Chainsaw History - Bonus Episode: White People Kept Going Native

Episode Date: July 28, 2021

Jamie & Bambi share a story from their own family, one that ties into an issue that even Ben Franklin once wrote about—the fact that once white people got a taste of Native American life they usually preferred it to white society. Find more bonus episodes on Patreon!

So, speaking of strange creatures jumping out and killing weed farmers, we can actually that's like well actually there is a strange creature that jumps out and grabs somebody in this story so you know we'll get there okay that is my way okay so monster grabbing so welcome to our very are there weed farmers in this episode because if there are I'm gonna be actually like super excited here's the thing we don't know what these pioneers were growing the sources so if we want to just assume there was just a whole shitload of weed we can't whether who is to say that that's not true history is not supporting this I cannot another

can they can neither confirm nor deny that our ancestors were growing shitloads of weed in northern and central Pennsylvania so this is our the bonus episode our very first one of chainsaw history are now named podcast the idea of the bonus episodes or they're going to primarily live on the patreon account and be like extra stuff for people who actually directly support us with their money even though I believe this one we will release to the wild for free because you got to give them a taste there's a saying where my wife comes from it's the first it's free kid

just for anyone listening for the first time be aware this is not safe for work for language and we are going to be discussing abduction violence torture including against women children this is a brutal story about brutal time so you know if you're sensitive to any of that stuff understand that that's what we're gonna be talking about and probably making really inappropriate jokes and also saying the word fuck a lot yes so one piece of feedback I got from our first episode was that the opening scene of violence abduction and baby murder might lead the audience into thinking that we were unsympathetic to the

indigenous peoples of North America even though I think anybody who listened to the whole thing can tell where we were coming from but somebody did say just starting that way kind of was jarring that's like oh here's a nice here's a bunch of pioneer children who are instantly snatched up by Native Americans and it might make people think we were on the anti Native American side which is absolutely not the case I'm not on anti anyone side yeah I mean history is the the first thing everyone needs to know about this is history is complicated when you look at someone like an individual you can usually understand their

motivations like every once in a while there'll be a straight-up monster but most of the time you can at least see where they're coming from even if you don't agree or you have this perspective that helps you you know so so I did want to make a statement up top so that our position as chainsaw history is very clear the people who lived on this continent before European settlers showed up are among some of the most screwed over people in all of world history first they were ravaged by disease after initial contact with white people the indigenous tribes of North America were continued victims of

treachery and acts of straight-up genocide from brutal massacres to this to the seizing of children to be raised among white families in an attempt to erase these people culturally acts of brutality and torture are commonly used to this very day to describe as justification rather for why white Europeans needed to civilize the North American continent but one visit to your local torture museum at a Renaissance fair will remind you that white people were horrifically torturing each other to death in the name of King country and their Lord and Savior Jesus Christ everyone is terrible

pretty much everyone's terrible brutality fucking terrible brutality is sadly a failing of human beings and there isn't a specific racial component studying history shows you just what people are capable of in both the best and worst ways you can imagine so there we go our disclaimer yeah i mean that's the thing if anyone who's paying attention to right now can can really say hey look look around you people are fucking terrible and it's not just now people have always been terrible and then you can always find the we're actually all we're doing better as a people isn't that tragically sad maybe maybe we're

slowly stumbling our way to being a society that has some form of justice so let's open up with a question on the actual full topic do you remember much about the movie dances with wolves um a bit i'm a kevin costner fan yeah and that was like that's what that was his kick in the door and that was kevin that was kevin's heyday yeah that's when he literally was like oh yeah i'm going to direct and star in this epic you know movie though for those who don't know the film is about a union soldier from the civil war who takes a post out on the western frontier and befriends members of a local indigenous tribe

and a wolf yes and in fact yeah the the main character eventually sheds his white identity to become a proud sue warrior named dances with wolves and as baby just said he gets his he gets his name from his new people because he at first had tamed a couple of local wolves he was feeding them and eventually was playing with them almost like dogs and they were watching him from a distance and so when he eventually joined up with them he got the name dances with wolves which is you know a badass name for sure and a cool name for a movie i still liked the girl's name in that movie

her her indian name was stands with a fist yep i was just about to get to her so yeah yeah i was 15 years old she punched a motherfucker in the face i love it yeah now she was great movie speaking of her yeah dances with wolves was the first time i'd heard about a white person going native now in the movie you were just talking about her mary mcdonnell plays the woman named stands with a fist in the story she was a white woman who was raised among the sue after her family had been massacred uh when she was a small child she at first she acts as an

interpreter for kevin costner's character because she knows a little bit of english from her childhood and then eventually she becomes kevin costner's love interest because of course the white people have to get together the yeah the white people are the ones who they but they truly belong you can't actually integrate to that society and for 1990 dances with wolves was very progressive but we're we're not going to have an interracial couple come on no mary mcdonnell personally has made my life

more difficult but that's a whole other story i said that the movie was good not that it was perfect now now back in 1990 i thought it was just a cool story what i didn't realize was that the movie describes a historical phenomenon so common that it was considered a legitimate problem in north america for a couple hundred years white people going native white people were like fuck these cities in 1753 a guy you might have heard of named ben franklin wrote a letter to a friend to discuss this very issue

he said quote when an indian child has been brought up among us taught our language and habituated to our customs yet if he goes to see his relations and makes one indian ramble with them there is no persuading him ever to return and that it is not natural to them merely as indians but as men playing from this that when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoner by these indians and lived a while among them though ransomed by friends and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the english

yet in a short time they become disgusted with our manner of life and take the first good opportunity to escape again into the woods from once there is no reclaiming them unquote yeah so ben franklin was like like not only do like if you raise raise a little indian kid and dress him up in all the right clothes teach him get to send him to school doesn't matter no matter how long if he gets a taste of his old life back he will go back to them but the same thing is true for white people men and women if they get especially if they're you know captured young they

would just get just a hint of freedom then they'd be those bitches be gone if you take the example from pain in the ass mary mcdonnell's case and dances with wolves it's easy enough to understand children quickly adapt to the family that they live with and adopt the culture and customs as their own but the truth is the issue kept happening regardless of age or gender or the circumstances under which the white person ended up living among tribal people in his book tribe which i cannot

