Molly Pitcher, Cannoneer in Petticoats
Daughter of German immigrants and a stranger to books and schoolrooms,
As a camp follower, she probably earned her way by performing tasks like washing laundry. Molly was a popular nickname for Mary, and the buckets of water she would have carried in her work were often called 'pitchers,' which may have led the soldiers to call her 'Molly Pitcher.' Otherwise, we know almost nothing about her life with the army, though some of the men later
It was this unremarkable woman of modest means and few social graces who would soon bravely enter into battle, bringing water to parched soldiers and then servicing a cannon when her husband became a casualty.
"Molly Pitcher at the Battle of Monmouth," 1912, after Charles Yardley Turner.
Public Domain
Water-Carrier at Monmouth
On June 28, 1778, American forces under George Washington fought and won the field at
From what we know, Mary Hays polished up her nickname of Molly Pitcher by carrying buckets of water to the soldiers. During this time, we can presume there were moments when she, too, was under fire.
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As the battle unfolded, Mary exchanged her water bucket and dipper for powder and shot. A Connecticut soldier, Joseph Plumb Martin,
Cannoneer
Whether William Hays collapsed from heat stroke or was wounded by a British ball is uncertain, but we do know that Mary then came forward to service the artillery piece to which he was assigned. She would have watched her husband practicing gunnery on numerous occasions, preparing and shooting the cannon, a task which required discipline and speed. With no one else available to assume his place on the gun crew, she joined the cannoneers without further ado.
Here we can again turn to Joseph Martin's written post-war testimony of that afternoon:
'While in the act of reaching a cartridge and having one of her feet as far before the other as she could step, a cannon shot from the enemy passed directly between her legs without doing any other damage than carrying away all the lower part of her petticoat. Looking at it with apparent unconcern, she observed that it was lucky that it did not pass a little higher, for in that case it might have carried away something else, and continued her occupation.'
Molly Pitcher was honored in 1928 with a stamp that reminded Americans of her heroism.
Public Domain
Though the records of that time are vague, the story has it that when George Washington learned of this feat, he personally commended Mary Hays for her heroism. Another tradition has him rewarding her bravery by bestowing on her the rank of sergeant. Whether true or not, for the rest of her long life Mary relished being called 'Sergeant Molly.'
Aftermath
William Hays died in 1786, leaving Mary a good deal of land, but her second husband, John McCauley, apparently squandered that inheritance before vanishing from the record books. Mary spent most of these postwar years working as a charwoman and a general servant. In 1822, decades after her exploits at Monmouth, the state of Pennsylvania granted her a veteran's pension of $40 ($1,093 today) per year.
Because a number of other women performed similar courageous acts during the Revolutionary War, some historians
A statue of "Molly Pitcher" in Carlisle's Old Public Graveyard.
George Sheldon/Shutterstock
Whatever the case, above Mary's grave in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, is a statue in her name, a bold woman standing upright with a cannon rammer in her hands. Nearby is an
When character counted and circumstance demanded, Mary Hays took her place beside the guns, a heroic act that rightfully made her an American legend.
