The Boatmans:
Claudius Boatman, the Lee Massacre, and Trying to Solve a Scalping

Claudius Boatman is the name of a man who lived a very full life; he was born a Huguenot in France in an era of religious persecution, an immigrant to what would be known as the United States, a militia member, a veteran of the Revolutionary War, an early settler of the Pennsylvania wilderness, a landowner, farmer and father. This page is not so much about him, as there is already a Wordpress site dedicated to decoding his life story, bearing the excellent tagline, "Separating Man from Myth".

The slogan is fitting given its relevance to my own historical research, which often pertains to culture but also extends to genealogy. And early on in researching my heritage, letting the digital tree on my mother's Ancestry.com account sprawl out its branches as far as possible, I encountered the story of one of Claudius's daughters, Francoise "Fanny" Boatman English, my seventh great-grandmother on my mother's side, and was immediately struck by the newspaper clipping attached to her profile.

The clipping comes from a May 1952 article from Williamsport, Pennsylvania’s Daily Gazette and Bulletin entitled “Pine Creek Burial Ground Typical Of Many to Be Visited Tomorrow,” an entry in Major Fred Bowles’s Outdoor Outlook column. The relevant paragraph reads,

Fanny English, daughter of Claudius Boatman is buried there. Fanny Boatman was scalped by the Indians in early times before Lycoming County was formed, she recovered and married John English (emphasis mine).

I was obviously struck by this story, especially in how nonchalantly it was relayed. As I was in the process of compiling an interactive Google Map containing the birthplaces of my ancestors, I made sure to jot down this detail on the 'pin' placed in New Rochelle, New York.

In returning to my research after an extended break, I found this story at the front of my mind, though not for the strangeness or relative tragi-novelty that had made it a staple of any conversation I had entered that turned to the topic of genealogy. I had realized that a chunk of research I had done on my father's side was actually quite incorrect, compelling me to go through other previous research of mine to check for inaccuracy or fallacy. I surely would not want to go about my life believing that this event was a part of my heritage if it were not, nor did I want to trivialize Fanny's memory by continuing to treat it as an oddball fact about my own life.

The Daily Gazette and Bulletin article itself appears to have surfaced in the years after the Wordpress site on Boatman was being updated. The proprietor of the site last left a comment in late 2014; the above paragraph was uploaded to Fanny’s FindAGrave page on June 28, 2015, and a full scan of the article has also been available via Ancestry.com’s Newspapers archive since at latest 2024.

As I dug deeper into the Boatman family's history seeking dots to connect, I realized that the Lee Massacre is inescapable when discussing their lineage. John F. Meginness, author of the 1892 History of Lycoming County Pennsylvania describes the Massacre thusly:

The murder of Maj. John Lee and several members of his family, some time in August, 1782, was very cruel and caused much excitement among the people. He lived near what is now the little town of Winfield, a few miles above Northumberland, on the west side of the river. It was a warm evening, and Lee and his family, with one or two neighbors, were eating supper. Suddenly a band of Indians burst upon them. Lee was stricken down and scalped, and an old man named Walker shared the same fate. Mrs. Boatman was killed and scalped, and a daughter was also scalped. Two or three escaped. A sort of Lee named Robert was returning home, and when he came in sight of the house the Indians were leaving it. He fled to Sunbury and gave the alarm. In the mean time the Indians, retreated up the river, carrying Mrs. Lee and her infant child with them as prisoners. Colonel Hunter hastily collected a party of twenty men and started in pursuit. When they reached the house they found Lee and Miss Boatman still, living. They were sent to Sunbury on litters for treatment, but Lee soon after died. Miss Boatman recovered and lived for many years (emphasis mine).

The 'Mrs. Boatman' is most likely Marie Jane Reed, first wife of Claudius Boatman. Curiously, the daughter - 'Miss Boatman' - remains unnamed until the forty-sixth chapter of the extensive history, which describes Claudius’s role in settling Pine Creek in McHenry Township.

Boatman, the pioneer, was a Frenchman by birth. He came from Buffalo [V]alley, where, it will be remembered, his daughter Rebecca was scalped by the Indians while making one of their last forays. She was found and cared for, and recovered. In after years she married Isaac Smee and had three sons, Charles, John, and Alpheus, and two daughters; Mary married Louis Hostrander; Elizabeth, John Shaner. Their mother lived to a good age, but never had any hair on her head after being scalped (emphasis mine).

