The following information on Henry and Frances Wilson

is taken from the

“History of Cooper Co, MO”, pages 261-267

Henry’s total time of actual service as a soldier of the Revolution, according to records in the War Department, was 23 months.  He served in many capacities – as a private, Indian spy, sergeant and captain.  Henry volunteered to join Captain John Allison’s company, a unit in the regiment of Captain George Rogers Clarke.  He served in the expedition three months against the Indians on the Ohio and Miami rivers.  He immediately re-enlisted and served three months as sergeant in Captain Charles Gattliff’s company of Colonel Trigg’s regiment.  He was on guard at Bryan Station when it was commanded by Lieutenant James Ray and Lieutenant James McCulluh, during the absence of Captain Gattliff at his home.

In the Fall of 1781, Henry Wilson was employed with Thomas Wilson and James Ledgewood as scouts against the Indians.  They discovered a tepee village up the Kentucky river.  Henry was appointed captain of a company to march against the camp.  In a battle with the Indians, he lost three men.  Henry again volunteered, in August, 1782, for three months’ service under Captain Silas Harlin in Colonel Trigg’s regiment.  During this period of enlistment, he fought at Bryan Station and Blue Licks. Soon thereafter news came to the wilderness that the Revolution was over and that the colonies were victorious.  The Indians, however, still were on the warpath.  Henry, as a sergeant served in Captain Simon Kenton’s company and helped to burn the Indian town of New Chillicothe, or Pequa.  Simon Kenton and Henry were associates of Daniel Boone.

Frances Faulkner, who became the bride of Henry Wilson in 1782, at Bryan Station, was one of the women who carried water to withstand the siege there.  Frances was a daughter of John Faulkner and his wife Joyce Craig.  Joyce was the daughter of Taliaferro (pronounced Toliver) Craig, Sr. (born 1704, married 1730, and died 1795).  Thus Frances Faulkner was closely related by ties of blood to most of the men and women who resided at Bryan Station between 1781 and 1783.  Visitors to the Memorial Wall at Bryan Station Spring, erected by the Lexington Chapter D.A.R. in 1896, are impressed with the number of Craigs who so gloriously served Kentucky at the siege of Bryan Station.  Barton Stone Wilson, who was a prominent citizen of Boonville during the 1850’s and ‘60’s, was a son of the Henry Wilson who married Frances Faulkner.

Henry had entered a large tract of land on Cane Ridge near the present Paris, in Bourbon County, Kentucky, during the Revolution, but marauding Indians made it impossible for him to improve it.  Later he entered 2400 acres and built a cabin near a living spring on Brush creek, in the fall of 1782.  Soon this cabin was replaced with a stone mansion, built with portholes, so occupants might defend themselves from Indians.  The house was built around a clear, cold spring with a springhouse under the dining room.

Henry Wilson and his wife, Frances, were the parents of 12 children.  As the sons and daughters married, each was given 200 acres and a horse and saddle.  The neighborhood became known as “Wilson’s Colony.”

     Cornwallis had surrendered at Yorktown, but the news had not filtered into the sylvan solitude of Kentucky, six hundred miles west of the farthest settlement in the Old Dominion proper.

     August, 1782, was green and gold in the broad Elkhorn Valley.  Sun and shadow wove changing patterns on nature’s verdant carpet as the south wind stirred leaves.  The earth yielded her increase from virgin soil in the clearings about Bryan Station (5 miles NE of present day Lexington KY).  Tall corn, hemp and a large vegetable garden flourished.  Flocks and herds had increased.  All about were evidences of peace and promised plenty.  Crops were laid by, and the frontiersmen again hunted and fished a-plenty, but with a weather eye for Indians and British.

     Bryan Station, established in 1779, abandoned, and later reoccupied by new settlers, consisted of 40 log cabins and four blockhouses, the buildings set at irregular intervals on the long sides of a parallelogram 150 by 600 feet, enclosed by a stout stockade.  Roofs of the cabins sloped but one way—in.

     Built on ground high enough to command the surrounding territory, the stockade did not have within it a water supply.  Women and children carried filled noggins and piggins from a spring under the hill.  The clear, cold draughts were even sweeter from a gourd dipper.  A noggin is a wooden bucket with two upright staves for handles.  A piggin has a handle made of but one upright stave.