recommend highly enough journalist and author sebastian younger describes what happened when some 200 white prisoners taken during pauniax rebellion were to be returned home to their original homes and families the colonel in charge was named on their e bouquet and he was shocked both at the dedication the tribal people had to their adopted white family members and to the number of prisoners who had no interesting going back to their old lives among the white people so one example was this mingo warrior this imprisoned woman who was taken during

pauniax rebellion was married to him and even though she was taken you know as a prisoner some people consider that this forceful situation we don't know however we do know that both the woman tried to run back to her new husband and he followed the train of prisoners for hundreds of miles or yeah or at least a hundred miles i don't know exactly how the distance but he followed them on foot like snaring animals and giving her food and just staying nearby leaving little gifts for his wife and and ever though their warning was like if you keep coming like we get back to town we're gonna shoot

you and yet he showed incredible dedication to his wife and she tried desperately to get back to him and that was just one of thousands of stories like that well and you have to understand too especially at the time period and for being a woman where you actually had a little bit more sexual freedom or just freedom in general yeah she probably had she probably had way more choice in marrying that mingo brave than she did to whatever oh yeah whoever she was sold off to in her original life you know

women had agency over their own bodies in yeah native society a woman could cast off her husband yeah and while it's really find another it's really easy to over generalize just because every tribe was different and had its own culture and rules but in general all like more primitive stone like stone age and hunter gather cultures are way more equal among the genders and way more equal period like just just like egalitarian society where everyone has an equal opportunity to to rise up and

prove themselves yeah and once you're a full member of the tribe your family yeah and your treat you as family and whatever your shit was before tended to just be you know forgotten like you know once you're adopted in the tribe your race and whatever happened before is meaningless you're now part of this this community which is very much a family so a guy named William Smith wrote around the same time quote the Shawnees were obliged to bind several of the prisoners and some women who had been delivered up

afterward found means to escape and run back to indian towns unquote interestingly enough at least one of the prisoners freed by bouquet was a young woman named rhoda boyd our fifth great grandant who ran away from her rescuers in an attempt to rejoin a native american tribe yes so this was a widely discussed problem for the colonists and there isn't universal agreement to this day as to why so many white people chose to abandon civilization and adopt a stone age way of life but what was obvious to everyone was

that it was a one-way issue europeans would often go native but it never seemed to happen the other way around no who the fuck would want to be a horrible european i mean there there are i mean and again this is i mean how far what exact year was this well in this case we're talking uh that was year 1782 so this is like you know when america was a brand new thing yeah it's like even yeah america in general didn't want to be european anymore so in letters to an american farmer french immigrant and writer

ekter decrevo k wrote in 1782 thousands of europeans are indians and we have no examples of even one of those aborigines having from choice become european so in other words it's the same thing no for for decades and even going into the 1800s this is just a thing and none of the white people can get it like why don't why wouldn't you want to live in our great culture so we'll talk more about the call of tribal life to white european settlers but now let's see how this directly affected our family let's meet the boys

the quintessential colonial pioneers of the 18th century i'm talking tough independent folk who didn't even want to be able to see their closest neighbor's house unless they went walking in that direction they wanted their land they wanted their space they wanted their privacy yeah well a lot of our family would still want that exactly in fact and there is a a chunk of my soul that loves that too like every time we go up in the mountain like yeah i could i could totally see myself like retiring to be to get the hell away from

everybody one day i'm i'm a convenience person though it's like yes i would love to be away from everyone as long as the grocery store isn't too far i can't imagine my wife wanting to live on top of a mountain away from everybody but we'll see so yeah these were immigrants used to scratching at a hard living they were working 16 hour days six days a week just taking sunday off to chill and pray yeah i wonder why anyone would not want to do that yeah why would you want to trade that for just hunting and fishing and and gathering stuff and then

spending the rest of the time possibly enjoying life yeah exactly so the boyd patriarch was john who sailed over from ireland at the age of 18 before marrying a young woman named nancy yuri the daughter of an established pennsylvania pioneer family oh nancy yeah we yeah you already have a little spoiler alert from last time what happened to nancy we don't really know much about john boyd other than his family was scotch irish a group of people who settled appalachia and became the famously independent tough and private hill folk

that are well represented in the area to this day now while there's a lot to say about them here's the the quick overview the scottish lowlands were a source of violent trouble for england going all the way back to the second century that's when the roman emperor hadrian was so freaked out by barbarians he built a coast to coast wall to block them off and that's what separated northern he was the original builder of the wall yes he was like build the wall because holy shit there are barbarians who paint themselves in crazy colors and run down

here in killisall the the picks specifically i could i could see how that would be a problem even then all these you know going centuries later the lowland scots were constantly having causing trouble for england so like over 1500 years after hadrian elizabeth the first you know the one played twice by kate blanchett she died without leaving a successor because she was famously the virgin queen huh virgin maya yeah not actually but she but what she didn't have were kids uh yeah well you know and that's the problem she wanted

she wanted her dude or no dude okay yep and so because of that she didn't have any children to directly leave the throne to and ended her her line and that's how we ended up with that motherfucker king james yes and we're just that's who we're about to talk about james the sixth he suddenly found himself ruler of scotland ireland in england and had to juggle the problems of all three countries and and that is and he sucked dick at it yeah so what was his genius idea for all these troublesome lowland scots

he's like well i've also got i've got lowland scots here constantly rebelling i've got these northern irish who are constantly rebelling against england why don't we punish the irish by seizing their territory giving it to english lords and then telling these lowland scots that they can have free land in northern ireland that's not gonna be a problem at all no that doesn't cause any problems and everyone lived happily ever after and there was never any violence or problems ever again no that's not how that went um without getting too much into the weeds

there were uprisings from the displacement of the irish there were conflicts between protestant sex and a bunch of other bullshit we're not going to get into now but what it ultimately meant was that the constantly fucked over people from southern scotland had gotten tricked into resettling under bad circumstances and so when the when the call came out that there was you know land for real up for grabs in north america a lot of people decided to go for it the situation in northern island was not great for the scotch irish yeah no yeah no and from somewhere that

