Martini just got it wrong.  Yet, another mystery of the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

Martini and the remaining Seventh Cavalry companies not riding with Custer defended Reno Hill for 36 hours until rescued by General Terry’s column.

After the battle, Martini remained in the army, transferring to the artillery.  He served in the Spanish American War and retired as a sergeant on January 4, 1904.  He died on December 24, 1922 in New York City.  He married in 1879.  His eldest son was named George, in honor of George Armstrong Custer.

Custer’s final message to Captain Benteen to “Come quick, bring packs”, written down by Adjutant Cooke went missing for decades. 

 

In the 1920’s one of Custer’s early biographers, William Graham tried to locate the missing document, only to be told by Benteen’s son that all his father's papers had been destroyed when their house had burned down many years before.  This turned out to by incorrect. 

 

Captain Benteen had given the famous message to an army officer friend, Captain Price. The message finally came to rest in the hands of a New Jersey collector for fifty years, before being put up for auction.  By a happy circumstance Colonel Charles Francis Bates learned of the existence of the message and secured it for the museum at West Point, where it resides today.

Custer’s Last Stand: Portraits in Time

Custer’s Last Stand and the Fetterman Fight

 

On June 25, 1876, at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, five companies of the U.S. Seventh Cavalry, under the direct command of George Armstrong Custer were wiped out.

This was not the first time that the U.S. military had suffered a calamitous defeat at the hands of the Plains Indians.  On December 21, 1866 Captain William J. Fetterman and eighty men under his command were similarly annihilated near Fort Phil Kearny in Wyoming.   There are some striking similarities between the two battles.

In June 1866, Colonel Henry B.  Carrington was ordered to build several forts along the Bozeman Trail to protect emigrants on their way to the Pacific coast. 

He established three forts along the trail, including his headquarters at Fort Phil Kearny, near present-day Buffalo, Wyoming some 90 miles south the Little Bighorn battlefield.

During the next few months, while Fort Phil Kearny was being built, Carrington suffered 50 attacks from Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors, losing more than 20 dead.

Although Carrington had served in the Civil War, providing valuable service in both intelligence and recruiting, he had never seen battle.  He went about fulfilling his mission cautiously.  Too cautiously in the view of some of his junior officers who urged him to take the offensive. 

Grumbling increased after November 3, when 63 men, including infantry Captain William Fetterman arrived to reinforce the fort.  Although he had no experience fighting Indians, Fetterman criticized Carrington's timidity and expressed contempt for the Indian foes. He boasted, "Give me 80 men and I can ride through the whole Sioux nation.”  This comment is strangely reminiscent of George Armstrong Custer’s boast, “There are not enough Indians in the world to defeat the Seventh Cavalry.”

Fetterman was a combat veteran of the Civil War and had been promoted to Brevet Lt-Colonel by the end of the war.  Many Civil War officers, including Custer, did not seem to realize that incurring high casualties was not an indication of good tactics. Frontal assaults and dashing charges were commonplace.

 The Plains Indians, on the other hand, rarely charged a stout defense. They hit the rear and flanks, probing for weaknesses and creating disorganization and panic by using mobility. They avoided heavy casualties whenever possible.

By December 1866, Colonel Carrington had been pressured into being more aggressive, despite the inadequacy of his troops.  Carrington’s guide, the famed Mountain Man Jim Bridger summed up the situation, "These soldiers don't know anything about fighting Indians." 

 Not much had changed by 1876 when Custer engaged the enemy at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. The frontier army was still small, ill-trained and badly equipped by a miserly Congress. The quality of the troops was appalling. Historian James Donovan writes,  “Training in marksmanship, horsemanship, skirmishing, any practical lessons that Indian fighting might actually involve, was virtually nonexistent.  Formal military training of recruits consisted mostly of elementary drill aimed at making a grand appearance at dress parade.”

 On December 20,1866 Colonel Carrington turned down Captain Fetterman’s proposal to lead 50 men in a raid on a Lakota village on the Tongue River, about 50 miles away.  Not unlike Custer, Fetterman had overlooked the need for intelligence about an enemy he underestimated.  In fact, there were some 1,000 warriors about 10 miles north of Fort Phil Kearny, waiting to lure the army away from the cannons and stout defenses of the fort.