How unfortunate could this family be - to have not one, but two daughters subjected to scalping, and even more miraculous that both survived the ordeal and went on to have bountiful health and large families. This inclusion of Rebecca, naturally, stuck out to me and implored me to go further.

Meginness's naming of Rebecca as described in the forty-sixth chapter is referenced on the Wikipedia page for McHenry Township alongside two other older sources, though neither of those name the scalped Boatman daughter, and neither does the 1857 book Otzinachson: or, a History of the West Branch Valley of the Susquehanna, the 1877 book Annals of Buffalo Valley, Pennsylvania, 1755-1855, a 1924 recount of the history, or Kathy K. Swopes's much more recent history for the Union County Historical Society.

Meanwhile, the 1886 book History of That Part of the Susquehanna and Juniata Valleys claims "a Mrs. Boatman and daughters, were killed" (emphasis mine), and the obituary of one of Fanny's daughters, Margaret English Harris, incorrectly claims it was another one of Fanny's daughters, also unnamed, who was scalped. Census data from the time, however, shows that a fifteen-year-old Rebecca was injured at the time of her mother's death. And an article from July 27, 1893 lists the Miss Boatman as later becoming "Mrs. Smee", accurate with the course of Rebecca's life.

Also, the quotes above are not the only references to a Boatman daughter being scalped in Meginness's history. The twelfth chapter contains discussion of the Walker Tragedy, which occurred in 1790 to Benjamin, Joseph, and Henry Walker, whose father John had perished in the Lee Massacre. The siblings encountered two Indians, one of whom made crude jokes about the boys' father, bragging about having killed him. The brothers planned with frontiersman Samuel Doyle to kill the two Indians, then approached their camp and did so. The murder shocked the community, and authority figures quickly took action to condemn the Walkers' murder as to avoid backlash from friends of the Indians, who were incensed by the brothers' shocking act, and the Indians themselves.

However, the Walkers did have many sympathizers, with petitions to authorities calling for their pardon, emphasizing the cruelty of the Indians as justfying their gruesome deaths. John Robinson, son of Captain Thomas Robinson, wrote in his letter to Colonel Thomas Proctor thusly:

One of the two Indians they killed vaunted of his taking twenty-three scalps. One of the scalped persons being alive, is willing to give in on oath that he scalped a woman at the same time their father, John Walker, was killed and scalped, which was their inducement for killing them.

Meginness ventriloquizes,

An Indian who publicly boasted of having taken "twenty-three scalps” deserved killing, even if peace did exist. The woman he scalped, and who recovered, was the daughter of Claudius Boatman, and they both lived and died on Pine [C]reek. It is not likely that she entertained much sympathy for the Indian on her own account - much less on the account of her mother, who was killed at the same time (emphasis mine).

Both sisters lived well into the 1800s, with Rebecca dying around 1839 and Fanny dying between 1844 and 1847, meaning that either could have testified for this account. The specific yet vague mention of Pine Creek deserves attention. According to the Wordpress site's research, when Claudius "arrived in Pine Creek in 1786, the family probably consisted of Claudius, his [second] wife, Esther, his son James and daughters Sarah and Rebecca." However, Fanny - who was, having been born around 1755, was a good decade older than Rebecca, who was born around 1766 - is described as having "moved from the Island where [her husband] John lived on the West Branch to the one they subsequently bought opposite Jersey Shore on Pine Creek, now in Cummings [T]ownship." Chapter forty-six of Meginness gives more detail to the couple's settling in the township:

John English had married Fannie, daughter of Claudius Boatman, the previous year, and she accompanied him to the new settlement. The country was extremely wild at that time and it required some nerve to settle in what was in every respect a "howling wilderness." The Seneca Indians, whose country was less than a hundred miles north, frequently came here to hunt and fish, and parties of them passed his cabin almost daily.

Their time in the area, however, had to be postponed.

