Execution of Lucy and James Sample
In 1872, amateur historian Nehemiah Matson related a story about the execution of a couple, James and Lucy Sample, by Potawatomis. According to Matson, the two were bound to a tree and then burned to death. The executions, said Matson, were directed by a man named Mike Girty, who was supposedly a mixed race son of Simon Girty. But a 1960 profile of Matson stated that "Because of his indiscriminate mixing of fact and legend, however, scholars generally discount his books as valid sources." The story was repeated over the next few decades in other books, but modern scholarly accounts of the Black Hawk War make no mention of this event, nor do they confirm the existence of a Mike Girty.
Read more about this topic: Minor Attacks Of The Black Hawk War
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