On December 21, 1866, a group of Indians, including Crazy Horse, a later hero of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, were chosen to lure the soldiers to their destruction.  Just as at the Battle of the Little Big Horn, a Lakota Sioux spiritual leader prophesied victory. The Lakota saw this as the good medicine that won the battle.

At about 10 am, on December 21, 1866, Colonel Carrington sent a party to gather timber for the construction of the fort.  Within an hour the timber party was under attack. Carrington ordered a relief party composed of 49 infantry and 27 cavalry troopers, and a few hangers on, to go to the rescue of the timber party.  Claiming seniority as a brevet lieutenant colonel, Fetterman asked for command of the relief party. Lieutenant George W. Grummond, a known critic of Carrington, led the cavalry.

 

Carrington’s orders were clear. "Under no circumstances" was the relief party to "pursue over the ridge that is Lodge Trail Ridge".  This differs significantly from the orders Custer received from his commander Brigadier General Alfred Terry which gave Custer great discretion in his actions.

 Unlike Custer, Captain Fetterman certainly disobeyed his orders.  In violation of his orders Fetterman followed Crazy Horse and the other Indian decoys over the Ridge.  Even worse, the command divided, just as Custer’s was to do at the Battle of the Little Bighorn.  The cavalry under the command of Lt. George Grummond, left Fetterman and the infantry some one mile behind as they hotly pursued the decoys.

 At this point the Indians sprang the trap.  The Indians fought mostly with bows and arrows, spears, and war clubs. The Indians at the Little Bighorn were much better armed. In hand-to-hand fighting, Fetterman and 49 of his men were killed.

 Captain Fetterman and another officer are alleged to have committed suicide by shooting each other in the head to avoid capture.  This story parallels the allegation that Custer committed suicide to avoid capture.

 The cavalry fared no better than the infantry.  Lt. Grummond decapitated one warrior with his saber before being overwhelmed.  It took the Indians about twenty minutes to kill the infantry and another twenty minutes to annihilate the cavalry. (

 As at the Little Bighorn, the bodies of the slain soldiers were horribly mutilated after the battle.  There was one exception, bugler Adolph Metzger, probably the last trooper standing, who when all else failed, used his instrument as a club until it was battered shapeless.  The Indians covered Metzger’s unmutilated corpse with a buffalo hide in tribute to his bravery.

 Just as at the Little Bighorn, recriminations flew after the battle.  Initially, Colonel Carrington was blamed for the debacle, but he quickly changed the narrative, labelling Fetterman , an “overzealous” officer, in short an overly ambitious  “glory hound” who did not follow orders, the same allegations that would be made against Custer ten years later.

 Interestingly, although he was originally buried near Fort Phil Kearny, Captain Fetterman now rests at the Custer National Cemetery in Montana.

Custer’s Last Stand: Portraits in Time

Custer and the Gatling Guns

 

     Richard Jordan Gatling invented the Gatling gun in 1861.  The gun fired two hundred rounds a minute and had a range of better than one mile.  The weapons weighed about 225 pounds each, while the carriage and limber together weighed about 405 pounds.  The gun was not accepted by the American Army until 1866, a year after the Civil War, although twelve guns were personally purchased by enterprising Union officers and used during the siege of Petersburg.

     Three Model 1866 .50-caliber, six-barreled Gatling guns accompanied General Alfred Terry’s column in the 1876 campaign against the Sioux.  On June 10 General Terry dispatched Major Marcus Reno and six companies of the 7th Cavalry to determine if there were any Indians on the Powder or Tongue rivers. A Gatling gun and crew accompanied Reno’s column.

     Reno’s column passed over “very rough ground,” which required manhandling the Gatling gun across steep ravines.  On June 15, the gun overturned, injuring three men. The “almost impassable” terrain later forced Reno to temporarily abandon the gun on a high hill. Completing his mission, Reno reported to General Terry that he had discovered a large Indian trail that appeared to lead to the Little Bighorn.

     The intelligence gathered by Major Reno, influenced Terry’s decision to send Custer “in pursuit” on June 22.   “I offered Custer a battery of Gatling guns,” Terry later explained, “but he declined it, saying that it might embarrass him, and that he was strong enough without it.”

     Captain Edward Godfrey later testified, “Custer had declined the offer of the Gatling guns, for the reason that they might hamper our movements at a critical moment, and because of the difficult nature of the country.”

