March 2, 2011 THE VILLADOM TIMES II • Page 15 about 100 Indians the British had recruited with the stipulation that the Indians not kill women or children, but bring them to the British for rewards. “Aged men, women, children, and prisoners must be held sacred from the knife and the hatchet, even in the time of actual conflict,” Burgoyne told his Indians. “You shall receive compensation for the prisoners you take, but you will be called to account for scalps.” On the morning of July 27, 1777, a young black servant spotted some Indians sleuthing their way toward the McNeil farmhouse. He gave warning and was sent to run to Fort Edward for help while the women and children hid in the root cellar. A black servant girl was able to conceal herself and two younger children, but Mrs. McNeil and McCrea were caught trying to slip through the trap door. The Indians put McCrea on a horse. Unable to lift the hefty McNeil onto another horse, they dragged her away. The American militia from Fort Edward, summoned by the young servant, pursued the fugitives, but the amateur Americans were unwilling to close with the Indian warriors and fired several volleys at them from a safe distance. The Indians ducked and pulled McNeil down with them as the musket balls whistled over their heads. Before they reached the British camp, the Indians stole her dress and brought her in wearing a chemise. They shortly found out, to their dismay, that the British second-in-command, General Simon Fraser, was her cousin. Fraser heard all about his “scoundrel Indians” from Sarah McNeil. Later, two more parties came in. One of them handed over what Mrs. McNeil recognized as McCrea’s scalp. Horrified, Mrs. McNeil accused the Indians of murdering McCrea. The Indians denied the murder. They said that McCrea, while mounted on the horse, had been hit by one of the American volleys of musketry, and that they had scalped her only after she was dead. Coarse as this was, it’s wasn’t outright murder. Both sides took scalps, and the British offered bounties for them, as long as they came from adult males. “…the probability that Miss McCrea was killed as they alleged is strengthened by the fact that they took the corpulent Mrs. McNeil, with much fatigue and difficulty, uninjured to the British lines, while Miss McCrea, quite light and already on horseback, might have been carried off with far greater ease,” Lossing said. Further investigation produced two accounts: Judge Morgan Lewis, later governor of New York, who saw McCrea’s body laid out for burial, saw three gunshot wounds in her torso, but no hatchet wound on her head. A surgeon named William S. Norton examined McCrea’s skull at the time of a reburial in 1826 and agreed that her head had not been broken – the usual method of execution by Indians. She clearly died from gunshot wounds, and the shooters were almost certainly nervous Americans who never meant to kill her. Lossing, writing in the 1850s when nobody was politically correct and there was still active Indian fighting going on in the West, said everyone in the region accepted this version. The Indians did wipe out a whole family around the same time, but they almost certainly didn’t murder McCrea. Horatio Gates and Benedict Arnold, the American commanders, inflated the purported civilian casualties to “upward of 100 men, women, and children.” (Ironically, the 10 murdered citizens with the possible exception of the slaves were all Tories killed by mistake.) Burgoyne called in his Indians and berated them, and most of them left his service in dismay. The American riflemen then won the battles at Saratoga, and with the subsequent help of the French, Spanish, and Dutch, they won the war. What’s the lesson here? Nothing grabs attention like allegations of rape. Gates and Arnold could have legitimately cited the murder of the family and their slaves, but chose instead to turn a friendly fire incident into a murder with overtones of rape because of the propaganda value. Rage against people who don’t look and think like we do can be generated by any number of methods, and bogus rape stories are just one way of doing it. The Indian Wars featured a lot of rape stories on both sides. “The Rape of Belgium” was a staple of British propaganda to draw America into World War I – but when the stories were examined carefully, the stories were found to be entirely bogus. Remember the Iraqis ripping Kuwaiti babies out of incubators and leaving them to die? Remember that it never happened? Remember the weapons of mass destruction that never existed and cost us the lives of thousands of servicemen and servicewomen who were sent in to root them out? Remember Jessica Lynch? The official version is that she fought back in an ambush and was raped and tortured before