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Vox
2 hours ago
- Vox
Giant invasive frogs are wreaking havoc on the West
is an environmental correspondent at Vox, covering biodiversity loss and climate change. Before joining Vox, he was a senior energy reporter at Business Insider. Benji previously worked as a wildlife researcher. On summer evenings in the Midwest, the muggy air comes alive with a chorus of crickets, cicadas, and frogs — especially bullfrogs. Their booming mating calls sound like something between a foghorn and a didgeridoo. As far as we know, summer here has always sounded like this. Bullfrogs are native to most of the Eastern US, from the Mississippi River to the Atlantic Coast. They evolved here. They belong here. I, for one, adored them as a kid growing up in Iowa, and spent countless summer days trying to catch them to get a closer look. What's unusual is that a few states west — into Colorado and on to California — summer nights are similarly marked by the iconic call of the American bullfrog. But here, they don't belong. They're unwanted. And they threaten the very existence of some of the West's other amphibious animals, such as the Oregon spotted frog, which is found only in the Pacific Northwest. An American bullfrog tadpole next to a juvenile northwestern pond turtle. Courtesy of Sidney Woodruff American bullfrogs are not native to the Western US. Humans brought them to the region more than a century ago, largely as a food source. And in the years since, the frogs — which are forest green and the size of a small house cat — have multiplied dramatically, spreading to countless ponds and gobbling up everything that fits in their mouths, including federally threatened and endangered species. Conservation scientists now consider them among the most dangerous invasive species in the Western US, and in the 40-plus other countries worldwide where they've been introduced. That leaves bullfrogs in an unusual position. Invasive species are typically brought in from other countries — Burmese pythons in Florida and spotted lanternflies in New York City come from Asia, for example — but American bullfrogs are, as their name suggests, American. They're both native and invasive in the same country. And the difference of just a few states determines whether we treat them like pests or as an important part of the ecosystem. It's easy to hate bullfrogs. They do cause a lot of damage and, like other non-native species, they're leading to what some researchers call the Starbucksification of the natural world — you find the same thing everywhere you go, which can make ecosystems less resilient. Yet bullfrogs themselves aren't the main problem, but rather a symptom of a much bigger one. How bullfrogs took over the West One reason is that people enjoy eating them. Or more specifically, their legs. In the 1800s, as the human population in the West surged amid the Gold Rush, so did an appetite for frog legs, which were associated with fancy French cuisine. To meet that demand, people collected native amphibians from the wild, like the California red-legged frog. But as those species became rarer and rarer — in part, due to overharvesting, researchers suspect — entrepreneurs and farmers started importing American bullfrogs from the eastern US and tried to farm them. For a time, it seemed like the bullfrog industry might take off. 'Bullfrog legs! Something to tickle the gustatory glands of the epicurean bon vivants,' a reporter wrote in the Riverside Daily Press, a California paper, in 1922. 'Propagation of the bullfrog in this state already has become a successful reality. In the near future, bullfrog farming may be expected to take its rightful place as one of the prominent industries of California.' That never really came to pass. 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Part of what enabled their success is biology: A female bullfrog can lay as many as 25,000 eggs at one time, far more than most native species. But as several researchers told me, humans have also modified the landscape in the West in ways that have helped bullfrogs take over. While western states have rivers and wetlands, permanent warm waterbodies weren't common until the spread of agriculture and the need for irrigation, said Tiffany Garcia, a researcher and invasive species expert at Oregon State University. Now ponds, reservoirs, and canals — which bullfrogs love — are everywhere. 'It's a story of human colonization,' Garcia said. 'Bullfrogs were brought by people settling and industrializing the West, and they are maintained by people who are natural-resource users of the West. They wouldn't be here and survive without us changing the landscape to create these systems where they do so well.' Bullfrogs are often found alongside other non-native species, Garcia said, which typically tolerate landscapes modified by humans. And sometimes they even help each other succeed. Research has, for example, shown that bluegill sunfish — introduced in the West largely for sportfishing — can help bullfrogs survive. Sunfish will eat dragonfly larvae that might otherwise prey on bullfrog tadpoles. 'You can't even consider them invasive species anymore,' Garcia said of bullfrogs. 'You have to consider it an invasive community.' Bullfrogs are bullies Like unsupervised toddlers, bullfrogs will put pretty much anything in their mouths. Mice, birds, turtles, snakes, rocks, other bullfrogs — if it fits, they'll try to eat it. This is a big problem for species that are already rare, such as the Chiricahua leopard frog or the northwestern pond turtle. Bullfrogs are shrinking their paths to extinction. 'They're implicated in the declines, along with habitat loss and drought, of many of our native reptile and amphibian species,' said Sidney Woodruff, a doctoral researcher at the University of California Davis who studies bullfrogs and other invasive amphibians. In May, Woodruff published a study that found that waterbodies in Yosemite National Park that were full of bullfrogs had lower densities of northwestern pond turtles than those without invasive frogs. She also found that where bullfrogs were present, only large turtles could survive. A northwestern pond turtle in Yosemite National Park. Courtesy of Sidney Woodruff 'Our study adds mounting evidence that hatchling and juvenile pond turtle losses to bullfrogs pose a serious threat to pond turtle population persistence,' Woodruff and her co-authors wrote. 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Grandchildren of men who experienced A-bomb attacks 80 years ago now work for peace
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