History, Legends and Lore

The Revolutionary frontier

Captured on the Ohio: The Malott Family’s Ordeal of 1780

In the last years of the American Revolution, a Maryland family set out by flatboat for a new life in Kentucky. They never arrived. What happened on the Ohio River split the family in two, and sent one half of it to Canada, where its descendants live to this day.

AI-generated depiction: a frontier family in 18th-century clothing on a wooden flatboat loaded with chests, barrels and a spinning wheel, drifting down a wide, muddy river between misty wooded hills in early spring, with a second flatboat carrying cattle and horses behind
An artistic depiction of Peter Malott’s family travelling down the Ohio River toward Kentucky, about 1780, created with generative AI. It is an imagined scene based on the family’s accounts and the history of the period, not a picture of the actual people or boats.

Leaving Maryland

Peter Malott was born about 1727 and had farmed for more than twenty years near Hagerstown, Maryland, where he leased land on the Conococheague Manor in 1754. With his wife, Sarah, he raised a large family. By the late 1770s, like thousands of other families, they were looking west, to the rich new lands of Kentucky.

The way to Kentucky ran down the Ohio River. On the Monongahela River the Malotts joined a man named Reynolds and fitted out two flatboats. Peter and two other men took charge of one, loaded with the family’s cattle and horses. The other, under Reynolds, carried the families: Sarah and most of the children.

Map of the Ohio River and the country to Detroit, showing the Malott family's journey and capture, about 1780 PENNSYLVANIA MARYLAND VIRGINIA KENTUCKY a County of Virginia THE OHIO COUNTRY Lands of the Shawnee, Delaware, Wyandot & Mingo PROVINCE OF QUEBEC LAKE ERIE L. St. Clair Ohio River Monongahela R. Allegheny R. Muskingum R. Scioto R. Miami R. Kentucky R. Maumee R. Detroit R. Hager’s Town the Malott farm Redstone Old Fort Fort Pitt Wheeling Fish Creek the ambush, c. 1780 Limestone Boonesborough Harrodsburg Shawnee Towns Detroit British post Malden Girty farm Gosfield Colchester A NEW MAP OF THE OHIO RIVER and the Country to Detroit, shewing the Journey & Captivity of the Malott Family, c. 1780 Their course down the rivers The way on to Kentucky, never finished Captives carried north (route uncertain) ambush fort A Scale of English Miles 0255075100 85°85°84°84°83°83°82°82°81°81°80°80°79°79°78°78°77°77°38°38°39°39°40°40°41°41°42°42°43°43° Longitude West from London
The country of the story, drawn for this site in the style of an 18th-century engraved map, with the names used in 1780. Rivers, lakes and shorelines are from Natural Earth. The family’s overland route from Hagerstown and their starting point at Redstone Old Fort, a usual place to launch boats on the Monongahela, are typical of the time rather than recorded, and the route the captives were taken north is not known.

Ambush at Fish Creek

It was early spring, in March. The sources disagree on the year, anywhere from 1778 to 1780, and one gives the date as 22 March 1780. The boats had passed Wheeling and were near the mouth of Fish Creek, in what is now West Virginia, running close to shore in a bend of the river, when Indians hidden on the bank opened fire.

AI-generated depiction: puffs of white smoke drift from a wooded riverbank as a frontier family crouches in alarm behind chests and barrels on their flatboat, while a second flatboat carrying horses pulls away downriver in the mist
An artistic depiction of the moment the ambush began near Fish Creek on the Ohio River, about 1780, created with generative AI. It is an imagined scene based on the family’s accounts, not a record of the actual event.

Reynolds was killed, and so was a small child. The warriors took the family boat. The stock boat, with Peter aboard, got away. So did at least one of the boys: according to a family account given in 1849, young William was with his father on the cattle boat.

This was no isolated attack. During the Revolution the Ohio was a war zone. Shawnee and other nations, fighting to keep settlers off their lands and supplied by the British at Detroit, struck boats and frontier settlements again and again. Captives were often carried north to Detroit, where some were adopted into Indian families and others were ransomed by the British.

Taken to Detroit

Sarah and about five of her children were led north through the Ohio country to Detroit. There, in August 1782, a British ration roll lists “Sarah Melot,” a widow, with five children. She believed her husband was dead. He believed the same of her.

Her daughter Catherine, about fourteen at the time of the capture, was kept by the Shawnee, and lived among them for about four years.

