Thomas Boyd And The Brutality Of The Western Frontier

The monument at the site of the Boyd and Parker ambush. The monument reads: “Sacred To The Memory of Lieut. Thomas Boyd and Sergt. Michael Parker Who were captured and afterward tortured and killed. Afar their bones may lie/but here their patriot blood/baptized the land for aye/and wideened freedom’s flood”
Photo credit: Ed Dehm, CC BY-SA 3.0 httpcreativecommons.orglicensesby-sa3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

In the darkness of September 1779, Thomas Boyd heard the muffled squeal of death.

Murphy, he thought. Can’t that man follow orders?

Boyd—an officer barely into his twenties—missed the fatal irony of his question.

But he did sense his mission was compromised. Boyd had orders to scout the British forces, not to engage them. Timothy Murphy’s shot must have echoed through the woods, alerting the Seneca. Worse, the others got away. No doubt the Indian would quickly warn his brothers. The encounter yielded one scalp, a horse saddle, and a bridle.¹ It seemed hardly worth the risk Sullivan’s men now faced.

The scouts needed to get out. And they needed to get out quickly. More importantly, Boyd needed to get word back to the General sooner. He dispatched two runners to ride ahead. They returned to report discovering a handful of Seneca on horseback up ahead.²

The young lieutenant remained confident that he would meet up with the main army soon enough. He rode on with his troops. They had not gotten far before they came upon the same group the runners had seen.

A choice.

Continue down the route they came? Or give chase?

Confident they had not yet warned their comrades, he decided to tail their adversaries. Every so often, the Indians would come into range. Boyd’s men would fire at them.³

They were close enough to the camp to hear the comfort of the drums when it happened. The false sense of safety vanished in a moment. They couldn’t see the hidden ravine on one side. On the other side, they couldn’t see into the dense thicket. Out of these, a hundred or more Tories and Indians burst forth.⁴

Things got worse fast.

Much worse.

Surrounded and outnumbered twenty to one, Boyd didn’t have any other option. He had to break through the lines. He had to rely on his training. Rather than retreat, he attacked.⁵ After all, his army most certainly would soon arrive.

The first foray appeared to cost the Americans nothing. Contemporary accounts suggest it left more than a dozen of their attackers dead.⁶ Emboldened, Boyd lunged forward again. This time, however, his troops suffered. One more time, and the line opened enough for a few, including Murphy, to risk making a run for it.

Lieutenant Thomas Boyd and Sergeant Michael Parker, however, couldn’t punch through. Their defenses collapsed. The enemy closed in on all sides.

Boyd’s riflemen and musketeers held out longer than expected. By the end, at least seventeen patriots lay dead in the field—perhaps more.⁷

They were the lucky ones.

Hours earlier, Major General John Sullivan paced as he greeted the daylight. He had assumed Boyd would have reported in already. The whole nature of events unnerved him. Especially since he discovered Boyd had overstepped his orders. Sullivan assigned six riflemen to the scouting force. To that, Boyd added twenty-two musketeers.⁸

This was supposed to be a scouting party, not a hunt. That many men risked losing stealth, the essential ingredient for survival in frontier terrain.

It didn’t help matters that, shortly before noon, shots rang out by the new bridge.

Capt. Benjamin Lodge had brought a contingent there to survey the structure. Its predecessor having been destroyed by the fleeing Tories, Sullivan’s army was forced to delay. Lodge’s crew came to the field with tools, not guns. They were attacked and ran for their lives, tomahawks and bullets whizzing past them. One hit poor Corporal Calhoun, mortally wounding him. Were it not for the expert shooting of one of the sentinels guarding the bridge, no doubt Captain Lodge might have suffered the same fate.⁹

Shortly after, a winded Murphy came rushing in. He reported what he had just witnessed.¹⁰ Sullivan immediately ordered Brigadier General Edward Hand to pursue. When Hand arrived at the location of the earlier battle, he found nothing but dead men.¹¹ He remained there until the rest of the army caught up.

The next day, the army spent most of the morning destroying the stores of corn they found. At noon, they marched to the Great Genesee Flats. Extending 12-14 miles up and down the river and several miles wide, it was covered with grass as high as eight feet. So tall was it that men on horseback could only see the guns of the foot soldiers sticking out above the grass.¹²

The march ended at Little Beard’s Town, the capital town of the Seneca, which Lieutenant-Colonel Adam Hubley described as “the largest we have yet met with in our whole route.”¹³ Sullivan’s troops found the town empty, its inhabitants already evacuated.