constantly kept having like plague and famine as well oh yeah in fact yeah get the fuck out of there there were waves of scotch irish colonization so over the course of the 1700s more than 200 thousand of them made their way over to north america now it's what to say isn't our family scotch irish twice oh probably more than that like we are heavily i mean because i know directly i'm just talking about like mom and dad yes i mean that and that's because yeah mom's family and this scotch irish but

dad's family scotch irish as well now the chambers themselves we are directly scottish there was no trip to ireland in the middle as far as i can tell if you directly go from our father's father's father you know going back to the chambers however a bunch of the other parts of the family are a hundred percent scotch irish so because they were too poor to live in the coastal cities most of them pushed westward into the hills and mountains of appalachia and that's where we get a lot of our relatives the you know illiterate violent drunk

backward redneck types but these were people who were i mean they'd already were used to difficult times and fighting for what was theirs so after they'd already been displaced more than once they already knew they were living in a rough place with tribal people around but they were like you can sort of understand well yeah but they could grow crops yeah they could do their own shit utopia you can fucking eat yeah and so you can understand why they were willing say to stake their claim and fight for their land even though it

technically wasn't theirs but you get it you know you get where they're coming from they got fucked over i mean and of course they're being taught that these that these you know quote unquote savages aren't real people you know and and and certainly aren't being told you're stealing someone else's land they're just told come on over and settle we'll give you a yeah it's america's land motherfuckers yeah exactly so so sick of foreign governments and knowing that native tribes could try to attack them they just you know grabbed their guns and

their and they just settled you know and built their farms and did their best they were willing to fight their asses off just a scratch at a rough living in the middle of nowhere yeah and that rough living in the middle of nowhere was still 150 times better than where they came from i mean because at least for the most part the government sort of left you the fuck alone no they were that they became addicted to and that's another thing it's like come find me assholes and this group of poor independent people who want the government to leave

them alone you can sort of draw a direct thread from there to today and honestly the government leaving most people alone is something i'm kind of for yeah let's jump ahead uh look to the year 1880 and check out a pennsylvania newspaper called the washington reporter for washington county pennsylvania they printed an obituary of james boyd a respective local citizen who was our fourth great uncle within a few days the reporter contained an obituary of mr james boyd better known as uncle jimmy boyd of

independence washington county interesting and eventful as was his long life 99 years his father david boyd had a still more remarkable one and appreciating the fact that the readers of this paper are deeply concerned in the history of the early pioneers of western pennsylvania we append a brief sketch of the elder boyd so get this so this is basically yeah this guy he was 99 years old yeah jimmy boyd jimmy boyd lived to almost a hundred years and apparently was very respected his life was full of accomplishments

and yet when he died the local papers just used as an excuse to talk about his father david who was way more interesting said poor jimmy he's like it's like yes guy was awesome let's talk about his death we love you jimmy your dad was so cool all right uh so most of the sources for this story are come from around the same time period at least the ones that can be easily found online so we're talking the late 19th century more than a hundred years after the events took place these include newspaper

articles self-published family histories and a book titled the history of washington county pennsylvania first published in 1882 but lots of the little details go back to primary sources things like military service records and notes about prisoners exchanged and census forms and shit like that all of that indicates that the main details of what i'm about to tell you are correct even if some of the sources disagree on little details but the main broad strokes definitely happen so the following is the most likely version of this story i pieced together

from reading a bunch of shit okay we'll see hopefully i'm close so we'll talk about the day the boys went from being an unremarkable pioneer family to one that people talk about to this day because i literally found a youtube video that mentioned them just last week so that's how yeah i'll just show that to you later it's it's a short like it's uh and i wasn't looking for it either that's the craziest part i was i was it was related to research for this episode but i was just googling like like white children abducted by native americans who didn't want to go

back home i was trying to find stories like that and literally the middle one says the boyd children and tells a very abbreviated and inaccurate version of this story so it's cool like the people literally are there was a bunch of them so this is this story is like a big deal so the boys were hardworking presbyterian pioneers who strictly observed the sabbath their only day off from backbreaking farm work but that mean they also loaded up extra shit on saturday so they could afford to take the day off so the mother nancy was still recovering from

childbirth and very much relied on one does yes so she needed her pack of kids to get everything done on the farm it was on a saturday in february 1756 when everything went sideways john boyd left his wife and children behind to visit their nearest neighbors um they were weavers a childless couple named the stewards they lived over a mile away to grab some cloth nancy gave her children the marching orders so there were like pairs of kids running around all over the property doing their chores david was the oldest boy he had

like two older sisters and he was 12 and his little brother john jr was only six and they were told to go collect wood for use in the town oven so like this is back in the days when like a like a bread baking kind of oven was not something you'd have in a home you would you'd have like a community oven a community oven so if you wanted to break your bake your bread you would need to go timeshare the oven in town because they only had like just a simple you know wood burning stove at home so they could make like cornbread or like

cast iron flatbreads and stuff like that but you wanted to bake a real loaf of bread you had to go to the go to the town store or stove rather and sometimes you just really want a good fluffy soft loaf of bread exactly and you could bake a couple loaves of bread and that'll last you a couple days huge fan of carbs well when you're working 16 hours a day you can eat all the fucking carbs you want so the young boys did not hear a sound but david looked over his shoulder and suddenly saw a terrifying figure

standing right by his little brother looking just so strange and other worldly he thought at first it was a ghost or bigfoot but of course it was it was a member of one of several members of a raiding party from the Delaware who were supposed to say don't be stupid they are way too dark to be ghost well that's what it said in the family history was that he thought it was a ghost besides ghost doesn't mean pale could mean anything spooky uh let's see so the Delaware's this was a

raiding party it wasn't just the Delaware's there's actually like a coalition of these tribes who decided to send these raiding parties out and it wasn't just against the boys it was about all the families in this area because this was in the middle of the French and Indian war which we talk more about in other episodes so Nancy the mom and all the kids are quickly snatched up and brought back to a rendezvous point John was in the middle of walking back with his cloth from the stewards cabin and was missed a stroke of luck that

is the only reason he lived through this story making their way back to the boyd home the Delaware's quickly determined that Nancy couldn't keep up with them and that carrying her baby little James Thomas was only slowing the group down so they sat Nancy down on a fallen tree and allowed her to say one final farewell to each of her children except the youngest that's a bummer yeah yeah i've already heard this so bye r.i.p. Nancy yeah it doesn't get easier i mean and again baby murder should never be easy

