Suddenly, in 1778, in the midst of the Revolutionary War, the name reappears in literature in a curious way. It comes to us through a poetical allusion from the pen of Colonel Arent Schuyler de Peyster, commandant at Michilimackinac. De Peyster, as his name suggests, was a New Yorker of the ancient Dutch stock He entered the English army and in 1757 was commissioned lieutenant in the Eighth, or King's Regiment of Foot. Necessarily he was and continued to be a royalist, and when war broke out served King George against Gen. George.
Fortunately for our knowledge of the West during Revolutionary times, Colonel de Peyster was a scholar and a gentleman as well a soldier and a Tory He left a volume of "Miscellanies," which was first published (1813) in Dumfries, Scotland, whither the old soldier retired when the bad cause for which he made a good fight came to a disastrous end by the peace of Paris in 1783.[AI] An edition, edited by General J. Watts de Peyster, of Yonkers, was published in 1888.
[AI] After his return to Scotland, Colonel de Peyster commanded the "fencibles" (militia), of which Robert Burns was a member, and it was in his honor that the poet wrote his poem, "To Colonel de Peyster," beginning:
"My honored Colonel, deep I feel
Your interest in the poets' weal."
and ending, after several stanzas:
"But lest you think I am uncivil
To plague you with this draunting drivel.
Abjuring a intentions evil,
I quat my pen:
The Lord preserve us frae the devil,
Amen! Amen!"
From "Cyclopædia of United States History."—Copyright 1881, by Harper & Brothers.
GEORGE ROGERS CLARK (LATE IN LIFE).
Colonel de Peyster's post of loyal service was Mackinaw, whither, as the "Miscellanies" tell us, he was sent early in 1774, "to command the post, with the painful task of superintending the lake Indians." "Canoes arrived with passes signed by the American General Wooster, and Dr. Benjamin Franklin, wherein it was stipulated that those traders should not afford any succor whatever to the British garrison."