     Terry transferred the Gatling guns to Gibbon’s column as it marched west along the Yellowstone River to coordinate with the expected sweep of the 7th Cavalry from the south and east.  Terry accompanied Gibbon’s column.  A steep hill near the Bighorn River required lowering the guns by lariats. When Terry decided to push on, one officer recorded that “the battery especially had great difficulty keeping up.” Lost at least once in the dark, the guns were abandoned until morning.

     The experience of the Little Bighorn campaign confirmed doubts about the mobility and, therefore, effectiveness of the Gatling gun in Indian warfare.  In a report on August 20, 1878, Captain James W. Reilly, chief ordnance officer of the Military Division of the Missouri, stated: “Gatling guns are only an encumbrance. Indian warfare is entirely of skirmishers, to which the Gatling gun is not adapted. It possesses neither [the ability] to move rapidly nor the power and range of artillery.”

     Ironically, had Custer taken Gatling guns with him, his command would probably not have been wiped-out.  Not because of the additional firepower they would have provided, but because his march would have been so slowed that his attack would have occurred in coordination with the other units converging on the Sioux.

Custer’s Last Stand: Portraits in Time

The Battle of Adobe Walls vs. the Battle of the Little Bighorn

 Kit Carson

In 1864, at the height of the American Civil War, U.S. troops battled Native American warriors in the Texas panhandle.

The battle came about when General James Carleton, commander of the military District of New Mexico, decided to punish the plains tribes of the Kiowa and Comanche, who were attacking wagon trains on the Santa Fe Trail.

Carleton selected Colonel Kit Carson a veteran Indian fighter to lead the expeditionary force. On November 10, 1864, Carson started out with 260 cavalry, 75 infantry and 72 Indian scouts plus two mountain howitzers. The mountain howitzer was designed to be lightweight and highly portable. Because of this, and its ease of disassembly, it did not require roads for transportation making it well suited to Indian fighting and mountain warfare.

The expedition proceeded down the Canadian River into the Texas Panhandle looking for hostiles.

Carson decided to march toward Adobe Walls, the ruins of an abandoned adobe trading post and saloon, located on the north side of the Canadian River. 

On November 24 the Indian scouts reported they had found the trail of a large Indian village. Carson left his infantry behind to guard his supply train and ordered a night march of cavalry and artillery.

Approximately two hours after daybreak on November 25, Carson's cavalry found and attacked a Kiowa village of 176 lodges. The chief Dohäsan and his people fled, spreading the alarm to nearby Comanche villages. 

Carson soon discovered that there were numerous villages in the area, including a large Comanche village. Carson saw large numbers of angry Indians pouring out like bees, ready to do battle.

Marching forward to Adobe Walls, four miles from the Kiowa village, Carson dug in. Carson’s command of 330 was now besieged by some 3,000 Indians.  It was only the supporting fire of the howitzers that allowed Carson to repel the repeated attacks over a period of eight hours.

As night closed in, Carson ordered a retreat. The soldiers found their supply train intact later that night. Some of his officers wished to renew the battle the next day but Carson, consulting only with his Indian scouts, ordered a retreat to New Mexico.

The United States Army declared the First Battle of Adobe Walls a victory. The Kiowa remembered it as the time when the Kiowa repelled Kit Carson. The battle left the Comanche and Kiowa unchallenged in their control of the Texas Panhandle for eight years. The First Battle at Adobe Walls would be the last time the Comanche and Kiowa forced American troops to retreat from a battlefield

Military experts believe that Carson's decision to retreat was wise and that he deserves credit for a good defense. As it was, Carson suffered six dead and 25 wounded.

He was outnumbered, and only his clever defensive tactics prevented his force from being overrun and killed as George Armstrong Custer and some 220 men under his immediate command were on June 25, 1876 at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. 

The Virginia Gunpowder Plot of 1775

 

In May 1775, Royal Navy sailors, under the direction of the Governor, Lord Dunmore, arrived in Williamsburg with the intention of removing all of the gunpowder from the public magazine and transporting it to the British ship HMS Magdalen. Townspeople discovered what was happening and raised an alarm.  An incensed crowd gathered and faced the governor and his servants who were now armed with muskets.  Town officers demanded the return of the powder, claiming it was the property of the colony to which the royal governor had no right. Lord Dunmore said that he had learned of a planned slave uprising and was removing the powder for reasons of public safety. The Speaker of the House of Burgesses, Peyton Randolph calmed the situation, at least for the moment. 