i'm gonna go ahead and say that despite all my sympathies for native people this part is not cool well no a lot of shit they did wasn't cool no no it was bad it was bad stuff being done you know these are rough times let's just face it it's not great to be you know if you're not rich essentially you're you're in a rough place at this time i mean and again when you say rich that just really includes men this is also true even though i would because yeah i still because even when you were rich property it still sucks

no argument there i don't know i honestly would have to think about it hard to make the choice if i could go back would i want to be a rich woman or a poor man in those times and neither are great but as david was being led away he looked back over his shoulder to see his mother alive for the very last time and even as an old man telling the story later he couldn't do it without wiping tears out of his eyes they said he cried every single time he talked about the last time he saw his mother as she raised her hands heavenward and

and cried out oh god be merciful to my children going among savages and he said he remembered that that prayer for the rest of his life two warriors were left behind to dispatch nancy and little baby james yeah so long nancy they returned and handed the scalps to david and his older sister sally to carry for the rest of the day holding on to his mother's hair david watched as the raiding party looted his family home and set fire to it others were doing the same all up and down the area including the stewards who were killed a childless couple they were

gone along with other families their homes were burned and robbed and so they gather yeah so this entire community was basically just wiped out well not everybody but a bunch of homes in this area because these were like the ones right on the edge the ones who had dared to push further west and so technically this was done according to the treaty these guys had with the french they were punishing these these british colonists for pushing too far into what they considered french controlled lands so this is literally considered part of the war technically even though these are not

combatants and personally like you know at least to western civilization you know attacking civilians is is uncool and scalping moms and babies is especially uncool but again it's certainly not baby murder is never cool let's not pretend that white people weren't doing some awful shit at the same time and that the fact that there were plenty of reasons for everyone involved had good reasons for doing the things they were doing even if they're horrible so they are all these people are getting killed the all the the raiding party meets back up again at their rendezvous spot

with plunder and prisoners and they make their way west toward the ohio country now when john boyd senior came within side of his home he saw he could put out the fire but immediately turned to go warn others and organize a pursuit which is like the only sensible thing he could have done we don't really know much about we don't like know much about what kind of guy john boyd was but there i have like two pieces of information that make me have a mixed opinion about him but this part

he absolutely devoted himself immediately and down the road toward recovering his wife and children that's the first thing he does like let my home burn i gotta go track them down so he rounds up locals from town and they found a bunch of local homes have been raided and burned they tracked the natives west and they found scraps of nancy's dress clinging to bushes and they followed more tracks to a ravine that's where they found the bodies of nancy and baby james yeah the pioneers kept a hard pursuit for several days but it was just no use

the fast moving raiders and their prisoners were long gone so that's kind of where we left off uh when i gave you the preview now i'm gonna tell you what happened to david for the next five years of his life okay so so david was 12 he was 12 at the time okay and like i said he had two older sisters and several younger siblings the youngest was um his little brother john jr who was six and these kids were all half naked half starved and running around in february in pennsylvania and these guys were moving swiftly like they did not stop to

take meals during the day they ate on the go and then finally after a few days the hunters found a little bear nearby killed the bear cooked up some meat and the kids refused to eat the meat meanwhile they're looking over and the raiding party is eating like cheese and shit that was stolen from their cabin while they're being offered like half raw bear meat that they don't want so they're all starving but kind of refusing to eat okay i mean depression will do that yeah they're having a rough time and stubbornness the first couple of days

couldn't have been great uh they said that john jr cried and screamed a lot and the older kids were worried that the that he was going to be killed too because he's too little to understand what was going on he's wanted his mom yeah so poor dude yeah not to mention for the record from someone who has kids that don't eat they will if you don't give them something they want they'll fucking starve themselves they're a little chicken nugget monsters of course asshole it's a little and this is a little

more intense survival situation but yes uh the next now the next morning they're like fuck you i don't want your bear meat it's not chicken nugget david comes around on bear meat uh the next morning that an older man among the Delaware made a shish kebab of the bear meat and he cooked it on the fire and gave it to david as they were setting out and to give him a snack he could kind of eat on the go so david realized he was he had actual hunger pangs and he needed to keep up his strength because he realized it's like if i fall behind i see what happens

because the other day i was i was holding my mother's scalp by the hair which he also got to watch them like cure the scalp and dry it out over you know next to the fire that was great so he developed a taste for bear meat and made it all the way back so all the kids make it back to the the village in ohio country the loot stolen from the homesteads was divided up between the tribes and the warriors who participated in the rates and then when david saw some silver dollars that were that were both whole and cut so like in the old days you didn't have like

different denominations you have a silver dollar and they would literally cut it in half to make a half dollar and cut those in half to make quarters so david recognized the yeah because it was it was by weight yeah and the coins were literally were scored to make it to make it easy to cut them because they were made out of silver easy to do so that's literally if you wanted a quarter obviously worth a lot more back then so david recognized the amount of cash his dad had taken to the stewards and saw that it had been taken so he realized oh he he assumed that his

dad was dead too because the money his dad had on him was divided up as spoils of war he did no idea his father was still alive he knew his mom was dead the children were also considered spoils of war and divided up between the different tribes david would not see several of his siblings again for years and we to this day have no idea what happened to john junior he might have either died or because he was so young he might have just kind of vanished among the native people and was never seen again we just don't know

so let's just let's just think happy thoughts in the same he just grew up to be a badass warrior happy thoughts he uh he he was adopted by a nice family but the fact that we know david's story and not john juniors is probably not a good sign because we literally we know what happened to every single one of the other kids they're like all on the record they're all all accounted for amazing no no out of this story for this one yeah out of all those kids we have a baby who was murdered and john jr just

kind of vanishes so he might have just gotten sick it may be a boring but sad story but like i said there is a chance he just got so lost he might have just he was so native that they never discovered who he actually was could be i like that version better so we'll go with that so the next year was pure hell for david as you can imagine he saw his sister salligan once but was not allowed to speak to her because she belonged to another group as a prisoner he was all but a slave he was forced to obey orders from literally

