American Rifle - Alexander Rose [22]
Later that night, the frontiersmen kindled a bonfire in the courthouse square, around which the company, “all naked to the waist and painted like savages (except the captain, who was in an Indian shirt),” awed onlookers with an “exhibition of a war dance, and all the manoeuvres of Indians holding council, going to war, circumventing their enemies, by defiles, ambuscades, attacking, scalping, etc.”6
This particular company of 130-odd riflemen and their Indian-shirted captain consisted of Michael Cresap’s Marylanders, Pennsylvanians, and others from places yet unsettled. The son of an English immigrant who became a prominent Appalachian, militia officer, and Indian trader, Cresap was a twenty-three-year-old Marylander with long experience fighting Indians in the Virginia militia, as well as an unenviable, if perhaps not entirely warranted, reputation for massacring the families of his native American foes.7
When Cresap’s company arrived in Boston, they shocked the New Englanders with their insouciance. The frontiersmen were certainly not what the Bostonians had been expecting after Congress—still a little unsure as to what a rifle was—voted on June 14 to augment the New England militias by raising “six companies of expert riflemen . . . in Pennsylvania, two in Maryland, and two in Virginia; that each company consist of a captain, three lieutenants, four sergeants, four corporals, a drummer or trumpeter, and sixty-eight privates.” These units were ordered to “march and join the army near Boston, to be there employed as light infantry.” (Historically speaking, they were the first troops recruited for the nascent Continental Army.)8
Among Cresap’s men, there didn’t seem to be any kind of hierarchy, let alone the traditional captain-lieutenant-sergeant-corporal-private structure envisaged by Congress. The Marylander was merely an Indian-style chief for whom they consented to work, yet the frontiersmen willingly did as they were told.9
Another rifle company under Daniel Morgan was run on almost identical lines. A frontiersman through and through, but one not born and bred, Morgan was probably conceived in 1735, in New Jersey, the son of Welsh immigrant farm-laborers. He first traveled to western Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia in the early 1750s, where he became acquainted with Kentucky rifles. An itinerant worker who enjoyed a good bar brawl, the six-foot Morgan eventually became a wagoner and transported goods into the hinterland to sell to settlers. When General Braddock set off on his fateful march to Fort Duquesne, Morgan accompanied the army as a teamster. Fortunately for Morgan, in order to travel faster, Braddock left his wagons behind, and so the Welshman missed the slaughter at the Monongahela.
After the Braddock debacle, Morgan joined a band of Virginia rangers, fought Indians while imbibing their “skulking” skills, and hunted in his spare time before returning to the wagoning business and buying farmland. With the outbreak of the Revolution and Congress’s call for riflemen, he held (just as Washington had done with his Virginia Regiment and other rifle commanders were doing) shooting trials to determine the best shots for his company. His men must have been singularly excellent because he actually took on ninety-six privates (rather than Congress’s stipulated sixty-eight). All were armed with rifles—Morgan even bought a brand-new one for the occasion—and they carried the usual terrifying complement of tomahawks and scalping knives.10
The alacrity with which backswoodsmen leaped to join the service surprised almost everyone and shooting competitions caught on everywhere. John Harrower, a Scottish merchant who had been ruined by the financial panic of 1772 and indentured as a schoolmaster