SIMON GIRTY

THE WHITE SAVAGE

By: KEVIN GROTE

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

In the Year 1774, at the Confluence of the Great Kanawha and Ohio Rivers, the raw Scrapings of the Virginia Back-Country are set down into a blind and primitive Butcher’s Shop of tree-to-tree Murder. Among them is Gideon Croft, a young Surveyor whose Fingers are blackened with the Soot of Powder and whose Neck is burdened by a four-pole Iron Chain. It is here, under the sulfurous Fog of Lord Dunmore’s War, that Croft first encounters Simon Girty—a Man who lives in the spaces between the Lines, translating the Wampum Belts of the Mingo and Shawnee while wearing the blue Uniform Coat of a Virginia Officer.
As the Flame of Rebellion ignites the Continent in 1777, Fort Pitt becomes a Garrison of Suspicion. Distrusted by the incoming Continental Authorities, who replace nuanced Tribal Diplomacy with a rigid and violent Anti-Indian Policy, Girty chooses a separate Path. On a dark, drizzling Night in March, alongside Alexander McKee and Matthew Elliott, he slips past the Postern Gate to throw his Allegiance to the British Crown, believing a British Victory to be the solitary Means to preserve the fluid "Middle Ground" of his Youth.
Thus begins an Epic and Arduous Pursuit spanning forty Years. From the horrific, smoke-filled Plains of Sandusky in 1782—where Colonel William Crawford is delivered to the Delaware Fire and calls in vain upon an impotent Girty—to the staggering Slaughter of St. Clair’s Army at the Ridge of the Dead in 1791, Girty rides as a Partisan of the Western Confederacy. Yet, the ultimate Fate of the Frontier is decided not by the Lead of smoothbore Trade-Guns, but by the relentless Advance of General Anthony Wayne’s Legion and the legal Mandate of the Land Ordinance of 1785. When the British regular Officers bar the heavy Timber Gates of Fort Miamis against their fleeing Native Allies, Girty’s World is broken forever. He is cast out into a blind, bitter Exile in Upper Canada, pursued to the very Brink of his Grave by Gideon Croft and the unyielding geometry of the Surveyor's Chain.