Suspicions of the governor’s motives persisted.  On April 22, after a second angry crowd, fully capable of storming the Governor’s palace, was convinced to disperse by local leaders, Lord Dunmore angrily declared that if attacked he would, “…declare freedom to the slaves, and reduce the city of Williamsburg to ashes.” 

By April 29, militia men all over Virginia had learned about the battles in Massachusetts at Lexington and Concord on April 19.  Hundreds of men mustered at Fredericksburg and decided to send a messenger to Williamsburg before marching on the capital.  Once again, Peyton Randolph sought to prevent violence and urged restraint.  The militiamen at Fredericksburg voted not to march.  But there were others who were more hot-headed.  On May 2, the Hanover County militia, led by Patrick Henry, voted to march on Williamsburg.  On May 3, Patrick Henry and the militia were fifteen miles from Williamsburg.  Lord Dunmore and his family departed for the governor’s hunting lodge, Porto Bello, and from there to HMS Fowey at anchor in the York River.

Moderates were still looking for ways to ease tensions.  Carter Braxton, a moderate member of the House of Burgesses came up with a solution.  Braxton negotiated a settlement with royal officials such that the colony would receive payment for the gunpowder.  On May 4, Patrick Henry received a full bill of exchange, signed by an intermediary (a wealthy planter), as payment for the powder.  A triumphant Patrick Henry then set off for Philadelphia to take his place as a Virginia delegate to the Second Continental Congress, where he presented the payment to the other Virginia delegates at the Congress.

On May 6, Lord Dunmore issued a proclamation charging that the money had been extorted and that “a certain Patrick Henry...and a number of deluded followers who had organized an independent company and put themselves in a posture of war be arrested as traitors.” 

Murder in Colonial Virginia

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"Lynch Law" in the American Revolution

 

Particularly unlucky were those Loyalist who actively took up arms or plotted against the Patriot cause. They suffered all of the pent up rage that accompanies civil war. The houses of such Loyalists were burned and their property seized. 

A particularly glaring example occurred in southwest Virginia in 1780. A Patriot spy uncovered a Loyalist plot to sabotage Virginia’s all important lead and saltpeter mines in the area and then march on Charlottesville to free British prisoners of war. Governor Thomas Jefferson ordered Judge Charles Lynch to arrest the ringleaders and send the guilty to Richmond for trial. Lynch arrested seventy five suspected Loyalists and brought them to his plantation called Green Level, some twenty five miles south of present day Lynchburg. Judge Lynch decided to administer his own version of summary frontier justice. A few of the accused were acquitted but many others were imprisoned for terms ranging from one to five years. The ringleaders were tied by their thumbs to the branches of a black walnut tree and given thirty-nine lashes with a cat o’nine tails whip. If the convicted Loyalist begged for mercy with the cry “Liberty forever,” he was cut down and forcibly impressed into American military service. In 1782 the Virginia General Assembly immunized Lynch from legal action that might have arisen because of his extra-legal methods of dealing with Loyalists. The General Assembly found that the measures taken by Judge Lynch were warranted given the emergency situation.

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Love, Sex, and Marriage in Colonial America 1607-1800

The Virginia Navy in the American Revolution

 

Late in 1775, Colonel Patrick Henry, on his own initiative, commissioned James Barron to arm a vessel and pursue two suspicious ships.  In December, Virginia’s Committee of Safety was authorized to arm as many vessels as necessary to protect Virginia’s rivers.  The Committee of Safety immediately purchased five vessels including two small boats, a somewhat larger schooner and two large brigs.  Virginia also bought vessels to serve as state-owned traders sent on voyages to the West Indies and Europe to procure gunpowder and other war materiel.

Throughout the war, vessels were bought and built.  Particularly popular were row galleys, shallow draft vessels that could maneuver using both oars and sails.  These vessels were particularly well suited to coastal and river defense.

Manning the vessels proved difficult because the Navy had to compete with privateers for manpower. The Virginia Navy officially commissioned seventy-seven vessels during the war, while a hundred Virginia vessels sailed as privateers, attacking enemy shipping for personal profit. The Navy’s view on prize distribution became more liberal as the war progressed and the manpower crisis grew worse.  The percentage of a captured vessel’s value going to the crew that took the prize rose from one third for unarmed merchantman and one half for an armed vessel to one half for a merchantman and the entire value for a naval vessel.  By October 1780, Virginia promised crews the full value of any vessels they captured.

