Shooting and Dancing
Notwithstanding the urgency of my business, I have been detained three days in this place by an occurrence truly agreeable. I have had the happiness of seeing Captain Michael Cresap marching at the head of a formidable company of upwards of one hundred and thirty men, from the mountains and back-woods, painted like Indians, armed with tomahawks and rifles, dressed in hunting-shirts and moccasins, and though some of them had travelled near eight hundred miles [this was a bit of an exaggeration], from the banks of the Ohio, they seemed to walk light and easy, and not with less spirit than at the first hour of their march.
That was the assessment of someone who may not have seen riflemen before. Muskets were the most common weapon at the time — rifles were mainly used by frontiersmen — and everyone was impressed when companies of riflemen passed through on their way to join the American army around Boston. Rough, tough, sharp-shooting men seem to have a special place in the American imagination, as shown by the many popular Western movies, and it seems that the same thing was true back then — or maybe it just seems that way to me because the idea of the tough frontiersmen has an appeal to me too.
At any rate, it wasn’t just the fact that the men were dressed, armed and “painted like Indians” that impressed the more “civilized” people that they met on their way. It was the way they shot. The writer quoted above, who was writing a letter from Fredericktown, Maryland, went on to describe how the riflemen were assembled one evening “to show the gentlemen of the Town their dexterity at shooting.”
A clapboard, with a mark the size of a dollar, was put up; they began to fire off-hand, and the bystanders were surprised, few shots being made that were not close to or in the paper. When they had shot for a time in this way, some lay on their backs, some on their breast or side, others ran twenty or thirty steps, and firing, appeared to be equally certain of the mark. With this performance the company were more than satisfied, when a young man took up the board in his hand, not by the end, but by the side, and holding it up, his brother walked to the distance, and very coolly shot into the white; laying down his rifle, he took the board, and holding it as it was held before, the second brother shot as the former had done. By this exercise I was more astonished than pleased. But will you believe me, when I tell you, that one of the men took the board, and placing it between his legs, stood with his back to the tree while another drove the centre. What would a regular army of considerable strength in the forests of America do with one thousand of these men, who want nothing to preserve their health and courage but water from the spring, with a little parched corn, with what they can easily procure in hunting; and who, wrapped in their blankets, in the damp of night, would choose the shade of a tree for their covering, and the earth for their bed.
Lots of people had the same thought: How could an army of regular soldiers, in the woods, beat men who had been used to the woods since they were boys and who could “plug nineteen bullets out of twenty, as they termed it, within an inch of the head of a tenpenny nail”? In fact, they had seen the situation before, during the French and Indian War, and the British sometimes hadn’t done too well against the French and Indians in the woods. In the Revolutionary War, however, riflemen weren’t always as useful as some people had envisioned, but that’s another story.
A few days after their shooting demonstration in Fredericktown, Captain Cresap and his men reached Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where they put on a similar demonstration and then provided further entertainment to the townspeople:
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 maneuvers of Indians, holding council, going to war, circumventing their enemies by defiles, ambuscades, attacking, scalping, &c.
Notes
Captain Michael Cresap had been in poor health for a while at the time he made the march of a few hundred miles to join in the siege of Boston, and he died a couple months later.
Sources
American Archives, 4th Series, vol. 1, p. 2.
Diary of the American Revolution, vol. 1, pp. 121-3.