The New York Journal, And Daily Patriotic Register

SURPRISING ESCAPE.

About four years before the Shawanese Indians were forced to remove from the late Savannah town, they took a Muskogee warrior, known by the name of Old Scraney—They bastinadoed him in the usual manner, and condemned him to the fiery torture. He underwent a great deal without shewing any concern: his countenance and behaviour were as if he suffered not the least pain, and was formed beyond the common laws of nature. He told them, with a bold voice, that he was a very noted warrior, and gained most of his martial preferment at the expence of their nation, and was desirous of shewing them in the act of dying, that he was still as much superior to them as when he headed his gallant countrymen against them. That although he had fallen into their power, in forfeiting the protection of divine power, by some impurity or other, when carrying the holy ark of war against his devoted enemies; yet he had still so much remaining virtue, as would enable him to punish himself more exquisitely than all their despicable ignorant crowd could possibly do, if they gave him liberty by untying him, and would hand to him one of the red hot gun-barrels out of the fire. The proposal, and his method of address, appeared so exceedingly bold & uncommon, that his request was granted. Then he suddenly seized one of the red barrels, and, brandishing it from side to side, he forced his way through the armed and surprized multitude, and leaped down a prodigious steep and high bank into a branch of the river, dived through it, ran over a small island, and passed another branch amidst a shower of bullets, from the commanding ground where Fort Moore, or New-Windsor garrison, stood, and though numbers of his eager enemies were in close pursuit of him, he got to a bramble swamp, and in this naked, mangled condition, reached his own country. He proved a sharp thorn in their side afterwards till the day of his death.