Shirley township

Captain Jack in Print

The Captain Jack story appears in print in Samuel Hazard's Register of Pennsylvania in December 1829. At first the man with the burned cabin and the man named Captain Jack were not plainly the same person. On December 19 the Register printed extracts from “Provincial Letters” furnished by “a friend in the interior.” One, headed “August, 1750,” tells of a man called the Black Hunter, the Black Rifle and the Wild Hunter of Juniata. It says he “is a white man” who came home one evening and “found his cabin burnt, his wife and children murdered,” and that from then on he lived in caves, protected the frontier settlers and seized “every opportunity of revenge that offers.” It never calls him Captain Jack. Another extract in the same issue praises a “Captain Joel,” a hunter who “formed an association of the settlers” to defend the settlements.

The next issue, on December 26, carried a letter from the man who had furnished the extracts. He found “only one mistake: in the name of the celebrated Capt. Jack, and not Joel,” and he supposed that one of the two Jack's Mountains “was called in compliment to him.” He included a copy of a letter signed George Croghan and dated “Fort Louther, June 6, 1755,” which says Captain Jack “has promised his aid in the contemplated attack of Fort Du Quesne.” He also wrote that the Black Rifle was called “a half Indian” in some records and “sometimes commanded Captain Jack's company,” which leaves it unclear whether these were one man or two.

In March 1830 the Register added an unsigned extract dated June 27, 1755, in which Captain Jack, joining General Braddock with his company, has an interview with the general, is told the general has experienced troops he can depend on, and withdraws into the interior of Pennsylvania.

Sherman Day's Historical Collections of the State of Pennsylvania (1843) made them one man. Drawing on “Mr. Conyngham's notes,” Day wrote that “Capt. Jack” was the black hunter and the black rifle, told the burned cabin story in nearly the same words, and said “He was sometimes called the Half Indian.” He added that the man's real name “has never been ascertained” and that it was supposed he “gave name to” Jack's mountain.

U. J. Jones's History of the Early Settlement of the Juniata Valley (1856) places him among the first settlers of the Aughwick Valley, and has settlers form a company under him that styled themselves “Captain Jack's Hunters.”

On October 1, 1873, The Huntingdon Journal printed a note on a Pennsylvania “Captain Jack.” It said that beyond those “who are reading the Legends of the Juniata,” it “may not be generally known” that a “veritable” Captain Jack had lived in Middle Pennsylvania in old Indian times. It then turned to a new novel just published in Pittsburgh, Old Fort Duquesne, or Captain Jack the Scout, by Charles McKnight, in which he “figures as the hero.”

The Legends of the Juniata was the work of the Rev. Cyrus Jeffries, who died in 1877 and was buried at Mount Union. The Juniata Sentinel of Mifflintown reported on July 2, 1873, that it was running as a serial in the Altoona Tribune under the title “Legends of the Juniata, or, Jackson and Keturah Culberson.” Two weeks later the Journal remarked that the serial called Mapleton the “Vale of Birds.” The spelling of the surname differs: the Sentinel has Culberson, while a Johnstown Tribune item that the Journal reprinted in 1874 has Culbertson. In 1911 an advertisement in the Centre Democrat of Bellefonte, using the spelling Culberson, announced that the story would soon appear in the Altoona Morning Tribune. None of these notices says whether the Jackson in that title is the Captain Jack of the legend.

The county histories that followed did not settle it. Lytle's 1876 history called the belief that Captain Jack named the narrows “a popular error,” and said so much had been written about his exploits “that is purely fictitious, that it is impossible to separate the false from the true.” Africa's 1883 history gives a different tradition: that the mountain takes its name from a “Capt. Jack Armstrong,” who it seems had a contract for cutting a road through the narrows and whose offer of himself and his men to General Braddock was not accepted. Soon after, it says, twelve Indians passed the road crew, “to all appearances” friendly. After they were out of sight the men heard a rifle, and they later found him dead near his cabin. The history does not say who fired. Elsewhere it tells of a trader named John Armstrong, killed at the Narrows about the middle of February 1744, eleven years before Braddock's march, without saying whether he and Capt. Jack Armstrong were the same man. Welch's 1909 history of Mount Union notes that others associate Captain Jack with Jack Culberson, and concludes, “Just who Capt. Jack really was, will probably never be known.”

Later historians were harder on him. C. Hale Sipe's The Indian Wars of Pennsylvania (1929) calls him “a mythical character” who “never existed, except as the beau ideal of the period.” William A. Hunter's Forts on the Pennsylvania Frontier, published by the state's historical and museum commission in 1960, calls him “a fictitious personage who first appears in spurious documents” contributed to Hazard's Register, and says Redmond Conyngham called those texts to Sherman Day's attention. Hunter says the Croghan letter is “unlike anything Croghan is known to have written” and that “Fort Louther,” a name he knew only from those 1829 texts, “probably is an invented name” for the fort at Carlisle.

Sipe and a 1979 article in the journal Pennsylvania History both give the name “Half Indian” to a real man, Andrew Montour. That article reports that a search of local histories and frontier sources “shows no trace of Captain Jack prior to 1829,” that later accounts rely on the Register or on “the same material from some source now lost,” and that Hazard left out any reference to Captain Jack or Captain Joel from the Pennsylvania Archives he later published. Its conclusion leaves the door open: “All that can be said for certain is that his existence cannot be proven.”

Checked against the record. We read the Register's pages of December 19 and 26, 1829, and March 20, 1830, on scans of the printed originals, along with Africa's and Welch's pages, because the dates and the Fort Louther dateline matter here. Searches of the Register's issues from January 1828 through December 12, 1829, and a phrase search of the Pennsylvania Newspaper Archive, found nothing earlier. Hunter's book and the 1979 article also name 1829 as the first appearance. That is not proof, since a printing in a paper we cannot search is still possible, and old type does not always search cleanly. We read the 1873, 1874, 1877 and 1911 newspaper notices on page images. We have not seen the text of the Jeffries serial: the newspaper archive we can search holds the Altoona Tribune only to 1865. A Cambria Freeman item of May 1873 repeats another paper's claim that the Legends had appeared years earlier in the Western Hemisphere. Part of that item is lost at the edge of the page, and we did not trace the claim. We did not check family records for any Culberson link. Still open: whether a real man stands behind the story, and whether the Jackson in the serial's title is the Jack Culberson that Welch mentions. The historians' judgments above are their own, and we have not tested them against the manuscripts. Hunter himself allows that two or three items in the 1829 series are authentic. We did not find an original of the Croghan letter, and we could not read the Croghan biography that Hunter cites as branding the letter fictitious.

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