Nevertheless, the Virginia Navy always had more vessels than it could adequately crew. The Navy could never compete with privateers who from the first had the right to keep a hundred percent of the value of the prize and could devote their full energies to taking prizes. The initially stingy Navy was furthered hobbled by non-income producing official tasks such as convoy duty, transporting troops, and carrying messages, all tasks not likely to result in capturing rich prizes.

Murder in Colonial Virginia

Secrets of Early America 1607-1816

British and Hessian Prisoners of War in the American Revolution

 

General John (“Gentleman Johnny”) Burgoyne surrendered a British Army at Saratoga, New York in October, 1777. The surrender terms documented in the “Convention of Saratoga,” called for 5,900 British and German troops to march to Boston where they would be shipped to England, with a pledge not to fight against the Americans again. The Continental Congress found a way to thwart the surrender terms and keep the prisoners.  Congress insisted that the surrender articles be ratified by “the King and Parliament.”  This was an impossible condition since it implied British recognition of the legitimacy of the Congress and the independence of America.

In November 1778, the Convention Army prisoners began a seven hundred mile march from Boston to Virginia.  They were divided into six divisions, each marching one day behind the other.  The prisoners crossed the Potomac River in late 1778 and passed through Leesburg, Prince William County, Warrenton, Culpeper County, and Orange Court House, before reaching Charlottesville, their final destination.  At Charlottesville, the prisoners built wooden huts, on what is today called Barracks Road.

While the common soldiers lived rough, the British and German officers were able to pay to rent private accommodations.  British General William Phillips and the Hessian commander Baron Frederick von Riedesel were treated more as guests than as prisoners.  Thomas Jefferson played the violin with Baron Frederick von Riedesel at Monticello.  Baron Frederick von Riedesel and General William Phillips were later exchanged for General Benjamin Lincoln.

Murder in Colonial Virginia

Anna Maria Lane a Soldier in the American Revolution

 

 Anna Maria Lane (1755–1810) joined the Continental Army in 1776 with her husband John.  Lane’s is the only documented case in Virginia of a woman dressing like a man and fighting on the battlefield.  Lane and her husband fought side by side. The couple were on campaigns in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Georgia. Anna Maria received a severe wound at the Battle of Germantown (Pennsylvania) in 1777 which rendered her permanently lame. Despite her disability, she continued to fight alongside her husband and was with him when he was wounded during the siege of Savannah in 1779. Husband and wife served until 1781. They then settled in Virginia.

   In 1808, Virginia Governor William H. Cabell asked the General Assembly to grant Anna Maria Lane a soldier’s pension, writing that she was “…very infirm, having been disabled by a severe wound which she received while fighting as a common soldier, in one of our Revolutionary battles, from which she never has recovered, and perhaps never will recover.”  The pension was granted and the record notes that, “in the Revolutionary War, (she) performed extraordinary military services at the Battle of Germantown, in the garb, and with the courage of a soldier.”

How Martha Washington Lived: 18th Century Customs

Secrets of Early America 1607-1816

Andrew Ferguson: Black Patriot of the American Revolution

 

Hundreds free and enslaved men from Virginia fought in the Patriot cause.  Like the rest of the population, these men had their own motives for doing so.  Some had no choice and were simply enlisted by their enslavers.  Others could see a path to emancipation.  Still others saw a possible avenue for economic advancement.

Take for example the case of Private Andrew Ferguson.  Andrew Ferguson was born in Dinwiddie County in the early 1760s.  Ferguson was born to free black parents.  Andrew and his father were captured by British forces who, assuming they were enslaved, offered father and son freedom if they would fight for the King.  They refused and were beaten for their obstinate refusal.  The pair escaped from the British and joined the Patriot forces.  Andrew Ferguson was destined to see a great deal of action, in several theaters, during the war.  He fought at Brandywine (Pennsylvania), at Kings Mountain (South Carolina) and Cowpens (South Carolina).  He was severely wounded at the Battle of Guilford Court House (North Carolina), but later fought at the Siege of Ninety Six and the Battle of Eutaw Springs (both in South Carolina).  Andrew Ferguson served five years and six months.

By June 1781 some 1,500 (25 %) of the 6,000 troops under George Washington’s direct command were black.

