Colonel Archibald Andrew Lochry (15 April 1733—24 August 1781) was a colonial American military officer whose command ended in disaster when he and nearly every member of his force were killed or captured by Mohawk forces led by George Girty, the brother of Simon Girty, and Chief Joseph Brant.
Archibald Lochry was born 15 April 1733 at Octarano Settlement, started 1717, Chester Lancaster County Province of Pennsylvania to Jeremiah Loughry and Mary Murphy.
The colonists on the Pennsylvania frontier had been vulnerable to attack by Shawnee, Delaware, and Sandusky Indians, necessitating a blockhouse as an armory and safe haven between the forts at Hanna's Town and Ligonier.
In a listing of the deputies to the provincial convention held at Philadelphia, July 15, 1775, Lochry is named as a Westmoreland official in several capacities.
In 1781 he was Clerk of Court, Westmoreland County, Pa. Also in 1781, Archibald was made a Colonel and given command over 100 men to discomfort Indian and British forces in the Ohio Valley during the Revolutionary War.
Following the French and Indian War and during the colonization of Western Pennsylvania, Virginia and Kentucky, friction between Europeans and Native Americans was an almost constant feature.
The Indian activities were of such a grave concern to settlers that Lochry had no problem enlisting and organizing a unit of 107 men by July 1781.
The specific attack strategy began with an expedition down the Ohio River in a manner to similar campaigns that Clark had led in the past.
Lochry's party of one hundred & seven mounted volunteers rendezvoused at Carnahan's Block House, eleven miles west of Hanna's town, on the July 24, 1781, but then things did not go as planned.
Rushing to catch up, Lochry's troops arrived on the 8th of August, only to find that Clark and all the men, boats and stores he could gather had departed just twelve hours earlier.
So even though he needed to have a larger force for penetrating the enemy lands, he was also obliged to keep moving in order to curtail desertions.
Captain Shannon's small group was forced to accompany the Indians for several days, while they followed Lochry down the river, at a discrete distance and waited the arrival of additional 500 men with which they intended ultimately to attack.
At about 10:00 in the morning on 24 August 1781, Lochry ignored the danger and ordered his men to put onto shore on the north side of the Ohio River about ten miles below the mouth of the Big Miami, near the present-day town of Aurora, Indiana.
Girty had his Indian scouts out along both banks of the river, and news of the landing was immediately communicated to his now larger force of 648 warriors.
In addition, some of the members officers who were captured kept records and pension applications make mention of some individuals in this group.
A list of the members of the expedition is shown below along with variant name spellings and if available, approximate age at the time of the capture.
(**Additional Excerpts of William Roark's separation with his regiment under Captain Michael Catt who was to become part of General Clarks army and his captivity as a POW with the Ohio Indians who moved him to Canada and his fight with Congress to collect his Revolutionary War Pension #S32495 can be found on the Fisher Family Genealogy site www.fishergenes.com and at the National Archives in Washington D.C.) (***This list of 103 persons compares to a total of about 107 men reported in contemporary documents.