Jane McCrea

DESCRIPTION: "It was in brilliant autumn time When the army of the north... and its riflemen came forth." General Burgoyne finds the Americans waiting at Bennington and elsewhere. In the fights that follow, "hapless Jane McCrea" falls an innocent victim
AUTHOR: "Frank Forrester" (William Henry Herbert, 1807-1858) (Source: Thompson-BodyBootsAndBritches-NewYorkStateFolktales)
EARLIEST DATE: 1936 (Thompson-BodyBootsAndBritches-NewYorkStateFolktales)
KEYWORDS: battle war death recitation
HISTORICAL REFERENCES:
1753 - Birth of Jane McCrea
Jul 27, 1777 - Death and scalping of Jane McCrea near Fort Edward, New York, during the Saratoga campaign (source: William L. Stone, _Ballads and Poems Relating to the Burgoyne Campaign_)
FOUND IN: US(MA)
REFERENCES (2 citations):
Thompson-BodyBootsAndBritches-NewYorkStateFolktales, pp. 328-333, "(no title)" (1 text)
ADDITIONAL: William L. Stone, _Ballads and Poems Relating to the Burgoyne Campaign_, 1893 (I use the 1970 Kennikat Press reissue), pp. 186-193, "Jane McCrea" (1 text)
Roud #6600
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "The Fate of John Burgoyne" (subject: the Saratoga campaign) and notes there
NOTES [45 words]: Stone, pp. 128-207, has a brief biography of Jane McCrea, a civilian casualty of the Saratoga campaign, and eight different poems about her, several of them very long and mostly quite dense. I suspect she deserved better, both of fate and of authors writing about her. - RBW
Last updated in version 4.4
File: TNY328

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