Secrets of Early America 1607-1816

An Independently Minded Woman of the American Revolution

 

 Hannah Lee Corbin (1728–1782) is reputed to be the first Virginia woman to take a stand for women's rights. She was born Hannah Lee, a member of the wealthy and influential Lee family of Stratford Hall in Westmoreland County. Two of her brothers Francis Lightfoot Lee and Richard Henry Lee were to become prominent American patriots and signers of the Declaration of Independence.

 Hannah married her cousin Gawain Corbin in 1747 at the age of nineteen. They had one daughter. Gawain Corbin died in 1760, leaving the thirty-two-year-old Hannah a rich widow, and so she would remain unless, as stipulated in her late husband’s will, she re-married, in which case she would forfeit her inheritance. Being a woman of advanced thinking for the age, Hannah did not let this stipulation stand in her way. She began to co-habit with her lover, a physician named Richard Hall. They had two children which she gave the Corbin surname. Hannah’s private life scandalized her family. She further aggravated her siblings by leaving the Anglican Church in 1764 and joining the Baptist Church.

 The ever-independent thinking Hannah Corbin wrote to her brother Richard Henry Lee in 1778, echoing back the very sentiments of “no taxation without representation” that animated the Revolution. “Why,” she asked, “should widows pay taxes when they have no voice in making the laws or in choosing the men who made them?” She railed against male domination in law and politics and argued for women’s suffrage. Like many whose lives did not reflect the promise of the Declaration that “all (people) are created equal,” Hannah’s Corbin’s dream would have to wait. Women did not get the vote across America for almost one hundred and fifty years after the Declaration of Independence.

Love, Sex, and Marriage in Colonial America 1607-1800

Virginia in the American Revolution

Elizabeth Zane a Heroine of the American Revolution

 

Elizabeth “Betty” Zane (1765–1823) was a heroine of the Revolutionary War. In 1782 Native American and Loyalist forces attacked a small garrison of forty-two at Fort Henry in western Virginia (modern day Wheeling, West Virginia). The garrison began to run out of black powder for their muskets and rifles. Zane immediately volunteered to leave the fort to retrieve a secret cache of powder. She ran fifty yards in full view of the enemy to retrieve the gunpowder. Her mad dash allowed American forces to hold the fort.

In 1861, John S. Adams wrote a poem entitled, Elizabeth Zane which immortalized Betty Zane and which reads, in part:

“No time had she to waver or wait
Back must she go ere it be too late;
She snatched from the table its cloth in haste
And knotted it deftly around her waist,

“Then filled it with powder –never, I ween,
Had powder so lovely a magazine;
Then scorning the bullets’ deadly rain,
Like a startled fawn, fled Elizabeth Zane.

“She gained the fort with her precious freight;
Strong hands fastened the oaken gate;
Brave men’s eyes were suffused with tears
That had been strangers for many years.”

Love, Sex, and Marriage in Colonial America 1607-1800

How Martha Washington Lived: 18th Century Customs

How Colonial Americans Travelled

 

George Washington's Riding Chair

Movies often give the impression that everyone in the eighteenth century owned a horse.  In fact, horses were transportation reserved for the upper class and professionals because of the expense involved in keeping them.  At most, a horse could effectively cover about fifty miles a day and most common folk walked if they needed to travel.  In the colonial period, the Virginia gentry traveled often by horse and carriage to visit family and friends, to attend social events, and to take part in the political life of Williamsburg.  The circumference of travel was generally fairly small except for business or political reasons.

Overland on horseback from Williamsburg to Richmond, in good weather, would take one day (fifty miles).  The journey from Williamsburg to Charlottesville could take four days and to the Shenandoah Valley five or more days.  Even riding the fastest horse, a trip from Williamsburg to New York City would take ten days.  The most famous overland trip from New York to Williamsburg was that made by the allied Franco-American army of George Washington and General Rochambeau. The army began its march on August 19, 1781, and arrived in Williamsburg, a march of some four hundred miles, on September 14.

The easiest method of travel between Williamsburg and Philadelphia or New York City was by ship. The trip to Philadelphia would take about a week, that to New York ten to fourteen days, depending on the weather.  Over land, the journey could take twice as long.  Ships traveling across the Atlantic took at least six weeks.

Love, Sex, and Marriage in Colonial America 1607-1800

How Martha Washington Lived: 18th Century Customs