gned himself to his fate. The whole scene is minutely described
in the several histories which have been written of this unfortunate
expedition; but the particulars are too horrible to be dwelt upon
here For more than two hours did the gallant soldier survive at that
flame-girdled stake; and during the latter half of this time, he was
put to every torture which savage ingenuity could devise, and hellish
vengeance execute. Once only did a word escape his lips. In the
extremity of his agony he again caught the eye of Girty; and he is
reported to have exclaimed at this time, "Girty! Girty! shoot me through
the heart! Do not refuse me! quick!--quick!" And it is said that the
monster merely replied, "Don't you see I have no gun, Colonel?" then
burst into a loud laugh and turned away. Crawford said no more; he sank
repeatedly beneath the pain and suffocation which he endured, and was
as often aroused by a new torture; but in a little while the "vital
spark" fled, and the black and swollen body lay senseless at the foot
of the stake.

Dr. Knight was now removed from the spot, and placed under the charge
of a Shawanee warrior to be taken to Chillicothe, where he was to share
in the terrible fate of his late companion. The Doctor, however, was
fortunate enough to effect his escape; and after wandering through the
wilderness for three weeks, in a state bordering on starvation, he
reached Pittsburg. He had been an eye-witness of all the tortures
inflicted upon the Colonel, and subsequently published a journal of the
expedition; and it is from this that the particulars have been derived
of the several accounts which have been published of the _Burning of
Crawford_.[48]

It was not to be expected that such a man as Simon Girty could, for a
great many years, maintain his influence among a people headed by chiefs
and warriors like Black-Hoof, Buckongahelas, Little Turtle, Tarhe, and
so forth. Accordingly we find the ascendancy of the renegade at its
height about the period of the expedition against Bryant's Station,
already described; and not long after this it began to wane, when,
discontent and disappointment inducing him to give way to his natural
appetites, he partook freely of all intoxicating liquors, and in the
course of a few years became a beastly drunkard. It is believed that
he at one time seriously meditated an abandonment of the Indians, and a
return to the whites; and an anecdote related by McClung, in his notice
of th