her rescue. Lynch herself said she never fired her weapon, was knocked out when her vehicle crashed, received medical attention from Iraqi doctors and nurses, and was neither raped nor tortured. She said the rape story was made up over her objections. Next time you’re confronted with a story that appeals to prejudice against others, ask yourself: Who stands to get rich if we act on this and avenge atrocities that may not have happened? McCrea wasn’t even on our side, but her death was used to serve a good cause. American independence and liberty was a good cause, but we were fighting people we understood for our own hemisphere. That’s not always how it works. People who have read American history have generally seen the John Vanderlyn painting depicting a Colonial lass on her knees as two tomahawk-wielding Indians threaten her. The painting dates from 1804, but the incident, which took place in 1777, changed the course of America history. There is nothing like the murder with overtones of rape of an innocent young woman to stimulate patriotism and make men who are not otherwise bloodthirsty want to fight to defend their families and kill the bad guys. The murder of Jane McCrea at the hands of those in British pay polarized New York State. Frontier farmers who might otherwise have let the English and the New Englanders fight it out amongst themselves took to the forests with their rifles and muskets in their hands, even as the screen of Indian warriors covering the inept British and Hessians faded back toward their homelands, having been rebuked for the killing of a Tory’s sweetheart. Once the Indians were gone, the Americans shot the British and Hessians from behind the trees in the best frontier fashion, and the British lost the battles of Saratoga. Convinced that the Americans had a chance to win, France entered the war against Britain on the American side, soon to be followed by the Spanish and the Dutch. The British, stalemated on the North American continent, felt the French, Spanish, and Dutch threat to the “sugar islands” in the Caribbean and agreed to end the war rather than lose lucrative holdings where no one was fighting against them, and we all became a free country. The murder of McCrea may have won the struggle for American liberty. For all that, it was a fake. McCrea wasn’t raped and she almost certainly was not murdered by the Indians. She was, according to reliable testimony from loyal American patriots of her own era, the victim of what we ironically call “friendly fire.” The most detailed investigation into the death of McCrea was carried out by Benson J. Lossing, a four-square patriot and admirer of George Washington, and a thoroughly honest man. Lossing heard the story from the descendants of the people involved. McCrea was the daughter of a Presbyterian minister from Jersey City. While living there, she befriended Sarah McNeil, who had married twice. Both husbands were lost at sea. McNeil later moved to an estate in New York State near Fort Edward. When McCrea’s parents died, she moved in with her brother, who also knew the McNeil family. The outbreak of the American Revolution left McCrea in a quandary. Her brother supported the American cause and accepted a commission as an American officer, but the young man she loved, David Jones, supported the British cause and withdrew to Canada. McCrea was ordered by her brother, who now ran the family, to return to New Jersey, but she appears to have lingered with Mrs. McNeil, a loyalist, in the hopes of seeing Jones again. Jones soon returned to the Fort Edward region with the British and Hessian Army of General John Burgoyne. The British, who had been shot to pieces by American marksman during the retreat to Boston in 1775, were screened by America’s first fake atrocity story Speakers discuss social investing The Sunset Rotary Club, which includes members from Glen Rock, Paramus, and Ridgewood, recently hosted Jennifer Farrington and Ellen Rafferty of Becton Dickinson. The speakers discussed BD’s social investing program. President Tom Shea is seen here with Farrington and Rafferty. For eligible BD associates and retirees, the company matches both monetary donations and volunteer time to many nonprofit public charities and educational institutions that meet the program guidelines. Thousands of gifts are matched each year that support the nonprofit efforts of 501(c)(3) tax-exempt public charities. Also eligible are qualifying U.S. organizations in the areas of health, environmental protection, arts and culture, social welfare, education and more. Sunset Rotary also supports numerous worthy causes in the central Bergen region. To learn more, contact President Tom Shea at (201) 444-4215 or Membership Chairman Steve Wolferman at (201) 483-7193.