     Bryan Station settlement was the home of 43 hardy woodsmen, five old men, 32 women and 64 children.  A few lived outside the walled enclosure, down by the sheds sheltering huge, homemade tanning vats and crude contrivances for making rope.

     This little outpost of empire drowsed through the golden afternoon of August 14, 1782.  Babies slept in cradles made from hollowed logs.  Pioneer mothers spun or wove, or tidied up the 14-foot-square cabin, with its wide fireplace at one end and, in a corner, its one-poster bed of spicy pine boughs, spread with bear pelts and buffalo robes.

     Toward sunset, when most of the hunters had returned, Hardy Goodfellow, riding fast from Hoy’s Station, came as express, as messengers often were called, to warn that Indians had captured two youths from that settlement.  Settlers had been defeated at Upper Blue Licks.  British officers with the Indians added fears of cannon in anticipated further attacks.  Reinforcements from Bryan Station to join the relief party from Hoy’s in pursuit of the Indians were asked and immediately assured.

     The day’s tranquility was followed by excitement and feverish activity.  Lead was melted and molded, and “Monk”, the slave, mixed more powder, using saltpetre he had mined from a cave.  Powder horns were filled.  Guns were cleaned—long, small-bore, accurate rifles with which the owners could hit a squirrel’s eye at 100 yards.

     Betsy Craig, wistful and in her early teens, assisted her mother to mold bullets and insisted on melting her gold beads because Simon Girty, the renegade, sometimes called the white Indian, had boasted he never would be killed by lead.

     Late at night preparations were completed and the relief party turned in for an early start next morning.  The fighting men slept the sleep of exhaustion.  But before dawn, one by one they were awakened by the ominous hush of wild life in the forest about them.  The pioneers who lighted our Saxon fires on the shadowy frontier knew immediately that cornfield and woodland teemed with naked savages.

     As day came tense and pale, there was as little sign of activity within the stockade as outside.  The woodsmen instinctively knew the Indians wondered if their ruse at Hoy’s Station had deprived Bryan of its garrison.  They would keep to cover until they could determine the settlers’ strength.  Quietly, Thomas Bell and Nicholas Tomlinson slipped away to go to Lexington for aid.  The Indians did not molest them, hoping still to hide their presence.

     There must be plenty of water if the garrison was to withstand a siege.  Toting it from the spring was traditionally the work of women and of the older children.  For men to play the knightly part would invite certain disaster.  Without ceremony the women and girls formed a party and straggled casually from the wide gate near the center of one of the long walls of the stockade.  There was one such gate one each side.  Down the hill they carried their wooden buckets, conscious of a thousand savage eyes upon them.  At the spring they took their turns.  It was shallow, not permitting a quick dipping of the pail.  Then, with their backs to the unseen enemy, they walked in little groups back up the steep incline.  One by one they gained the safety of the enclosure, and hopes rose like an incoming tide.

     Later the settlers in Bryan Station were to learn that the force against them numbered about 600, including 560 Indians and 60 Canadian Rangers and Tories.  This force had descended upon the settlement, hoping to find it practically defenseless.

     The British had ordered all settlements south of the Ohio River annihilated.  Lieutenant-governor Hamilton had delegated Captain William Caldwell to direct the gory task.  He had gathered a company of British and Canadian rangers and had enlisted the aid of Simon Girty, the cruel and cunning renegade who had turned against the colonies in 1777.

     To draw out the men, and thus determine the strength of the garrison, the enemy sent its smaller force to make an attack from the side of the station opposite to where the larger force lay hidden near the spring.  Suspecting a ruse, Captain John Craig, commanding the garrison, sent Elijah Craig, 17, with a small force out to meet the attackers.  This little band made much noise, firing rapidly and creating the impression that they were the sole defense.  The Indians retreated rapidly, leading, as they thought, all the men from the station.  Then the vast multitude swarmed from around the spring to storm the opposite side of the stockade.  A withering fire from the long hunting rifles of the keen-eyed defenders shot to pieces the wavering advance, and force savages and rangers to seek shelter behind trees and rocks.

