They Went Whistling by Barbara Holland

They Went Whistling by Barbara Holland

Author:Barbara Holland
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction
ISBN: 9780307429704
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2009-04-04T16:00:00+00:00


Renegades

She was, according to West Virginia State Historian Virgil Lewis, “a maid with fair complexion, hazel eyes, a perfectly developed form, a sweet disposition, a mind strong and vigorous, softened by the rudiments of an education obtained in the schools of Liverpool.”

He doesn’t say how he knows, writing over a hundred years later in 1891, since the only contemporary glimpse of “Mad Ann” Bailey is an undated head-and-shoulders drawing from the Ohio Historical Society. She has an intimidating, rock-solid, broad-boned skull with hooded eyes and a tangle of uncombed shoulder-length hair; she seems to have been built like a tank and nothing in even the most whitewashed bones of her recorded history suggests a sweet disposition, but proper heroines follow certain rules.

West Virginia was still Virginia then, and Virginians are famous for fondling their history, but books of Virginian history five inches thick, mentioning surely every resident there since Jamestown, don’t mention Ann Bailey. She was not a nice lady. Virgil Lewis so admired her courage, though, that he contrived to write her biography by leaving out the rough stuff and making up much of the rest. Like Dr. Lossing, in his Eminent Americans, he was selective with heroines, and approved only those with the “complete union of strength, courage, love, devotion, meekness and shrewdness which fitted them for the often terrible ordeals through which they had to pass.” The “meekness” clause gave him a problem, and since he had no use for any woman who has “ingloriously stained her hands in human blood,” he has to leave out a lot.

A different source says Bailey “killed more than one person’s share of Indians,” but doesn’t specify how many constituted a fair share. A contemporary is on record as saying she “halways carried a haxe and a haugur and could chop as well as hany man,” but passes over the question of just what, or whom, she was chopping.

She was born in Liverpool, England, around 1742, daughter of a soldier in Queen Anne’s wars who named her after the monarch. When she was nineteen or so her parents died and she went to Virginia. Lewis says she came to the wild frontier to stay with the Bell family, friends or perhaps relatives, but others say she was an indentured servant. (Lewis is giving her a leg up socially, but there was nothing reprehensible in coming across indentured, your passage to be paid by your new employers, for a girl who wanted to see the world beyond Liverpool.)

In 1765, in the remote Indian-inhabited wilds near the settlement of Staunton, she met and married Richard Trotter, described by Lewis as one of nature’s noblemen, and became, he tells us, a “devoted wife” in a cabin in a clearing. Two years later she produced a son, William. In ’74, an Indian uprising in the wind, the governor came to muster an army at Staunton; Ann was foremost among the recruiters. No doubt she urged her husband forth, and Trotter dutifully marched away through the trackless forest to Ohio, where the Indians disposed of him and a number of his comrades.



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