The Story of Colonel William Crawford Part 1

February 3, 2021·44 min·3 clips

"Who is the only American military officer to ever be burned at the stake?"

1. This is part one of a multi-episode Real Stories Podcast series on Colonel William Crawford, the only American military officer known to have been burned at the stake. 2. Hosts Graham and Brian, longtime residents of Wyandotte County, Ohio, narrate the story together, drawing on research and a guided tour with a local historian named Ted Bruner. 3. The episode's core question is how a decorated, retired Revolutionary War colonel ended up executed near Upper Sandusky, Ohio in 1782. 4. Crawford was born in 1722 in Westmoreland County, Virginia, near the Fairfax family's plantation, and later became a friend and surveying colleague of George Washington. 5. In 1744, Crawford married Hannah Vance and the couple bought a 64-acre farm bordering the Fairfax estate for 64 pounds. 6. Crawford served alongside Washington throughout the French and Indian War, including at the Battle of the Wilderness, and later worked as a Native American land negotiator in western Pennsylvania. 7. He joined the American Revolution, fighting at the Battle of Long Island, crossing the Delaware into Trenton with Washington, and fighting at Princeton before being stationed at Fort Pitt. 8. Crawford retired from military service in 1781 at around 58 years old, expecting to live out his life on the Pennsylvania frontier with his wife and children. 9. The hosts explain that in 1781, the British at Fort Detroit convinced Wyandotte chief Dunquot to relocate Delaware villagers from eastern Ohio to the Sandusky Valley, ostensibly for their safety. 10. By February 1782, food shortages sent about 150 Delaware back to Gnadenhutten to retrieve stored crops, while a separate Wyandotte war party had clashed violently with a white family in Pennsylvania. 11. Colonel David Williamson's Fort Pitt militia set out to find the Wyandotte war party but instead encountered the returning, unarmed Delaware at Gnadenhutten. 12. The militia promised the disarmed Delaware safe passage back to Fort Pitt, but overnight decided instead to execute them, with Williamson insisting on unanimous agreement from his men. 13. On March 8, 1782, the militia bound and killed 62 Delaware adults and 34 children with a Cooper's mallet, then piled and burned the bodies. 14. Two teenage boys survived by playing dead; one hid in a cellar as blood from the dead poured through the floorboards above him. 15. Colonel Crawford was not present at the massacre, but two Delaware survivors later misidentified him as a participant, a mistake that would prove fatal to him. 16. News of the massacre spread anti-American sentiment through the region, prompting General Irvine at Fort Pitt to write to Washington, who ordered the Ohio Valley secured. 17. The episode is a two-host conversational narrative format mixing detailed historical narration with casual banter and local color about Wyandotte County. 18. The tone shifts from lighthearted trivia framing at the start to somber and detailed when covering the Gnadenhutten massacre itself. 19. Listeners interested in Ohio and Revolutionary-era frontier history, Native American history, or true historical atrocities would find this compelling. 20. Listeners seeking a single, self-contained story rather than the first part of a multi-episode series may want to wait for the full arc.

As heard by us

A frontier death tale that treats geography as part of the story.

Real Stories Podcast follows Colonel William Crawford from his retirement and life with his wife Hannah into the grim end of his story, opening with the claim that he was burned at the stake in 1782 just outside Upper Sandusky, Ohio.

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Start with a stake-burning, stay for the Ohio frontier and the story of Colonel William Crawford.

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