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Sam Brady was a scout and Indian fighter in the Revolutionary War era, when our area of the Ohio River Valley was the wild and dangerous American frontier. His legendary exploits rank with those of Daniel Boone and Simon Kenton, though he is less well-known.
Local people who are familiar with Brady's Run Park, a county park near Beaver Falls, Pa., may have assumed, like I did, that it was named for a small creek. No, it was named for the captured frontiersman and the run of his life.
Stripped naked, he was about to face running a gauntlet, which, if he survived that, would be followed by slow torture and death. He surprised his Indian captors with a bold move and raced off on foot. He initially eluded his Indian pursuers with a desperate 22-foot leap across a river chasm, hid in a partly submerged hollow log until they gave up, and eventually made his way back to Ft. McIntosh, where the Beaver River meets the Ohio.
Brady had grown up in a family of Indian fighters; he had lost his father and brother to Indian attacks within a few days of each other in 1781. He was appointed (originally by George Washington) as the leader of a band of men with similar frontier skills to patrol the north and west side of the Ohio River in this area, guarding against Indian raids on the scattered settlements in western Pennsylvania and what is now the Northern Panhandle of West Virginia. Brady's Raiders adopted Indian tactics of bravery, stealth and cunning that made him personally known and highly respected by his foes. So much so, that instead of quickly killing him after his solo capture, the Indians held him until many tribes could gather to witness the spectacle of his slow execution.
The scene as described by author Allan W. Eckert in his book "That Dark and Bloody River," had Brady, whose bonds were loosened for the gauntlet, punching a warrior in the face, plunging into the crowd, snatching a "blanket-swathed baby away from a squaw," tossing it into a campfire, and running off in the confusion.
Eckert, in the prologue to this incomparable book, said no other eastern river saw "such prolonged violence and bloodshed in its conquest" as the Ohio.
I grew up on stories such as Betty Zane's brave 60-yard dash to fetch gunpowder during a siege of Fort Henry at Wheeling. She rightly guessed that the surprised Indians would not fire on a woman as she hiked her skirts and ran from the blockhouse to the fort, but they did as she ran back with the powder. Every shot missed and the fort was saved.
The South Fork of Tomlinson Run flows through our farm. A few miles west, where the creek empties into the Ohio, the Poe brothers won an epic hand-to-hand battle against the sons of Wyandot Half-King Monatkaduto, with Adam Poe killing his son Dakadulah, and Scotash surviving to tell his father.
Not far from there, Chief Logan's family was treacherously murdered by a gang of whites led by Jacob Greathouse, on the Ohio riverbank opposite Yellow Creek. That launched Dunmore's War and gave us Logan's Lament, a personal view of what America's "Manifest Destiny" meant for the Indians.
When I was young, Lewis Wetzel was lionized as a peerless Indian fighter, just as Simon Girty was despised as "Dirty Girty," an American traitor who as a British agent paid bounties to Indians for the scalps of white settlers. Wetzel, I belatedly learned, was an outright sociopath who, for the rest of his life, ambushed and killed peaceable Indians out of pure hatred. He has been called America's first serial killer. Girty, I learned, did his best to save and ransom many captured whites, and in light of modern attitudes can be seen as the moral ally of an indigenous people resisting the theft of their lands.
Stories of Dirty Girty, Lew Wetzel, Adam Poe, Betty Zane, Dakadulah, Scotash, Chief Logan and Samuel Brady recall real historical events along our section of "That Dark and Bloody River."