Another daughter named Fanny married John English, who had located as early as 1784 on what has since been known as English [I]sland in Pine [C]reek[.] He was warned by "Shawney John," a friendly Indian, to leave as the savages were about to make a descent on Pine [C]reek. He heeded the warning and remained away about a year, when he returned.

The Wordpress site mentions "Shawney John" in the section on the ‘Family’ page describing Fanny’s life, though in a disembodied and contextless sentence; its proprietor was most likely intending to include this information but had a keyboard slip. He is also mentioned much earlier in Meginness’s history, in its fifth chapter, as “John Shawnee” as a "Shawanese" (a tribe sometimes referred as Shawnee or Shaawana elsewhere) resident of Lycoming County, but nowhere else. The local Shawanese Indians are described earlier in that chapter as being "opposed to the whites". However, the Shawanese elsewhere are described as having been divided by American Independence, with many siding with the British, though others remained neutral.

This story means that had Fanny been the scalped Boatman sister, she would have had a positive encounter with an Indian two years after her scalping, adding further complexity to the unfolding of her life. Her husband is considered by most accounts the first white settler of Cummings Township, making this cordial interaction all the more striking, though its circumstances are not implausible. It is good that Meginness verifies "Shawney John"'s existence as a participant in the community, as it could be easy for such a story to become a sort of folk tale to increase John English's mystique around the Thanksgiving table, though "Shawney John" unfortunately remains very obscure in wider Lycoming County history, though he does have pages on FamilySearch, MyHeritage, and Ancestry.

The concern of history being passed down through word-of-mouth as opposed to through record is genuine, especially given the conflicting information surrounding the Boatman scalping/s that has accumulated in the generations following its/their occurence. Fanny's FindAGrave page says even her death date could have been so, as no record of it currently exists. The circumstances of Fanny's burial are their own controversy: both Ancestry and the FindAGrave page claim she is buried, albeit without a marking, next to her husband on English Island, the small island in the Pine Creek named for them. Claudius himself is also buried there, as is Thomas Ramsey, Jr. However, the obscure, overgrown cemetery the article profiles is described as being located “just a mile below English Center along Little Pine Creek on the Waterville road”; this road may be Little Pink Creek Road itself, as it runs south along the river to Waterville.

FindAGrave does not provide GPS coordinates for English Island, nor is it searchable on the map systems hosted by Apple and Google, but it is stated to be in Waterville itself. Furthermore, FindAGrave also has Fanny’s burial ground listed as Lower English Center Cemetery, also known as Boatman Cemetery, Callahan Cemetery, English Island Cemetery, which is described as being situated “1/5 miles south of English Center”. Numerous other Boatman and English descendants are buried here, but not John, nor is there evidence of Fanny’s burial, well, anywhere. If she is buried in the Pine Creek cemetary, with no photo record online, it remains uncertain whether anymore information about her life could be gleaned about her life from her headstone - if there is one; and, judging by the headstones of her father and husband, not much likely would be.

Confusion only abounds once more details are gathered about the Boatman scalping/s. The History and Biographical Cyclopaedia of Butler County - in which James Boatman, son to Claudius and brother to Fanny and Rebecca, later settled - alludes to a run in with Indians not strictly tied to the Lee Massacre:

Himself [James], wife, brothers, & sisters were great hunters. In PA they would go out hunting many miles from home & remain for weeks…They were often chased by the Indians, having many narrow escapes. On one occasion, while he & his sister were hunting, they were pursued by Indians, & his sister was caught, scalped, & left for dead. She escaped, recovered, & afterwards married & lived to a good old age, although without a forelock, which was artificially supplied.

However, the name of his sister is not listed. To further jumble things, there are also numerous idiosyncrasies regarding the geographical circumstances of Rebecca's scalping between accounts. The original quote from chapter forty-six of Meginness, claims that Rebecca was scalped in Buffalo Valley, with no mention of the Lee Massacre specifically. Other descriptions imply that she was scalped in Lycoming County. This county borders Union County, where both the Buffalo Valley and Winfield, the site of the Massacre, are located. However, Winfield is in the lower half of Union County about four and a half miles from Lewisburg, the outskirts of which contain the Buffalo Valley, while Lycoming borders the county to the North. Cummings Township, where Fanny settled with her husband, is located in central Lycoming County, about twenty-six and a half miles northwest of Williamsport.

