Service and Captivity of Captain John Boyd,
Born February 22, 1750
One of the distinguished patriots of the Continental Army during the Revolution was Captain John Boyd, a frontiersman, who suffered Indian captivity and lived to rejoin his family and again become one of the foremost citizens of his time.
The Boyd family gained a foothold in America when John Boyd, the emigrant from the North of Ireland, landed on these shores in 1744, and settled in Chester County. He married Sarah De Vane, and they removed to Northumberland County, where they continued to reside until their decease. They were the parents of three patriotic sons—John, born February 22, 1750; Thomas, born in 1752, and William, born in 1755.
William Boyd was a lieutenant in the Twelfth Regiment of the Continental Line, under Colonel William Cooke. He fell at the Battle of Brandywine.
Thomas Boyd was a lieutenant in General John Sullivan’s command when he made his successful campaign against the Six Nations in Northern Pennsylvania and Southern New York in 1779. Lieutenant Boyd was in charge of a scouting detail on the march when he was captured by the Indians and Tories under command of Colonel John Butler, near Little Beard’s Town, in the Genesee.
Boyd was surrounded by a strong detachment of the enemy, who killed fourteen of his men. He and a soldier were captured and only eight escaped. When General Sullivan learned of Boyd’s fate the advance was quickened in the hope they could reach him, but on arriving at Genesee Castle his remains and those of the other prisoners were found, surrounded by all the horrid evidences of savage barbarity. The torture fires were yet burning. Flaming pine knots had been thrust into their flesh, their fingernails pulled out, their tongues cut off and their heads severed from their bodies.
John, the eldest brother, was commissioned as a first lieutenant in the Continental Army in May, 1777, which rank he held until February, 1781, when he received a captain’s commission from the State of Pennsylvania, which had resolved to raise and equip three companies of Rangers for the defense of the western frontier, then sorely distressed by the hostile incursions of the savages. It was to the command of one of these companies, that Captain John Boyd was promoted.
In June, 1781, while marching his men across the Allegheny Mountains, he fell into an ambuscade of Indians near the headwaters of the Raystown branch of the Juniata River, in Bedford County, and was made a prisoner with a number of his soldiers, and led captive through the wilderness to Canada.
Captain Boyd was confined during his imprisonment in Canada on an island in the St. Lawrence, near Montreal.