AI-generated depiction: a ragged frontier mother and her young children arrive on the muddy riverbank at the palisaded town of Detroit with Shawnee escorts, the mother reaching toward her teenage daughter, who is led away by Shawnee women toward canoes; British soldiers in red coats stand at the gate and a church spire and fort rise behind
An artistic depiction of Sarah Malott and her children arriving at the British post of Detroit, about 1780, while her daughter Catherine is taken to live among the Shawnee. Created with generative AI; an imagined scene based on the family’s accounts and the history of the period, not a record of the actual event.

Catherine and Simon Girty

Simon Girty was one of the most notorious men on the American frontier. Born in Pennsylvania in 1741 and captured by Indians as a boy, he grew up speaking their languages, and in 1778 he went over to the British at Detroit, serving as an interpreter and leading raids against American settlements. To the Americans he was a traitor, “the White Savage.”

By the family’s account, Girty got Catherine away from the Shawnee by saying he only wanted to take her to visit her mother, and promising to bring her back. Instead he married her. The wedding took place in August 1784 at the mouth of the Detroit River, performed by a German preacher; she was about eighteen or nineteen, and he was over forty.

They settled on a farm in Malden Township, near Amherstburg, Ontario, and had five children between 1785 and 1797: an infant daughter who died, Ann, Thomas, Sarah and Prideaux. The marriage was not a happy one. The family remembered that Girty drank hard and was brutal, and Catherine left him for years, living with her brother Peter before the two were reconciled. Girty died in 1818 and was buried on his farm. Catherine outlived him by more than thirty years, and died at Colchester, Ontario, on 2 January 1852, about eighty-eight years old.

A son goes home to Maryland

Back in Maryland, Peter Malott bought back his old homestead and married again, to a woman named Rachel. Years later his son Peter, one of the children captured on the Ohio and now a grown man, travelled back to Maryland to learn what had become of his father. He found him alive, with a young new wife.

The elder Peter never reunited with Sarah. She died in Canada about 1796. He died in Washington County, Maryland, on 22 May 1806, and his will of 1804 names eleven children, among them Theodore “Dory” Malott, the Revolutionary War fifer from whom the owner of this site descends. Dory was a grown man serving in the Maryland militia by then, and does not appear to have been on the boats.

The Canadian Malotts

The children taken to Detroit stayed on the British side of the new border. A county history records that three brothers, Peter, Theodore and David, and two sisters, Catherine and Delilah, were at Detroit by 1783.

  • Peter married Mary Jones, who as a girl had herself spent years as a captive among the Wyandot. They lived a year on Grosse Ile, near Detroit, then traded a cow for an old soldier’s land claim in Gosfield Township, on the shore of Lake Erie, and farmed there for the rest of their lives. Peter died in 1815; Mary lived until 1845. They were buried on their homestead.
  • Theodore took up land in Gosfield Township, married Catherine Wigle, raised a large family, and died at Kingsville, Ontario, in 1836.
  • Delilah married Philip Wright.
  • David settled near St. Catharines, Ontario, where his descendants spelled the name Marlotte.

From these families come the Malotts of Essex County, Ontario. They are cousins of every Malott on the American side, separated by one morning on the Ohio River.

How we know

Much of this story survives because of Lyman C. Draper, a Wisconsin historian who spent a lifetime collecting the memories of frontier families. Between 1846 and 1864 he interviewed Catherine’s children and grandchildren, among them her daughter Sarah (Girty) Munger and her grandson Joseph Munger, and wrote down what they remembered. His notes, the Draper Manuscripts, are now at the Wisconsin Historical Society. In 1893 Catherine’s granddaughter, Nancy Ann Sanford, swore a statement about the family as well.

William P. Marlatt gathered these accounts, along with land records, wills, pension files, county histories and the work of many other researchers, into his study of the family, where each source’s version is laid side by side.

What is still uncertain

  • The year. Accounts range from 1778 to 1780.
  • Whose children they were. Some sources say the family on the Ohio was that of Peter’s younger brother Joseph, not Peter himself. Catherine and her brother Peter both told their families that their father was Peter, and Catherine’s daughter insisted on it, “not Joseph, as some have stated,” but others in the family said Joseph.
  • Sarah’s maiden name. Different sources suggest Tracy, Harmon or Crossley. None is proven.
  • Who was on which boat. Exactly which children were captured, and which escaped with their father, is not certain.

The full evidence is in Bill Marlatt’s study, Families of Peter Malott and Joseph Malott.