What's in a Name? Butler County

Our county is named for Major General Richard Butler. Badly wounded in the legs during a battle with the Northwest Indian Confederation on November 4, 1791, he leaned against an oak tree and waited to die.  The place is today the village of Fort Recovery, Ohio, about 72 miles north of Oxford. 

Various accounts say that Richard Girty, a white man who sided with the Native Americans in the conflict, refused to kill Butler but pointed him out to other warriors. The Native American men, probably Miami or Shawnee, then tomahawked the general, crushing his skull. One account of Butler’s death includes violent descriptions of what happened to his body afterward, including being scalped.

Both sides — really all parties in the second half of the eighteenth century, when we consider the British, Canadian militia, the French, Native peoples and white settlers and militia — took scalps in Ohio.  Various states and the town of Cincinnati paid bounties for scalps, leading to many an additional atrocity when peaceful Indigenous men, women and children were slain and scalped.

Butler died in one of the U.S. Army’s worst defeats, called St. Clair’s disaster, St. Clair’s debacle or, from the Native Americans’ point of view, simply a victory.  Arthur St. Clair, in command of a force of regular troops and militia, had set up camp along the Wabash River. At daybreak on Nov. 4, the Confederation attacked in a crescent formation.  656 American soldiers died and another 279 were wounded; perhaps 100 camp followers were also killed. St. Clair’s defeat saw three times as many Americans killed as Custer lost in 1876. The Northwest Confederation’s losses amounted to about 21 killed and 40 wounded.  I will return to the story of the battle when I write about St. Clair himself.

While Butler would die in violent fashion on American soil, he was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1743. In about 1760, he moved with his parents and siblings to Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Butler’s father, who had made guns in Ireland, set up as a craftsman of American long rifles. In the hands of a skilled marksman, these guns — quite different from the smooth bore muskets of the day — could kill at more than 100 yards; some say even 300 yards. Riflemen played important roles in the American victory at Saratoga in 1777, for example.  

Ironically, the key to the Indigenous victory and Richard’s death was a detachment of Miami riflemen led by another white man who became, in essence, a Miami warrior. This was William Wells, captured as a boy and raised by the Miami. But in the flexible world that was Ohio, he turned back to the American side in 1792 and served as a valuable army scout.  Alas, he lived too far away from Oxford for most of his life to be a local hero or bum. But think of Wells Street in Chicago.

Four Butler brothers served in the Continental Army against the British, Richard with particular distinction. They were known as the Fighting Butlers, and George Washington once toasted them as particularly valuable officers. Richard finished the war as a colonel.

Two of his younger brothers were with Richard on the Wabash just before he died. One of them had also been severely wounded, and the remaining brother could only rescue either Richard or the other sibling. Richard told them to leave him, thinking that he would die in any case. The brothers managed to escape; they left Richard with a loaded pistol, which he could barely raise.  He may have shot one of his final tormentors.

Butler’s sword was inscribed with lines in Spanish, “No Me Sacque Sin Razon—No Me Enbaines Sin Honor,” in English “Draw me not without reason (or just cause), Sheath Me Not without Honor.”  What happened to this weapon, which must have been one of the greatest trophies of the battle, is unknown.

In 1803, as the state of Ohio was entering the Union, the current boundaries of our county were drawn, and the new district was named for Richard. There are also Butler counties in Pennsylvania and Kentucky.  In the first state, a town called Butler was recently the site at which a certain political figure was wounded in one ear. (Butler University in Indianapolis is named for a different person.) The fashion of calling counties and towns after American officers who fought in the Revolutionary War and in Ohio continued well into the nineteenth century. George Washington was the clear numerical winner, but near us we have any number of places named for Anthony Wayne (aye, we will get to him), Nathaniel Greene, Alexander Hamilton (yes, of course) and William Darke of another county near to us.

We live on, or close to, bloody ground on which the fate of the young Republic, just over two years old when Richard Butler died, as well as the future of the Miami, Shawnee and others, came to a sharp turning point.  The victory of 1791 caused the Americans to regroup; they finally won a decisive battle in 1794.

The places named for Richard Butler are relatively numerous; for his main adversary on the Wabash, Little Turtle of the Miami, there seems to be only a historical marker in Churubusco, Indiana. It designates him the “Peacemaker” and the “First Great Hoosier,” in honor not of his victory but for his role afterward as an ambassador and goodwill traveler on behalf of his people. In a way, the circle came around as Little Turtle died at the home of his son-in-law, William Wells, at Fort Dearborn, Chicago, in 1812.  A few months later, Wells was killed by Pottawattamie warriors who considered him a traitor to all Native Americans.

Robert W. Thurston, Emeritus Professor of History at Miami University, is currently working on a history of the Ohio Indian Wars and the Whiskey Rebellion of the 1790s.