Joseph Bowman

Joseph Lawrence Bowman ( – 15 August 1779) was an American frontiersmen and military officer who fought during the American Revolutionary War. He was second-in-command during Colonel George Rogers Clark's 1778 military campaign to capture the Illinois Country, in which Clark and his men seized the key British-controlled towns of Kaskaskia, Cahokia, and Vincennes. Following the campaign, Bowman was critically injured in an accidental gunpowder explosion and subsequently died of his wounds. He was the only American officer killed during the 1778-1779 Illinois campaign. Joseph Bowman kept a daily journal of his trek from Kaskaskia to Vincennes, which is one of the best primary source accounts of Clark's victorious campaign. Early life Joseph Bowman was born in Frederick County, Virginia, the son of George Bowman and Mary Hite. Their names were Anglicized from their original German names, Hans Georg Baumann and Marie Elisabetha Hite. His maternal grandfather was Jost Hite, a German immigrant credited as the first white, European colonist to settle west of the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. In 1732, Hite led his extended family, including his daughter Mary and her husband, George Bowman, to the Shenandoah Valley, near present-day Winchester, Frederick County, Virginia. Jost Hite distributed land that he owned to his family and to other settlers—claims, which would later be contested in Hite v. Fairfax, a landmark Virginia land case. In 1774, Joseph Bowman served in the Virginia colonial militia during Lord Dunmore's War. Other Virginians, who served with him in the war, included George Rogers Clark and Leonard Helm. A year later, Bowman moved to Kentucky with other Anglo-American colonists who were seeking available land on the western frontier. In 1776, Bowman was among the petitioners in Harrodsburg, Kentucky seeking to establish a new county. On September 11, 1777, thirty-seven men from the area gathered at Bowman's property to shell corn and were attacked by Indians. One white settler was killed and six others were wounded before the Indians were driven off. Revolutionary War service Joseph Bowman and three of his brothers served in the American Revolutionary War. Bowman is sometimes confused with his brother, Colonel John Bowman, a prominent leader of the Kentucky frontier settlements of the Virginia State Forces during the war.