Captain Jack in Print

The Captain Jack story appears in print in Samuel Hazard's Register of Pennsylvania in December 1829. At first the man with the burned cabin and the man named Captain Jack were not plainly the same person. On December 19 the Register printed extracts from “Provincial Letters” furnished by “a friend in the interior.” One, headed “August, 1750,” tells of a man called the Black Hunter, the Black Rifle and the Wild Hunter of Juniata. It says he “is a white man” who came home one evening and “found his cabin burnt, his wife and children murdered,” and that from then on he lived in caves, protected the frontier settlers and seized “every opportunity of revenge that offers.” It never calls him Captain Jack. Another extract in the same issue praises a “Captain Joel,” a hunter who “formed an association of the settlers” to defend the settlements.

The next issue, on December 26, carried a letter from the man who had furnished the extracts. He found “only one mistake: in the name of the celebrated Capt. Jack, and not Joel,” and he supposed that one of the two Jack's Mountains “was called in compliment to him.” He included a copy of a letter signed George Croghan and dated “Fort Louther, June 6, 1755,” which says Captain Jack “has promised his aid in the contemplated attack of Fort Du Quesne.” He also wrote that the Black Rifle was called “a half Indian” in some records and “sometimes commanded Captain Jack's company,” which leaves it unclear whether these were one man or two.

In March 1830 the Register added an unsigned extract dated June 27, 1755, in which Captain Jack, joining General Braddock with his company, has an interview with the general, is told the general has experienced troops he can depend on, and withdraws into the interior of Pennsylvania.

Sherman Day's Historical Collections of the State of Pennsylvania (1843) made them one man. Drawing on “Mr. Conyngham's notes,” Day wrote that “Capt. Jack” was the black hunter and the black rifle, told the burned cabin story in nearly the same words, and said “He was sometimes called the Half Indian.” He added that the man's real name “has never been ascertained” and that it was supposed he “gave name to” Jack's mountain.

U. J. Jones's History of the Early Settlement of the Juniata Valley (1856) places him among the first settlers of the Aughwick Valley, and has settlers form a company under him that styled themselves “Captain Jack's Hunters.”

The county histories that followed did not settle it. Lytle's 1876 history called the belief that Captain Jack named the narrows “a popular error,” and said so much had been written about his exploits “that is purely fictitious, that it is impossible to separate the false from the true.” Africa's 1883 history gives a different tradition: that the mountain takes its name from a “Capt. Jack Armstrong,” who it seems had a contract for cutting a road through the narrows and whose offer of himself and his men to General Braddock was not accepted. Soon after, it says, twelve Indians passed the road crew, “to all appearances” friendly. After they were out of sight the men heard a rifle, and they later found him dead near his cabin. The history does not say who fired. Elsewhere it tells of a trader named John Armstrong, killed at the Narrows about the middle of February 1744, eleven years before Braddock's march, without saying whether he and Capt. Jack Armstrong were the same man. Welch's 1909 history of Mount Union concludes, “Just who Capt. Jack really was, will probably never be known.”

Later historians were harder on him. C. Hale Sipe's The Indian Wars of Pennsylvania (1929) calls him “a mythical character” who “never existed, except as the beau ideal of the period.” William A. Hunter's Forts on the Pennsylvania Frontier, published by the state's historical and museum commission in 1960, calls him “a fictitious personage who first appears in spurious documents” contributed to Hazard's Register, and says Redmond Conyngham called those texts to Sherman Day's attention. Hunter says the Croghan letter is “unlike anything Croghan is known to have written” and that “Fort Louther,” a name he knew only from those 1829 texts, “probably is an invented name” for the fort at Carlisle.

Sipe and a 1979 article in the journal Pennsylvania History both give the name “Half Indian” to a real man, Andrew Montour. That article reports that a search of local histories and frontier sources “shows no trace of Captain Jack prior to 1829,” that later accounts rely on the Register or on “the same material from some source now lost,” and that Hazard left out any reference to Captain Jack or Captain Joel from the Pennsylvania Archives he later published. Its conclusion leaves the door open: “All that can be said for certain is that his existence cannot be proven.”

Checked 2026-11-01 · Primary sources and the Pennsylvania Newspaper Archive

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