everyone in the tribe they just go up and say you know go get me this go do that give him some menial drop drop and give me 20 whatever it is he was just a second class citizen forced to obey any actual member of the delaware tribe and he was also subject to ritualized abuse uh sounds about right yeah he was he was routinely ordered to run the gauntlet where two rows of women and children would taunt him and throw sticks and stones as he ran between them so he was like constantly just covered in bruises and scrapes and scratches constantly just called names

and just treated like shit that's horrific yeah that's awful this was a year of his life he went from 12 to 13 at this point and he was convinced every day he was going to be just woken up and killed so he kind of reached a breaking point where being killed didn't scare him that much anymore he was like good good night David he's just getting the shit beat out of me sleep well i hope you don't i might kill you in the morning exactly every day for a year this is what he's going through every once in a while he's just forced to be

humiliated and beaten with all so he just reached a breaking point where he just wanted all he wanted was a little bit of payback before he died that was all he was asking at this point but in the middle of this that old man which they describe as an old chief and that's the way i basically all the sources called him an old chief i don't know if he was technically a chief as in a leader of the tribe but he was clearly like a respected elder he might have been like a medicine man maybe he was just super high just we don't know it's called him chief

he was chief so they called me old chief he was the guy who gave him the bare meat on the road he would offer him advice or just little kindnesses just give him a little something give him some better food give him a little some a little scrap of clothing or just like he was being nice to him but usually only when nobody else could see like he'd sneak around a corner like here have some have some meat have this little treat whatever that was the one person who was nice to him for a year so there was like one humane

dude one dude who took a liking to david he he was nice to him now in the and some of the family stories they said that family tradition said this chief was corn stock who you might have heard of if you heard of chief corn stock he's a famous figure for this period but it doesn't really matter because i checked into it there's no way there's nothing lines up it's it's total it's total bullshit it's not this guy he wasn't he wasn't a Delaware he wasn't in the right part he in the in the timeline doesn't add up so it's a it's a nice thing to say

just to make this character like a more famous person but nope we don't we to this day we just don't know we just call him the old chief because that's all we know so the old chief told david gave him a little bit of advice he's like look what you need to do is catch one of these people who throws shit at you and calls you names catch him alone and make it a fair fight that way you can earn a little bit of respect around here so david was like this is probably going to get me killed but let's do this there was one there was one

asshole kid he decided it was worth risking his life to break that guy's nose and i i get i have a lot of sympathy here because you ever had that one person you sometimes every once in a while you're willing to get in trouble to fuck somebody up i've been there and it's happened yeah i mean i i'm typically not someone who loses my temper violently but i will throw a beer on a bitch i will i i more hurt you with words yeah so so david decided he was going to go for it

he bided his time and at some point everybody was picking tree nuts to store up for the winter and he found his opportunity he found his his targeted bully alone he's walked up to him and sucker punched him and just tore him to the ground and gave him the kind of backwards beat down you can only imagine like after a year of frustration he must have beat the fuck out of the kid fuck that kid he probably deserved oh no it sounds like he did so as written in the family history titled history and capture and captivity of david boyd from cumberland county

pennsylvania 1756 quote he's spraying upon his tormentor and they had a rough and tumble wrestle but at last the pale face found himself on top and he redressed his wrongs as only an infuriated boy could finally a noise attracted his attention and looking up he saw squaws and braves running toward him tomahawks uplifted it was sure death now as it was his last chance he redoubled his licks coming nearer and seeing his determination they dropped their weapons and patted him on the back saying make fine indian

make fine indian unquote so he beats a kid it worked they actually like okay this kid's got some backbone maybe he's not just a worthless little white guy after all that was a turning point where at least he got a little bit of respect and they stopped running him through the gauntlet because that's basically for only the people who are completely unworthy of respect if you're not willing to fight up and stand up for yourself then we're just gonna fucking torment you so his life got a tiny bit better after he beat the shit out of this kid

so there's a there's a lesson sometimes that's the way it happens there's your lesson boys and girls if so many pisses you off beat the shit out of them and everything will get better this is another reason why children should not listen to this fucking podcast um all right so the chief would go out on important business for the tribe and david was always anxious when he was gone because once again this is the only guy who is nice to him ever but then one day the the old chief had been gone for weeks and then he got one morning two fully painted and decked

out warriors just grabbed him up and and david was like oh shit this is it this is the morning i'm gonna get killed this is the day i've been waiting for for over a year because this point he's like 14 so we're 14 years old now they get like two like warriors with their weapons in full war paint come and grab him and they drag him off to a river and a few miles away they strip him off down to all of his clothes leaving him only with the belt that he was uh that he had when he the day he was captured and they dip dip him down three times on the water and

according to the sources say go down white man come up red man then they shaved his head and left just a little tuft of hair at the top they painted his skin they put moccasins on his feet and dressed him in a hunting shirt the only thing left was that leather belt so then he was left brought back to the village and he found out that everybody had like gotten ready for some kind of crazy party that all the warriors in the village were now dressed up painted as if for battle had their weapons and they were screaming and

trying and chanting and the women were making all this noise david didn't understand what was going on now his grandchildren quoted him from when he was an old man years later saying quote child i can't describe my feelings as i would marched along i could not conceive of what they were going to do to me i suppose they were going to put me to death as there could be nothing else they would make such a parade about but i had never seen anything like it among them before and it never gave me any intimation of what they were going to do

unquote so the procession marched for several miles david was in the front as these warriors are chanting and shouting behind him he reaches an open meadow and the parade goes into a circle and there's david is inside all decked out and then the only other person inside the circle was this old brave in full dress and paint holding a large knife and a grim expression and david's like oh shit this isn't good david was brave yeah this can't everybody's screaming he's in this circle this guy's coming at him with a knife

there was nowhere he could go nothing he could do so he just stood his ground the old man advanced on him and the knife flashed and then the belt around his waist was cut off the very last piece of him from his old life as a white boy then the old warrior took david in his arms and quote cried out in the native tongue my son my son my son and then david realized that the old painted dude was the old chief was the old chief okay and now he was officially adopted into the tribe by this dude and now he's yes he is now a delaware warrior

