One of the first companies that marched to
the aid of Washington when he was at Cambridge in 1775 was that of Captain
Michael Cresap, which was raised partly in Maryland and partly in the western
part of Virginia. This gallant young officer died in New York in the fall of
1775, a year before the surrender of Fort Washington, yet his company may be
taken as a fair sample of what the riflemen of the frontiers of our country
were, and of what they could do. We will therefore give the words of an
eyewitness of their performances. This account is taken from the Pennsylvania
Journal of August 23rd, 1775.
"On Friday evening last arrived at
Lancaster, Pa., on their way to the American camp, Captain Cresap's Company of
Riflemen, consisting of one hundred and thirty active, brave young fellows,
many of whom have been in the late expedition under Lord Dunmore against the
Indians. They bear in their bodies visible marks of their prowess, and show
scars and wounds which would do honour to Homer's Iliad. They show you, to use
the poet's words:
"'Where the gor'd
battle bled at ev'ry vein!'
"One of these warriors in particular
shows the cicatrices of four bullet holes through his body.
"These men have been bred in the
woods to hardships and dangers since their infancy. They appear as if they were
entirely unacquainted with, and had never felt the passion of fear. With their
rifles in their hands, they assume a kind of omnipotence over their enemies.
One cannot much wonder at this when we mention a fact which can be fully
attested by several of the reputable persons who were eye-witnesses of it. Two
brothers in the company took a piece of board five inches broad, and seven
inches long, with a bit of white paper, the size of a dollar, nailed in the
centre, and while one of them supported this board perpendicularly between his
knees, the other at the distance of upwards of sixty yards, and without any
kind of rest, shot eight bullets through it successively, and spared a
brother's thigh!
"Another of the company held a
barrel stave perpendicularly in his hands, with one edge close to his side,
while one of his comrades, at the same distance, and in the manner before
mentioned, shot several bullets through it, without any apprehension of danger
on either side.
"The spectators appearing to be
amazed at these feats, were told that there were upwards of fifty persons in
the same company who could do the same thing; that there was not one who could
not 'plug nineteen bullets out of twenty,' as they termed it, within an inch of
the head of a ten-penny nail.
"In short, to evince the confidence
they possessed in these kind of arms, some of them proposed to stand with
apples on their heads, while others at the same distance undertook to shoot
them off, but the people who saw the other experiments declined to be witnesses
of this.
"At night a great fire was kindled
around a pole planted in the Court House Square, where the company with the
Captain at their head, all naked to the waist and painted like savages (except
the Captain, who was in an Indian shirt), indulged a vast concourse of people
with a perfect exhibition of a war-dance and all the manoeuvres of Indians;
holding council, going to war; circumventing their enemies by defiles;
ambuscades; attacking; scalping, etc. It is said by those who are judges that
no representation could possibly come nearer the original. The Captain's
expertness and agility, in particular, in these experiments, astonished every
beholder. This morning they will set out on their march for Cambridge."
Talk about
confidence. I’ve got some friends who
are excellent shots but I’m not sure that I would want them to shoot an apple
perched on my head! Call them foolhardy
or call them brave, there’s no question that these men were expert marksmen and
the dread of their Indian and English foes.
Christ, not man, is King!
Dale
1) Danske Dandridge, American Prisoners of
the Revolution (Charlottesville, VA: The Michie Company, 1911), p. 5-8.
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