Legionville | Kathryn Bashaar

Was Mad Anthony Wayne truly mad? Not really. He just had a fiery temper. But legend has it that his ghost still haunts the state of Pennsylvania, where he was born, died, and became the father of the professional U.S. Army.

Wayne had pretty ordinary beginnings. Born in Paoli, PA, on January 1, 1745, he had only two years of education at an uncle’s academy in Philadelphia. In 1765, he worked for a year in Nova Scotia as a surveyor and agent for a land company. When the American Revolution broke out, he was working as a tanner and serving part-time in the Pennsylvania state legislature.

The American Revolution

In January of 1776, barely aged 21, Wayne assembled a militia and received an appointment as a colonel in the Fourth Pennsylvania Battalion of the Continental Army. He participated in the Army’s unsuccessful invasion of Canada later that year, successfully executing a rear-guard action at the Battle of Trois-Rivieres. Wayne also saw action at Fort Ticonderoga and Mount Independence. He protected Washington’s right flank in the Battle of Brandywine in 1777, and endured the brutal winter at Valley Forge. In the Battle of Monmouth, Wayne’s forces held out against a larger British force after General Charles Lee abandoned them.

Wayne’s finest hour as a commander was probably the Battle of Stony Point. He personally led a nighttime bayonet attack, and his columns stormed and captured the British fortification. Although the victory was more a morale boost than a strategic triumph, the Continental Congress awarded Wayne a medal for his courage and leadership.

Even after the British surrender at Yorktown, Wayne continued to serve his country. He helped disband the British alliance with Indian tribes in Georgia, and negotiated peace treaties with native tribes. After the war, he received a belated promotion to Major General and retired to a plantation in Georgia, seized from a loyalist and awarded to him for his service.

The Legion of the United States

This is the site of Legionville, near Baden, about a quarter mile from the Ohio River. Logstown, the Indian town that once stood here, burned in 1754. An Indian burial ground lies nearby.

In 1791, Washington called Wayne back into service. After Arthur St. Clair’s disastrous rout in Ohio, the President realized that he needed a general who could build a disciplined army, and Wayne had earned a reputation for both strict discipline and for seeing to the comfort and well-being of his troops. Wayne established a training camp at Legionville, near present day Baden and Ambridge, and spent the winter of 1791-2 turning a few thousand remnants of the Continental Army and some recruits from Pittsburgh into a formidable fighting force: the Legion of the United States.

Modern historians rightly point out that Wayne’s subsequent successful campaign in the West was one of many steps in the European genocide of the natives of North America. And that he owned slaves. As it happens, he was a less successful slavedriver than general. He went into debt buying enslaved people to work his Georgia plantation, and ended up bankrupt.

Weirdest Death Ever

Here’s Mad Anthony’s gravesite. Well, one of them . . .

But his death is the strangest part of Wayne’s colorful life story. Wayne’s rival for the position of General of the Legion, James Wilkinson, did not accept defeat gracefully. Wilkinson went out of his way to undermine Wayne and spread gossip about him. When Wayne received intelligence that Wilkinson was being paid as a spy for Spain, he began proceedings to court-martial him. But the court martial never happened. Wayne died on December 15, 1796. Some sources say he died of gout, others say a stomach ulcer. Rumors abounded at the time that Wilkinson had had him murdered. Wilkinson’s career as a spy wasn’t confirmed until 1854, almost forty years after his death.

But the story of Wayne’s death gets even weirder than that. After his death, Wayne was buried at Fort Presque Isle, near present-day Erie, PA. In 1809, his son, Isaac Wayne decided to disinter the body and move it nearer the family home in Wayne, PA. Imagine his surprise when he found the thirteen-year-old corpse in an astonishingly good state of preservation. A local doctor, James Wallace suggested boiling the body to separate the flesh from the bone, and then transporting the bones. Wayne’s flesh and clothing were reburied at Presque Isle, and the bones taken on the 400-mile journey to Wayne, PA.

Oh, wait, though, the weirdness isn’t even finished. When he arrived home, Isaac realized that he was missing some bones. They had apparently fallen out of the wagon along the way. So, Wayne is buried not in one grave, nor in two, but in a 400-mile trail of a grave.

Unsurprisingly, given the bizarre circumstances, legends abound that General Mad Anthony Wayne’s ghost haunts the state of Pennsylvania to this day, rising every New Year’s morning to ride the roads between St. David’s Episcopal Church in Wayne, PA, all the way to Erie, searching for his lost bones.

Coda

As I guess befits a man who is both a ghost and a war hero, and also has a problematic history as a perpetrator of both slavery and genocide, Wayne has several taverns named after him. There’s Mad Anthony Wayne Café, in Wayne, PA, General Wayne Inn in Merion, Pa, and Mad Anthony’s Taproom & Restaurant in Waynesville, NC. There are Mad Anthony Brewing Company locations in Fort Wayne, Auburn and Warsaw, IN. From 1950 until the 1990s, there was a Mad Anthony’s Bier Stube at 1233 Merchant St., in Ambridge, PA, a sniper’s bullet away from where he trained the Legion of the United States 230 years ago.

Sources:

https://www.nps.gov/vafo/learn/historyculture/wayne.htm

https://www.eriehistory.org/blog/a-halloween-story-the-death-of-anthony-wayne

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Wayne

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Wilkinson

The Ghost of General ‘Mad Anthony’ Wayne and his Missing Bones

Like smaller, weaker nations always and everywhere, the American Indians were blown in all directions by the hurricane of the American revolution. By 1778, only the Delaware and Oneida sided with the Americans. Across Iroquois country, Indian villages suffered attack by either the Americans or the British or Indians who sided with one or the other. The Indians near Fort Niagara were attacked so viciously that the very cold winter of 1779-80 left them close to starvation.