and adopted son of the the chief so the the belt was cut into pieces and divided up among the warriors and the old chief presented his old hatchet back to him the one that was captured the day he was taken and given to him as a spoiler for his very first spoil as a as a warrior of the tribe so he got his old axe back and he was given a new tribal name which sadly does not come down to us however his adoption was celebrated the whole tribe had a massive feast everybody got trashed on booze as one does yeah in a celebration hell yeah the chief's wife immediately

accepted david as her son oh and yeah apparently though the the celebration was so drunken and violent that the old chief pulled david out of his own party about halfway through so let's go back to the tent because people are gonna start fighting and things are gonna get crazy and he didn't didn't want his new son to get knifed because they're having just a violent barbarian party which sounds kind of fucking it sounds like it rules i would go to that sounds like it's awesome but also very dangerous he's a 14 year old boy who's brand new around here so uh the the old woman

immediately like cleaned up his feet and pulled like thorns from him put salve on him and made a place inside their home for him so david's like officially in with the head family of the tribe so now he's so now that he's got a sweet sweet deal yeah he went from being all but i mean everything but a slave and just constantly shit on every single day now he has got equal standing with any every other warrior nobody gives him shit from that day forward is just you're now one of us the past doesn't matter anymore that's why that's like

part of that ritual is to really mark the day the you know the old life ended and the new one began so now that he was a respected member of the tribe and loved as a son by an important man david's situation improved and over time he realized he truly enjoyed his life the tribe shared in good times equally or they suffered together equally if things sucked david's adoptive father was a patient and wise teacher and david became an expert hunter and tracker and throughout his life until he was an old man a legendary marksman and a successful fisherman

dreams of going home completely faded well he has a new dad yeah he's a new dad now and probably one that pays way more attention and like the old dad's like here's your list of work to do for the next 12 hours whereas this guy's like with him by his side teaching him how to hunt and fish and telling him stories and giving him wisdom you can sort of see why one father may be a little bit more appealing than the other one even if even if john wasn't a bad guy just like in these kinds of cultures parents are so much more attentive whereas let's face it the

well because they can be and they kind of have to be as opposed to it's nothing but if we don't work to death we don't survive it's this cultural difference between the two types of living the farm the farm life versus the hunter-gatherer life and frankly the hunter-gatherer life involves a lot less hard work it's more dangerous and it can involve a lot more hard times because you're not necessarily so however these tribes have been doing it for thousands and thousands of years and it worked so unless you got if you didn't get wounded

or sick you're probably going to have a better quality of life so if there's a lot to be said so david go you know he fully embraces his life as a Delaware warrior now one funny little side note about the old chief is that i just found hilarious was apparently he had a habit that every time he ate a meal he would thank the great spirit and he would raise his arms in the air and go who who who like Santa Claus or the jolly green giant so that totally changed the picture of this guy in my head when i heard that part so imagine David and his all his new dad

just getting down for a meal everybody who who who well and see from the moment you started calling him old chief he's just like the native american version of snoop dog there you go so now he's just like who who who let's face it these people were probably smoking up on the regular that's why they called him old chief all right now one day David as a Delaware warrior was out hunting and he stumbled on to kind of a grim scene he goes into a clearing and he sees a white guy sitting on a log all wide-eyed

and looks over and sees that there's a bunch of natives from a different tribe building a big fire and david just kind of freezes there looking in the scene and the white guy looks up at him and apparently recognizes him as like a fellow white guy and just like yeah he's like what are they going to do to me are they going to burn me and david just he doesn't know what to do he does know these aren't his people so he's like powerless to do shit so he does a he just does a Homer Simpson walk backwards through the bushes and just like he felt bad but there's

like anything it was like nothing he could do so for the rest of his life david wondered what happened to that guy but let's probably nothing good i mean maybe they were just going to toast marshmallows and sing kumbaya but uh i doubt it so david felt bad but what what's he gonna do maybe they were just going to keep him warm he was like 15 years old was he supposed to do and he had actually no real motivations to stick his neck out for that guy yeah i mean it would have been the heroic thing to do but he's not a hero

he's a he's a real this could have also been a much shorter story yeah he's a he's a real teenage boy not a movie character so that guy died almost certainly um the following what happened to that guy the following autumn there was another adventure for david this was a point where they were moving camp and so you know that's a really big undertaking because these are like semi-permanent camps this is not a fully roaming thing so they so so pulling up and setting down is a big deal and one old woman was put in charge of

moving the ammunition for their muskets and she took the balls but forgot the gunpowder so they're like well fuck we kind of need that for these guns to work so even though there was some argument about it david had volunteered to be to to go and fetch the powder because they had moved because of how dangerous it was this is still in the middle of the french and indian war and the old chief was kind of reluctant but david's like no i you know this is this is important and i can do this so finally his father relents and they pick another boy to go with him so

david and his friend go rushing off to the old camp to go find the the gun powder that was left behind but unfortunately the morning fire before they had left had never been put out reached dry grass that so the boys are like coming from the distance and there's this incredible explosion kaboom they're literally Jesus this huge explosion happens um and the the old camp explodes and they're like well shit their mission's already a failure they didn't get to the powder in time to save it so they decided to turn around and

head back to the new camp and they stumbled on a flock of wild turkeys score so they kill a turkey make camp for the evening they're cooking some turkey over an open fire which smells great to a local pack of wolves so they grabbed the turkey and ran like stuffing cooked turkey in their mouths as they're running wolves are coming after them and finally they like throw the bird over their shoulder flying everywhere well hopefully they plucked it first but uh they so they like throw the bird over their shoulder to slow the pack down and they scramble up a tree uh

and so like they spent a sleepless night with wolves just circling and jumping up and scratching the trunk of this tree and scaring the shit out of them but eventually the next morning the the the wolf pack gives up leaves they go back to the camp in failure only to be screamed at by the old woman who's the one who'd fucked up in the first place fuck you old woman this was your screw up lady but apparently the old chief told him to run and hide and wait until she calmed down because she was ready to beat them yeah that that's actually kind of awful because

it's like he yeah i didn't forget the gunpowder i didn't put out i didn't i wasn't the one who didn't put out a fire i don't know much about this lady but i think she sucks she screwed up and wanted to beat a bunch of kids maybe she maybe she shouldn't be put in charge of things yeah so time went on and fortunes changed in the french and indian war and ways we'll talk about in an upcoming episode but it ended with david's tribe making peace at a british fort as he walked between lines of redcoat bayonets

