COUSIN HEZEKIAH WYMAN fact, fiction or a little of both?

...the regulars gave him the name of 'Death on the pale horse'.

~ from a story in the Boston Pearl

the story begins

Our cousin Hezekiah Wyman (3C7X) became a legend, if not in his own time, then not too long afterwards. Hezekiah was born in 1720 in Woburn. He was a grandson of our cousin (or possible grandfather) John Wyman (1C7X) who came to America with his brother Francis (1C7X) (our other candidate for grandfather) in the 1630s.

Much of the information I've gleaned about some of our relatives in the revolution began with J.L Bell's wonderful blog, Boston 1775, which has thousands of posts. Bell was so fascinated with Hezekiah's story that he has no less than twenty-three posts that mention him. Bell begins by writing: "There really was a Hezekiah Wyman in Middlesex County on 19 Apr 1775. In fact, there were two, father and son."

Bell became interested in our cousin from a story he found that appeared in an 1835 edition of The Boston Pearl which was a Literary Digest. The story, titled "The White Horseman," begins with a young Patriot slain on the lawn at Lexington and an old man who witnesses the death:

There was an old man by the name of Hezekiah Wyman, the window of whose house overlooked the ground where these murders were committed; and no sooner did he see his brave countrymen fall, than he inwardly devoted himself to revenge the unhallowed slaughter.

“Wife,” said he “is there not an old gun barrel, somewhere in the garret?”

“I believe there was,” said she, “but pray what do you want with it?”

“I should like to see if it is fit for service,” replied he, “If I am not mistaken, it is good enough to drill a hole through a rig’lar (regular).”

“Mercy on me, husband! are you going mad? An old man like you—sixty years last November—to talk of going to war! I should think you had seen enough of fighting the British already. There lies poor Captain Roe and his men bleeding on the grass before your eyes. What could you do with a gun?”

The old man made no reply, but ascended the stairs, and soon returned with a rusty gun barrel in his hands. In spite of his wife’s incessant din, he went to his shop, made a stock for it, and put it in complete order for use. He then saddled a strong white horse, and mounted him. He gave the steed the rein, and directed his course toward Concord.

He dashed so closely upon the flank of the enemy that his horse’s neck was drenched with the spouting blood of the wounded soldiers. Then reining back his snorting steed to reload, he dealt a second death upon the ranks with his never failing bullet. The tall gaunt form of the assailant, his grey locks floating on the breeze, and the color of his steed, soon distinguished him from the other Americans, and the regulars gave him the name of 'Death on the pale horse.'"

No sooner had they (the British) commenced their march, than the powerful white horse was seen careering at full speed over the hills, with the dauntless old Yankee on his back. "Ha!" cried the soldiers, "there comes that old fellow again on the white horse! Look out for yourselves, for one of us has got to die, in spite of fate." And one of them did die, for Hezekiah's aim was true...

fiction?

We know, of course, that a man name Hezekiah Wyman actually lived during the Revolutionary War. In fact, there were lots of Wymans in Woburn and environs. Bell says, "you couldn’t throw a stone in parts of Middlesex County without hitting a Wyman." Our Hezekiah didn't live in Lexington, however. He lived in Woburn. But Bell further posits that if you wanted to write a fictional story about a Middlesex farmer in 1775, you "could do a lot worse than to choose the surname Wyman." (Richardson would also have been an excellent choice.) And, according to Professor Daniel Scott Smith, Hezekiah was the 62nd most common name in 1775.

But just how did Hezekiah Wyman get to be so popular that Project Appleseed, a company that exists today, choose him to grace one of their t-shirts. The shirt featuring Cousin Hezekiah is part of the organization's "Dangerous Old Men" collection.

It appears that the story of Hezekiah in The Boston Pearl tickled the fancy of more than just a few. Bell says the story went "viral, cropping up in other periodicals." In 1851, Henry Watson included his verson of the the story in his book The Yankee Tea-Party or Boston in 1773.

In Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's original verson of Paul Revere's Ride, written in 1861, the following passages are believed to be an allusion to Hezekiah Wyman:

And there in the field, in the midnight gloom,

Stood a white steed cropping the clover bloom

Shaking his bar-entangled mane.

Charles Bahne, a researcher of Longfellow's poem, noted that by 1860 Cousin Hezekiah's story was so well know that "more people had probably read about Hezekiah Wyman’s ride on 19 Apr 1775 than about Paul Revere’s."

In 1861, another story, this time about an eighty-year-old Hezekiah Wyman, appeared in Thrilling Adventures among the Early Settlers by Warren Wildwood.

In 1889, The Boston Tea Party and other Stories of the American Revolution relating many Daring Deeds of the Old Heroes began Hezekiah's story with two old men reminiscing about the old days of war:

”I can tell you folks of something more about that retreat from Concord,” continued Davenport. “The story is generally known up around the country here, but some of you may not have heard it. It’s about old Hezekiah Wyman, who gained the name of ‘Death on the pale horse.’”

or fact?