**This statue of young Guyasuta stands in Sharpsburg, PA**

Ever the displomat, Guyasuta accompanied Cornplanter to the fort to plead with the British for help. It was their only hope. By this time, the Iroquois ability to hunt or wage war was so weak that they were reduced to begging.

Although offered only minimal help by his British allies, Guyasuta returned to the Ohio country in 1780 . He urged the Mingo people to remain loyal to the crown. Later in 1780, he led thirty Wyandot warriors in an attack on the Americans’ Fort McIntosh.

The Delaware and the Americans continued to attack Mingo villages. And Guyasuta became impatient with the British refusal to provide either protection or retribution. In the summer of 1782, he participated in a raid on the Patriot town of Hanna’s Town. The one-day fight destroyed thirty homes, dozens of acres of crops and 100 cattle. The town was never rebuilt. It was Guyasuta’s last battle.

In the 1782 Treaty of Paris that officially ended the war, the British signed over to the Americans all of their territory east of the Mississippi River. No one had consulted the Indians who lived there. They had no representative at the peace conference.

In 1784 and 1785, the Iroquois and the Mingo signed peace treaties with the United States, confirming the terms of the Treaty of Paris. But it was a mere formality. All was already lost. Once again, Guyasuta had backed the losing side.

The (Iroquois) Empire Strikes Back

The white men weren’t the only ones who broke treaty terms. Although the Indians had signed a peace treaty with the new United States, many young warriors refused to honor it. With the authority of the old Iroquois Confederacy weakened, bands of young warriors conducted freelance raids. Gradually, a new western confederacy of anti-treaty warriors emerged, supplied by British Canada. The frontier was still a dangerous place for isolated white settlers.

Against Guyasuta’s and Cornplanter’s objections, a former Mingo ally named Thayendanegea (also called Joseph Brant) assembled a force of 1500 warriors from the Wyandot, Shawnee, Delaware, Ottawa, Chippewa, Miami, Mingo, Creek and Cherokee tribes. Between 1786 and 1791, Thayendanegea’s army and their allies massacred 1500 settler families.

In 1791, President George Washington sent an army into the Ohio country led by Arthur St. Clair. But a near-bankrupt Congress could supply the army very poorly, and most of them were militia or 6-month draftees. Of the 2000 troops mustered, 600 deserted. The Miami general Little Turtle easily defeated St. Clair’s force.

Logstown: The Birthplace of the Professional United State Army

But Washington didn’t triumph in the Revolution by being a quitter. By the winter of 1792, Washington had selected General Anthony Wayne to lead the next attempt. Similar to Forbes in 1755, Wayne took a more methodical approach than his predecessor. From the 2500 soldiers remaining in the Continental Army and some new recruits from Pittsburgh, Wayne established the Legion of the United States.

He built a training camp at the abandoned site of Logstown (see this previous post), renaming it Legionville. Wayne spent the winter training and drilling his new army, which included Meriweather Lewis, William Clark and future president William Henry Harrison.

By this time, Guyasuta was about 70 years old. He had settled with two wives on a piece of fertile land along the Allegheny River near Pittsburgh.

Guyasuta visited the training camp twice. In his first visit during the winter, he asked for clothing and supplies. He also warned Wayne that the Western Confederacy was still on the warpath. His second visit took place in March of 1793. He pleaded with Wayne not to launch an attack on the Confederacy until all diplomacy was exhausted. But the Confederacy would settle for nothing less than a return to the 1768 treaty, which stipulated no white settlement west of the Ohio River. And the new United States would never agree to that.

Again like Forbes, Wayne built a string of forts between the fall of 1793 and the summer of 1794. Marching west, his Legion supplemented by 800 Kentucky militia, he burned every Indian village between present-day Fort Recovery Ohio and Defiance, Ohio, a distance of about 63 miles. The two towns still bear the names of the forts that Wayne built on their sites.

The Battle of Fallen Timbers

The Indians debated surrender, but decided to make one last stand. They chose a site near British Fort Miami, where they could still get supplies from the British and could retreat if needed. They thought this would be a good place to ambush Wayne’s army. On August 20, 1794, the forces of Little Turtle and Blue Jacket suffered defeat in the 80-minute Battle of Fallen Timbers. When they attempted to retreat to Fort Miami, they found it closed to them. Indian power in the Ohio country was finally completely beaten.

The peace treaty signed at Fort Greenville on August 3, 1795, ceded the Ohio river and most of the state of Ohio to the United States. In exchange, the Indians received a small annuity and a stipend of commodities.

Death of Guyasuta

Guyasuta had died just a few months earlier, in late 1794 or early 1795. He started his life in Logstown, a prosperous little town along the Ohio. And he ended it in another prosperous Ohio River town: the growing city of Pittsburgh. He had been a sachem, a warrior and a diplomat. In every war of his lifetime, he had the bad luck to choose the wrong side. His life as a representative of an empire in defeat tragically illustrates the fates of thousands of American Indians in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

As a student in the Pittsburgh Public Schools in the 1960s and 1970s, I learned little about the fates of the original natives of our nation. They used to live here. Our white ancestors came and displaced them. Now they live on reservations in the west. The end. In this series about Guyasuta, I’ve tried to bring to life the people who were native to Western Pennsylvania before it was part of the United States. And I’ve tried to show parallels between them and other fallen nations. Nothing can ever do justice for the loss of their home. But they were the first Americans and it is right that we remember them.

If you are interested in learning more, I highly recommend Brady J. Crytzer’s book, listed in my Sources.

Sources:

Crytzer, Brady J. Guyasuta and the Fall of Indian America. Yardley, PA: Westholme Publishing, LCC, 2013.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Wayne

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Fallen_Timbers

Kathryn Bashaar

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Mad Anthony Wayne