they saw like a brun skin dark eyed young warrior in full paint moccasins literally no one even recognized that david was a white man and he's he was i'm sure after being in the sun he was more of a bronze man at that oh for sure and this was the point when the old chief first realized that his love for david meant he should return him to his own people and original family and he told david for the first time that john boyd had not been killed in the raid several years before now david actually objected to this plan but

but the old chief paid an englishman two dollars to write and deliver a letter to john boyd to tell him hey your son is still alive and i'm gonna bring him back to you safely not not asking for anything just like i'm going to bring you but bring your your kid back to you because he basically could see the which way the wind was blowing and realized that that being a delaware like long term wasn't gonna be the safest thing for david and he loved him that much that he would rather him live a long life rather than go down fighting oh wow

yeah that's like gen genuine love adopted dad was like get out yo get out while you still can now this this part is is weirdly heart breaking to me because even though it's like yeah this old guy he was there with them like he was part of the raiding party that killed david's mom and captured him yet you can also not deny from the story that he genuinely seemed to to love him and was willing to make personal sacrifices for him so it's it's weird to know how to feel you know so he's he's losing his family again yeah now john so this is the second time in

david's life that he literally has had to say goodbye to his family it's it's kind of sad but it takes him a little bit longer before this happens uh john senior received the letter but he did not believe a word of it he was convinced that someone was fucking with him because he hadn't seen any of his kids in years and was convinced they were all dead it's like i found my i found my wife and baby dead i haven't seen anybody else why is somebody writing me five years later and telling me my son's alive he didn't believe it

however having sent the letter the old chief kind of became interested in the process of reading and writing and asked david if he would teach him so this is kind of a sweet story where david grabs you know uh some tools to to teach and he teaches the old chief the english alphabet and had like pages from an old book of songs that they he'd had from that was taken all the way back from the cabin and so he teaches the chief and so as an old man he would tell his own grandchildren just how proud he was

listening to this old guy learn to read he spent some time and that's how it was so they spent the winter trapping furs but as the old french trading situation was very much disrupted by the war they couldn't make any sales they just had a bunch of furs so it hit the old chief hard that time was running out and that times were changing and that his own time to teach and protect david was running out so quoted in the family story the old chief said quote do you see how swiftly the sun is going down and my son will soon be set too

then i will be in the happy hunting grounds where my son is and i want to restore you to your own father before i go unquote when spring came they packed their best ponies with furs and made the journey east just the two of them the old chief provided all the protection they needed while still in native land but when they crossed over into british controlled territory they tied a white cloth to a stick and literally walked under a flag of truce when they reached the town of carlyle the white teenager and old delaware chief caused quite a commotion

and a guy named thomas yuri was summoned to see if david was truly his long lost nephew so the stories say that thomas yuri like immediately wanted to pull his gun and kill the old chief the moment he saw him because that's the guy who helped kill his sister oh wow okay so he had to be talked he had to be talked down but all the people in town were like you can't attack this guy he came in under a flag of truce he's returning this kid this we can't murder him yeah you can't just murder him that's not okay

so david really wanted to bring his adoptive father to meet his biological one but his uncle said oh hell no oh and probably yeah i i could see how that would be a conflict of interest i can imagine that john senior probably would want to shoot the chief in the face if he'd actually showed up in his doorstep be like yeah like sorry about your ruining your life here's one of your kids back oh he's very different he's pretty great he's awesome now i fixed him uh that did not work out that way so

they had to say their goodbyes earlier than planned and but in the chief did not want to push his luck because he knew he knew that these guys could just shoot him and nobody would care yeah except for except for poor or david who would probably yeah who's at this point i feel has been through enough and i'm guessing that david was probably the reason why this old guy didn't get murdered because he's like no no no he's really yep he's good he's bringing me back he's right so instead the old man sold the furs and

the ponies he bought a brand new outfit like nice clothes for david to wear when he went to meet up his father again and then gave him all the money and everything except for what he needed just one pony and enough to take him back into the ohio country he gave everything else to david so he really did love this kid i mean it's like very clear all the way through and the fact that david had way more to say about this old guy than his own father okay so again we're at the tragic heart another goodbye

this kid having to say goodbye to yet another parent that's yeah this time that's only yeah this time by love and adoption but he had to say that second goodbye and he never saw the old chief again or found out what happened to him it was another 20 mile trip from carlyle to the small farm where john boyd still lived rebuilt farmhouse now had a new wife new kids and we don't know much about their reunion except that farm life was intensely unsatisfying for david and in fact

he attempted to run away and made and announced very loudly they had no intentions of sticking around so they apparently they like the family literally guarded him and tried to make sure he didn't run off for a while because he was like fuck this i'm not gonna stick around here you guys suck yeah why would yeah you people suck i i could imagine how that wouldn't be an ideal situation and again he probably didn't walk into the loving situation that he just left either no this is going back to a strict

presbyterian family it's all about discipline and hard work yeah i would fucking want to go back to old chief yeah old chief who loves you and teaches you and gave you everything like practically gave the shirt off his back so it's complicated to know how to feel about it um now david did settle down didn't he did not go back to the ohio country but he'd stayed restless and unimpressed with life among white people for his entire life and had plenty to say about it even until he was an old man now there are many theories as to why so

many white people went native and there are no real examples of tribal people eagerly adopting civilized life but hearing this you can kind of understand now why david liked the life among the deliwares and in fact not only that but except for little john jr every single one of his siblings at different points had a chance to go back home every single one of them at least attempted to run away so that's literally a like like five for five so i kind of have this impression that maybe john

he may have like been devoted his family but he probably wasn't a nice father like nobody wanted to go back and live with him well i mean have you met presbyterians ouch that was by the way by the way all of our ancestors on both sides are presbyterian like it's like on like it's the where most of us came from at least on the chamber side and the boy i said what i said and i stand by it um so we didn't spend the rest of our lives recording this episode i'll give you the cliff notes version of what happened to the rest of david boy's