Had a Boatman scalping occurred in the Buffalo Valley, it would have most likely taken place during the "Big Runaway" as one of numerous raids by British-allied Indians that occurred along the Susquehanna River in 1778 following the Wyoming County Massacre in the northeastern region of the state near modern-day Wilkes-Barre; the name is derived from the number of white settlers who were driven out. Margaret Durham was scalped during one of these raids at the age of twenty-two, surviving after a lengthy recovery that potentially involved having a metal plate placed in her head and going on to have six children, proving that surviving a scalping is not impossible, however miraculous. And a house built in the Valley in 1795 features an engraved stone clock, permanently bearing the time at which the home’s architects, Johannes and Susannah Sierer, narrowly escaped such a fate. Lycoming County was the location of some of the grisliest raids.

So, where does this leave us? All the evidence pertaining to the Boatmans signals towards both Fanny and Rebecca Boatman having had contact with Indians while carving out their lives in the wilderness of Pennsylvania. As for the wider picture of American history, we have learned more details than most know about the relationships between Indian communities and the white settlers of their territory during the extremely complex period of the American Revolution.

But what about history overall, as a field? History is often kept in unorthodox ways or ways that eventually become frustrating for those trying to parse out truth from untruth from ambiguity. Like how the architect of an oral history must pin-pong back and forth between participants when discrepancies arise, historians working with documents from centuries ago must also embark on fact-checking missions. Most of the documents cited here were created decades, if not centuries, following the Lee Massacre, so details and nuance are bound to be lost, misremembered, or even completely altered.

And what details do survive can even be suspect - I personally find it curious that Meginness made sure to note that Rebecca lived her life without hair atop her head after being scalped, which does coincide with the accounts of numerous men who survived scalping and were unable to grow back hair, such as Robert McGee. William Thompson even used his unwilling new 'do to make money. But Meginness makes sure to mention a few paragraphs down in his description of the Boatmans that Fanny - erroneously listed as daughter to Claudius's second wife, Esther - as being "very stout". Esther, too, alongside her success in the day's medicine, is described as "a very large woman, weighing about 250 pounds". These details , but the fact that they are attached to the women of the Boatman family as opposed to any men is slightly suspect.

All history has biases, flaws, and blindspots, and many histories jump to conclusions in order to appear definitive. Yet some stories, no matter how tightly one tries to knit them together, will always have moth holes. Unless more documentation is unearthed about the Boatmans, this is how the story of the Boatman scalping/s will stay: evidence of the fascinating malleability of history's fibers.

Side note that interests me since trying to track my family tree back as far as possible is very interesting to me: The proprietor of the Wordpress site has no information of Claudius’s parents aside from a mention that an unverified genealogy lists his father as sharing his given name. A Geni profile lists his father as a Claude Baudiment born in Brugheas, Allier in 1708, with his mother as Catherine Marguerite Cornil, born in Paris in 1712. An Ancestry thread lists his father as Martin Boatman, born in France in 1676, having died in Brugheas on December 6, 1751; his mother is listed as Nicole Lion Basmaison, born in 1692 in Ferrières, who died on May 10, 1767 in Brugheas. Ancestry also alternatively lists Claudius’s birth year as 1722 or 1724, as opposed to Lostroots’s research, which placed his birth date sometime around 1728. The former year is repeated on FamilySearch, which lists his mother as Basmaison and his father as a Claude Martin Baudiment, born in 1702, died on February 13, 1792 in Brugheas.

And that is to say nothing of the radio silence on his first wife, Marie Jane Reed. Knowledge of her heritage is entirely nil, likely not made any easier by the generic nature of her name. Some Ancestry trees list her father as a Thomas Reed and her mother as a Sarah Reed(e) or a Leah Sarah Willis, with her birth location as Lancashire, England in 1723, as opposed to New Rochelle, New York in 1732. However, these sources list her father as dying in Pennsylvania while she died years later back in England; it would be strange if only one half of the couple chose to immigrate, though it could be possible that the two divorced, though no evidence of this is given. Also, the proprietor of the Wordpress site is convinced that Marie was, like Claudius, of French heritage, owing to her residence in New Rochelle, New York, a distinctly French city.