Sympathy for the Devil: Simon Girty, the Frontier Captive Experience, Loyalty and American Memory

Abstract

He was fifteen. In those fifteen years he had witnessed and experienced things which only those growing up on the fringes of a frontier society could. He had been raised at a place known as Chambers's Mill in what is now south central Pennsylvania, a settlement rough even by frontier standards. Nineteenth-century historian Consul Willshire Butterfield tells us, "Indeed, it had few, if any, rivals, for its wickedness, in the province."¹