life he married a young woman named elizabeth henderson in 1771 the hendersons were a very well-regarded family with money so david so david went from being a dirt farmer to a a delaware brave to married well into white society and you can probably imagine david was probably a very interesting figure from his background he's probably physically impressive and you know a cool guy well yeah i mean if he were gonna he was depending and the description of him i mean some kind of the description was was having

dark hair and dark eyes so so imagine like a deep tan good shape guy and so and well known like for the rest of his life even as a you know living back as a white guy and yeah he was scotch irish yes scotch irish dude uh you know legendarily known as being an expert marksman good hunter great fisherman and enlisted three times in the revolutionary war who was an actual enlistment yes so he not just they like forced him to do it three years in a row he volunteered and according to family tradition he was

at the bloody field of brandy wine he was present for the crossing of the delaware river and the surprise at trinton he spent the winter with george washington at valley forge so he was a full full on badass and he was known he was uh let's see oh yeah and he apparently like the family told about how he was the one who shouted at everybody and told how great it was when lafayette brought back and said the french were gonna support the revolution so like he was right there in the middle of it with everybody so you can consider him so he's like a

background character in hamilton you can just imagine him being one of the people dancing in the stage is anonymous soldiers in the middle of the revolutionary war so he might have even met both of these people there's a chance that he at least you know walked by and said good morning to general washington which is kind of cool yeah if he was at the crossing in delaware and he was in a valley forge yeah so as a fun little side note that the service records from the revolutionary war do show his three enlistments the first one was in 1775 as a

sharpshooter under one captain james chambers oh really that was such a cool little footnote now i don't think this one is any direct relation to us but just that name popped up i was like that's that's that's spooky you know because i was on ancestry i literally saw the little piece of paperwork that survived to this very day that showed his service and showed the name of like sharpshooter captain james chambers like james changers that's a good name i like that name i'm sure captain james chambers was a proper british soldier

so his time fighting the redcoats stirred enough hatred against the british that it influenced his politics many years later his sons were all in open support of president john quincey adams but david stubbornly refused to vote for him he supported andrew jackson and his one reason was quote if he whipped the british he could be trusted to govern the united states unquote so it's literally just like people say for trump i like him because he's strong and tough even though that's like trump john uh you know andrew jackson

sucked a lot and it's really ironic considering how much he loved native americans and andrew jackson was the worst president toward them in the history of a bunch of shitty presidents like there's no good ones there's not a single good one when it comes to native american relations when andrew jackson takes the fucking cake and yet david boyd voted for his ass but his own kids were just simply saying father's getting old yeah you can't trust rednecks to vote

that's really what it is sometimes they get it right in a few weeks we're gonna be talking about george wallis and rednecks voting a lot that'll be fun so by all accounts david boyd was well respected well read and apparently he had a personal library filled with history politics theology and he was a devout presbyterian throughout his life he said when he when he and his wife elizabeth got married they like built a little altar in their home and were very super like strict religious folk um he died in 1831 oh sorry he died in 1831

in in the state of pennsylvania that was completely unrecognizable from the rough frontier country he grew up in and his adopted people had been killed off or driven west they'd been long it sucked for them however among david's many children because he and elizabeth got busy oh you mean she was constantly pregnant but this time not murdered she actually just she just lived a life now they had a son named william he grew up to have a son named hu who was the father of henry who was in turn the father of ben benjamin boyd's daughter was named ruby

our grandmother and that's it that's the connection of david boyd to us oh that was that's a brutal that was a rough story it's it's it's as usually is the case when you really look into these things it's like you never know exactly how to feel because on one hand it's super easy to paint simplistic pictures but the truth is even if the root thing is unfair like the way the natives were treated was 100 unfair but you can like individually understand why people made their own decision you can understand why the

boyd's were willing to risk what happened to them in order to say you know i got we got fucked over in two other countries before this one we are gonna stand our ground on this one and you know it so in other words like you said everybody sucks but you can also find these little moments of decency and and love and generosity even in the middle of all the horror well truly that's kind of a metaphor for for all existence it's it is it's it's when you take something as a big picture it's usually terrible and horrible and you have to sort through and find

the happy and the humanity and the decent because people are both decent and horrible we're complicated people which is why i like kittens yeah kittens are just assholes no i'm holding my kitten and he's we have kitten on the podcast at the moment yeah and another thing too for anybody who's interested in this whole call of the wild kind of a thing where people like you know to really explore why people might prefer this sort of stone age way of life over you know civilization there's a couple books i recommend one of them is i mentioned

before it's called tribe by sebastian younger and another one is called civilized to death by dr christopher ryan and both really go into this whole like really lay out the case of why communal living in this in this more primitive way that's a little bit more connected to nature where people are treated equally or personal property really isn't much of a thing it's it's yeah women have like women have uh agency over their own bodies and yeah so it's like that especially there's there's a number of ways you can see

and honestly i feel like it also can provide a roadmap for us in modern life it's like it's not like we should all just go leave our homes and go into the woods but what we can do is understand that the things that make people happy are about community and are about sharing are about about having a closer connection to do nature and to putting ourselves in these cages that we built for ourselves and the society that makes us do selfish and awful things to other people it's bad for us and we can still keep toilet paper and

dentists and netflix and still maybe live a slightly better way for the human soul that's kind of my case i'm going to make here at the end of this podcast we can do better we can do better and get a kid get a kitten take a walk go take a go go for a nice hike in the woods do something nice for another human being don't murder families and scalp babies yeah never murder babies and uh we will be talking together again soon to do the conclusion of young george washington and the end of the french and indian war

before moving on to bigger and better things so uh so now let me if anyone wants to follow me on twitter my at is jamie1km you can go to my website at jamiechambers.net or if you want to support this podcast we the current best way to do that is on patreon which is patreon.com slash jamie chambers don't find me one thing i will be doing shortly is starting up some chainsaw history social media accounts so we can post links and little pictures and other bullshit that we find uh stuff to articles sources

for anybody who actually enjoys this sort of thing uh for now go hug a cat or something go uh yeah outside snuggle a kitten give some yeah you know give someone who you're probably not going to infect a hug open a door for someone be nice to your fellow humans remember jesus was a socialist so is santa claus so is santa claus whole whole whole all right everybody i think that does it for this very first bonus episode we will catch you next time see ya bye