     The smaller force commanded by Elijah Craig raced back through the stockade’s quickly opened gate and re-enforced the defenders.  The fighting continued through the afternoon, the enemy firing from forest and fields dense with corn, hemp and cane.

     In the meantime, Bell and Tomlinson, the messengers to Lexington, had learned the men there had gone to the aid of Hoy’s Station near the present Richmond (KY).  They overtook the force and headed them back toward Bryan Station.  As shadows slanted toward the east, a cavalcade of 16 horsemen and hunters on foot approached Bryan Station along the narrow trace toward Bryan Station gate while the deadly silence warned them of imminent danger.

     A hasty conference; then action.  The column of 16 mounted men rode madly along the trace toward Bryan Station gate while the footmen scurried for it through the tall corn.

     Savage yells and rifle shots served only to notify the garrison to open the gate—and every horseman dashed safely into the enclosure.  The riders, passing close to the savages, were poor targets and the dust kicked up by the flying steeds along the earthy surface of the trace where wild animals had worn away the grass as they traveled to watering places, had helped to create a smokescreen.

     The footmen in the corn encountered many savages.  There was hand to hand fighting with rifles used as clubs.  The hordes of savages cut off their approach to the stockade.  Disorganized and every man for himself, two were killed.  The rest escaped back to Lexington (KY), four survivors being wounded.

     With night descending and the garrison re-enforced by 16, the Indians shot lighted arrows, aimed at the cabin roofs.  Several of the cabins burned but a favorable wind kept the flames from spreading.  Boys too small to handle a rifle were placed upon the inward slanting roofs to throw off the blazing brands as fast as they fell.  A flaming arrow fell upon the infant Richard M. Johnson, a future vice-president of the United States, as he lay in a sugar-trough cradle.

     Simon Girty then decided to try his powers of persuasion in the arena where force had failed.  Hiding behind a stump near the stockade, he hailed the garrison, demanding surrender.  He commended their courage but deprecated their judgment, saying he expected momentarily re-inforcements with artillery that would blow up the cabins.  When the station was taken by storm, he would be unable to save the settlers' lives, but if they surrendered immediately he promised not a hair in their heads should be hurt.  He announced his name and inquired if they knew him, assuring they could trust his honor.

     The garrison had listened in silence.  A youth named Reynolds, noted for his courage, energy, and frolicsome gaiety, promptly replied that they knew the enemy commander and that he (Reynolds) had a worthless dog that he had named Simon Girty because of its striking resemblance to the namesake; that if Girty had either artillery or reinforcements to bring them on and be damned; that when Girty and his rascals gained the fort the settlers would throw away their guns and drive them out with switches; and, finally, the settlers themselves expected reinforcement’s, as all inhabitants were marching to the assistance of Bryan Station, and the scalps of Girty and his cutthroats soon would dry on the cabin roofs.

     Simon and his savages vented their wrath by destroying the garden and crops, killing livestock and appropriating horses outside the stockade.  With their campfires still burning, they slipped away before dawn on August 17.

     About 40 Indians were killed, according to Daniel Boone, who arrived with a relief party and then joined the growing army of settlers who pursued the Indians and British and fought the disastrous last battle of the American Revolution at Blue Licks two days later, August 19, 1782.

     Being overly eager, the frontiersmen attacked too hastily and the outcome was almost a massacre.  Because many horses had been stolen from Bryan Station, few men from there participated in the Battle of Blue Licks.  Pursuit of the erstwhile besiegers had been by mounted frontiersmen.  Included in the list of heroes on the memorial monument erected on the Blue Licks Battle Field is that of Henry Wilson.

“The force of 600 Indians had crossed the Ohio and reached the Blue Licks on the Licking River (KY) undetected.  There the majority of the force, 350 warriors, had positioned themselves for the ambush (at the Blue Licks) while the remaining 250, including Capt. William Caldwell and his 50 (British) Redcoats, went on and fiercely attacked Bryan’s Station.  The presence of the British with the (Indian) attackers, as (Simon) Girty had anticipated, helped convince the Kentuckians that this was the whole attacking force.  Indian spies watched as the two whites they allowed to escape (from Bryan’s Station) fled to Lexington (KY) and raised the alarm.  First a party of 50 men, including ten who had arrived from Boonesboro, galloped to Bryan’s Station in an attempt to provide relief for the besieged station, but they were quickly beaten off and retreated to Lexington with word that a greater force would be necessary to drive off the Indians.