By the time Cartoonist Jim Dobbins, who died in 1995, decided to devote a page to the well-known Hezekiah Wyman, it had already been established that our cousin Hezekiah of Woburn (later Winchester) pretty much fit the bill as the right man. Jim Dobbins’ tribute to the White Horseman, was published in the Boston Traveler:

Then there was David H. Fischer's 1995 book on Paul Revere's ride which includes a paragraph about Cousin Hezekiah as if the story about him is actual fact:

Many on both sides remembered a middle-aged militiaman named Hezekiah Wyman, from the outlying hamlet of Woburn that is now the town of Winchester. This day was his birthday. On the morning of April 19, 1775, Hezekiah Wyman turned fifty-five. His wife told him he was too old to fight, but he saddled his “strong white mare” and galloped away. He collided with the British column on the Road east of Lexington, fired at an advancing Regular and brought him down.

Hezekiah Wyman became highly visible on the battlefield—a “tall, gaunt man” with long gray locks, mounted on a white horse. The British infantry saw him many times from Lexington to Charlestown, and grew to dread the sight of him.

Wyman was a crack shot. Again and again he rode within range of the British vanguard, jumped off his horse, and laid the long barrel of his musket across the saddle. As the Regulars approached he took careful aim, and squeezed off a shot with slow deliberation. Then he remounted and rode ahead to a new position—a grim, gray-headed messenger of mortality, mounted on death’s pale horse.

Whatever Fischer may have gotten right in in his account of Hezekiah, he certainly got his birthday wrong. Our Cousin Hezekiah was born on August 5, 1720.

In Massachusetts Soldiers and Sailors in the Revolutionary War, I was able to find only one Hezekiah Wyman who marched on the alarm of June 19th, 1775. That Hezekiah (4C6X), who marched out of the town of Weston, was the son of the famed Hezekiah of Woburn. If Hezekiah, Sr. actually was out shooting British regulars that April day, he went rogue just like the stories tell it.

can I get a witness, please?

In 1864, the Reverend Samuel Abbott Smith wrote a history of the town of Arlington. In that history he mentioned Hezekiah Wyman and wrote about a man he had talked to who remembered Hezekiah. First Smith told Hezekiah's story:

Through their whole retreat the British had noticed one man in particular, whom they learned especially to dread. He was an old, gray-haired hunter, named Wyman of Woburn, and he rode a fine white horse. He struck the trail as they left Concord, and would ride up within gunshot, then turning the horse throw himself off, aim his long gun resting on the saddle, and that aim was death. They would say, “Look out, there is the man on the white horse.”

Smith writes that he had heard the story of Hezekiah from James Russell, a former state senator who died in 1863, who heard the story from his father:

...James Russell, the father of James Russell, Esq., then a boy of a dozen years, from behind a house on Charlestown street, saw him gallop across the brook and up the hill, pursued by a party of the flank guard who kept the plains midway between Charlestown and Main streets. He turned, aimed, and the boy saw one of the British fall. He rode on, and soon the same gun was heard again, this time also with deadly effect.

In his footnotes, Smith said he'd gotten a similiar story from another man named Thomas Hall.

family lore

Cousin Hezekiah was the son of Seth Wyman (2C8X). We wrote of Seth in our "Lovewell's Fight" post. Seth became famous for taking command of Lovewell's company when their fearless leader was wounded. He also gained noteriety for killing Chief Paugus, the act which ended the fight. Seth died shortly after his participation in Lovewell's Fight but the province of Massachusetts still granted his family a plot of land for his service. When province boundaries were changed years later, Seth's land wound up on the wrong side of the New Hampshire border. In its 1772-73 session, the Massachusetts legislature decided to compensate Seth's sons, Hezekiah and Ross Wyman, by granting them 500 acres in western Massachusetts instead.

Note: Ross Wyman was the blacksmith we wrote of in our Final Straws post.

Hezekiah's grandson, Isaac Chaucey Wyman (5C5X), has kept alive a rather remarkable depiction of his grandfather.

From a book called Genealogical and Personal Memoirs Relating to the Families of Boston and Eastern Massachusetts, published in 1908 and edited by Richard Cutter:

He (Hezekiah Wyman) was a soldier in the French and Indian war, and was in General Wolfe’s army at the battle of Quebec. Tradition has it that he pointed out the secret path that led to the Heights of Abraham, by which the British and Americans were led to the plateau, met the French on equal footing and conquered the city. In recognition of his services in this campaign he was granted a manor in New York, but never claimed his grant, and it was finally taken up by squatters.

When the revolution came he marched with his company on the Lexington alarm and took part in the fighting at Concord, April 19. 1775. When he died he bequeathed outside his family the gun he carried on that eventful day, but it is now in the possession of his grandson, Isaac Chauncy Wyman, of Salem.

As it turns out, none of the preceeding is true of Cousin Hezekiah except the part about the family gun. J.L. Bell writes about the gun and more:

Chris Hurley, who researches Woburn’s Revolutionary history, supplied me with a quotation from Hezekiah Wyman’s will confirming that he did indeed have a white horse when he died in 1779. That same will confirms that he had two others things which some sources ascribe to him.

 A son Isaac and a gun. What’s more, Chris Hurley has tracked down the musket that Isaac Chauncey Wyman owned.

Below is the gun believed to have been owned by Cousin Hezekiah:

Cousin Hezekiah died in 1779, only four years after his legendary ride. J.L. Bell says that if they were to make a movie about Hezekiah, he sees "Mel Gibson in the role, once all his hair turns white."

The picture of Hezekiah on his white horse, rifle aimed, shown at the top of this post is preserved in the public library at Woburn.