They also found the bodies of Thomas Boyd and Michael Parker. The sight was sickening. The journals kept by Sullivan’s soldiers weren’t shy to describe the cruel barbarity before them. Lieutenant-Colonel Henry Dearborn wrote that the bodies were “mangled in a most horrid manner. From appearances, it seems they were tied to two trees near which they lay, and first severely whipped, then their tongues were cut out, their finger nails plucked off, their eyes plucked out, then speared and cut in many places, and after they had vented their hellish spite and rage, cut off their heads and left them. This was a most horrid spectacle to behold and from which we are taught the necessity of fighting those more than devils to the last moment rather than fall into their hands alive.”¹⁴

While Boyd’s compatriots could only observe the aftermath of his torture, one eyewitness described it in detail. Mary Jemison, a white woman living among the Seneca, was there and saw it firsthand.

“Little Beard, in this, as in all other scenes of cruelty that happened at his town, was master of ceremonies, and principal actor. Poor Boyd was stripped of his clothing, and then tied to a sapling, where the Indians menaced his life by throwing their tomahawks at the tree, directly over his head, brandishing their scalping knives around him in the most frightful manner, and accompanying their ceremonies with terrific shouts of joy. Having punished him sufficiently in this way, they made a small opening in his abdomen, took out an intestine, which they tied to the sapling, and then unbound him from the tree, and drove him round it till he had drawn out the whole of his intestines. He was then beheaded, his head was stuck upon a pole, and his body left on the ground unburied. — Thus ended the life of poor [Thomas] Boyd, who, it was said, had every appearance of being an active and enterprising officer of the first talents. The other prisoner was (if I remember distinctly) only beheaded and left near Boyd.”¹⁵

The bodies were respectfully buried on the spot with the honors of war. There they remained until 1841, when they were re-interred at Mt. Hope Cemetery in Rochester, NY.

Too often we forget our nation was forged under the brutal reality of lawless savagery. Some would call it uncivilized, but it was simply a different world. A darker world.

Others would vanish into this same darkness. But not all would die. Some would become stronger than they ever could be.

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¹ Beatty, Erkuries. Journal of Lieut. Erkuries Beatty, in Frederick Cook, ed., Journals of the Military Expedition of Major General John Sullivan Against the Six Nations of Indians in 1779. Knapp, Peck & Thomson Printers, 1887, p. 31.
² Hubley, Adam. Journal of Lieut.-Col. Adam Hubley, in Frederick Cook, ed., Journals of the Military Expedition of Major General John Sullivan Against the Six Nations of Indians in 1779 (Knapp, Peck & Thomson, 1887), p. 161
³ Beatty, pp.31-32.
⁴ Burrowes, John. Journal of Major John Burrowes, in Frederick Cook, ed., Journals of the Military Expedition of Major General John Sullivan Against the Six Nations of Indians in 1779 (Knapp, Peck & Thomson, 1887), p. 48.
⁵ Fellows, Moses. Journal of Sergeant Moses Fellows, in Frederick Cook, ed., Journals of the Military Expedition of Major General John Sullivan Against the Six Nations of Indians in 1779 (Knapp, Peck & Thomson, 1887), pp. 90.
⁶ Hubley, p. 163.
⁷ Campfield, Jabez. Journal of Dr. Jabez Campfield, in Frederick Cook, ed., Journals of the Military Expedition of Major General John Sullivan Against the Six Nations of Indians in 1779 (Knapp, Peck & Thomson, 1887), p. 59
⁸ Letter from Major Adam Hoops to the Hon. John Greig, Canandaigua, in Frederick Cook, ed., Journals of the Military Expedition of Major General John Sullivan Against the Six Nations of Indians in 1779 (Knapp, Peck & Thomson, 1887), pp. 310-311.
⁹ Barton, William. Journal of Lieut. William Barton, in Frederick Cook, ed., Journals of the Military Expedition of Major General John Sullivan Against the Six Nations of Indians in 1779 (Knapp, Peck & Thomson, 1887), p. 11.
¹⁰ Beatty, p.31.
¹¹ Henry Dearborn, Journal of Lieut.-Col. Henry Dearborn, in Frederick Cook, ed., Journals of the Military Expedition of Major General John Sullivan Against the Six Nations of Indians in 1779 (Knapp, Peck & Thomson, 1887), p. 75.
¹² Ibid, p. 75.
¹³ Hubley, p. 162.
¹⁴ Dearborn, p. 75.
¹⁵ Seaver, James E. A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison. Canandaigua: J.D. Bemis & Co., 1824, p. 68. (In the original publication of her book, Jemison erroneously refers to Boyd as “William” Boyd instead of “Thomas” Boyd.)