The Indian spies who had followed them quickly brought back word that reinforcements had arrived at Lexington, and a mounted force of some 200 had quickly formed and were on the way.  At this intelligence, Girty ordered the (Bryan’s Station) attackers to mount up, and they headed directly for the Blue Licks, making no effort to hide their trail.  The pursuing whites were not far behind and, when the trail of the party they were following cross the Licking and continued past the Blue Licks and up a ravine on the other side, they followed.  Girty’s ambush was sprung with devastating success.  Seventy-two of the Kentuckians were killed, and the rest fled in panic.  Only three Indians were killed and four others slightly wounded.  Taking scalps, weapons, horses and other plunder, Girty’s force then returned in triumph to Chalahgawtha (the Indian village).”

March 6^th 1849

Cass

     My Dear Brother (Lewis F. Wilson), I quit writing to ma to say a word or two to you.  I have waited anxiously for your letter for some time, and you don’t give me the news that I long’d of all things to hear, surely you will not be displeased if I resume the subject again, for I assure you that no person here read my letter to you or your answer to it but myself.  Have you not read in the bible where it says “My spirit shall not always strive with man.  Now do not quench the promptings of the Holy Spirit.  I tell you this from experience.  Again the effectual fervent prayer of the righteous man availith much.  But you will say how is this applicable to me?  I will tell you but I wish this note kept to yourself lest people say it was hipocrasy during the protracted meeting last August which we attended regular the church covenanted together at the first of the meeting to pray for sinners and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit at the rising and setting of the sun.  I don’t know why it was but my constant wish was that God would give me strength and courage that I might not quench the spirit should I feel its promtings and on Monday the 14^th whilst they all were engaged in prayer, I was sitting by my beloved sister Sarah Westfall, who was weeping and praying for her oldest Brother and I could hear almost every word she said.  I could not enjoy the meeting as I wished, I felt so hard harted I thought I would give anything if I could only cry with her but I could not, the prayer was finished and we rose to our feet and commenced singing, sudden as a flash of lightning and awful terror spread over me and I sunk down on my seat unable to stand and burst in to tears and bellowed for Jerry Farmer (preacher from Tennessee), I was supported until he came to me, my terror was such that I did not wait for his question but told him that I had a dear Brother in Ky. and I wanted him to pray for him.  It appeared to me that eternal destruction would be your doom unless snatched instantly as a brand from the eternal burning, I begged him to pray for you, to pray right then and to pray out loud.  He knelt down, oh may the words of his prayer be fulfilled, though I may never see your face again.  O may I have testimony that we may meet again hereafter.  He promised me that he would remember you in his night and morning prayer and God has said that the effectual fervant prayer of the rightous man availeth much, and I cannot believe that there is a more righteous self denying man in Mo., one whose labors are blessed where ever he goes, surely then God will remember his promise and hear my prayer for his sake and send the blessing home to your heart.  How I wished for you there now do not quench the influence of the Spirit in your heart, but be strong in your weekness and call upon the Lord to pardon your sins for his own sake, for I do firmly believe this day that it was the holy spirit that promted me, to do as I did and my wish was granted.  I had courage sufficient to tell what I wanted and did not smother it in my own bosom and I now tell you again that Gods spirit will not always strive with man, and beware how you smother your feelings and seek pleasure to drive those feelings of self reproach from your bosom.

     I must stop but do not think that I am to hard on you.  I could not talk so plain to you and tell you all I want to if I were with you.  My feelings would not let me, therefore I thought best to write what I have.  Now don’t let any person see this for the reason I have assigned.  Come out this summer you and Ma.  I don’t ask an answer to this, only write as though I had told you nothing and may the God of justice pardon your sins and make you a burning and shining light and may I one day hear the voice of that stranger (for whom our beloved missionary prayed) in Union Church pleading in behalf of poor sinners.

Your Sister,

Ann (Martha Ann Wilson Sorency)

WILSON