Captain Alexander McKee, the Tory leader at Pittsburgh, was an educated man of wide influence on the frontier. He had been an Indian trader and for twelve years prior to the Revolution had been the King’s deputy agent for Indian affairs at Fort Pitt. For a short time he had been one of the justices of the peace for Westmoreland County, and he was intimately acquainted with most of the Indian chiefs. In 1764 he received a grant of 1,400 acres of land from Colonel Henry Bouquet, at the mouth of Chartier’s Creek, and he divided his time between his house in Pittsburgh and his farm at McKees Rocks. In the spring of 1776, McKee was discovered to be in correspondence with the British officers in Canada, and he was put on his parole not to give aid or comfort to the enemies of American liberty, and not to leave the vicinity of Pittsburgh without the consent of the Revolutionary Committee. In February, 1778, General Hand had reason to suspect that McKee had resumed his relations and correspondence with the British authorities and ordered the captain to go to York and report himself to the Continental Congress. For a time McKee avoided compliance, on plea of illness, but unable to further delay, he contrived to escape to Detroit and there openly ally himself with the British cause. About a year before this a young trader, Matthew Elliott, who understood the Shawnee language, had been employed by the Americans to carry messages from Fort Pitt to the Shawnee and other Indian tribes to the westward, in the interest of peace. On one of his missions he was captured by hostile savages and carried to Detroit, where, after a short imprisonment, he had been released on parole. He returned to Pittsburgh via Quebec, New York and Philadelphia, all then in British possession. He had been impressed by the show of British power in the East, in contrast to the miserable conditions of the American forces, especially along the frontier. He became convinced that the colonists would fail in the Revolution, and on his return to Pittsburgh got into communication with Captain McKee and others of the Tory party. Elliott was suspected of having poured into McKee’s ears the wild tale that he was to be waylaid and killed on his journey to York. McKee heard such a story and believed it, which decided him to escape from Fort Pitt and go to Detroit. The flight of the Tories took place from Alexander McKee’s house during the night of March 28, 1778. General Hand received a hint of this move early in the evening and dispatched a squad of soldiers to McKee’s house Sunday morning to remove McKee to Fort Pitt. The soldiers arrived too late. The members of the little party who had fled into Indian land in that rough season were Captain McKee, his cousin, Robert Surphlit; Simon Girty, Matthew Elliott, a man of the name of Higgins, and two Negro slaves belonging to McKee.