A Pennsylvania Historical Marker will soon rise outside a little 18th-century cemetery in Greenfield, a big step in restoring the reputation of a frontiersman unfairly villainized for more than 200 years.

Simon Girty, born in 1741 about where Harrisburg is now, “crossed cultural boundaries between native and white societies.” He had been captured and adopted by the Senecas when he was 15, settled with his family where Turner Cemetery is now upon his release, and three years into the American Revolution “defected to the British,” according to the sign.

“He remains controversial and is buried in Canada.”

There’s only so much that fits on a plaque, but even this is more than a man once branded a traitor could have expected a generation or two back. Much of the credit for this more nuanced appreciation of a man straddling two warring cultures goes to an 81-year-old former television writer from California.

In the late 1960s, Phillip W. Hoffman was a writer for television shows such as “Combat!” and “The Big Valley.” But a long meeting with Jay Silverheels, the Canadian Mohawk actor who had played Tonto in “The Lone Ranger” in the 1950s, reinforced his growing belief that nobody in Hollywood knew the first thing about Indians.

When he began devouring histories of the earliest clashes between white settlers and native Americans, he kept meeting this Jekyll-and-Hyde character named Simon Girty. As he dug further, he found documents suggesting that the man who had been repeatedly portrayed as “the Charles Manson of his era” was, from another perspective, a hero.

“Girty is the perfect window to those times,” Mr. Hoffman said. “He was interpreting [11 native languages] for the highest military authorities and the chiefs.”

To understand why Mr. Girty finally threw in his lot with the Senecas, Mr. Hoffman began research for a book he thought might take two years but took two decades. “Simon Girty, Turncoat Hero: The Most Hated Man on the American Frontier” was published in 2009.

After Gen. Edward Braddock’s British and colonial forces were defeated by the French and Indians in July 1755, native tribes were emboldened to attack in the east, where Simon Girty was captured along with his three brothers, mother, stepfather and infant half-brother, John Turner. He’d see his stepfather tortured and killed, and his kin parceled to other tribes, before his adoption by the Senecas.

Eric Marchbein, 72, of Squirrel Hill, who initiated the drive for this historical marker years ago, said the Girtys lived at the bottom of the rigid colonial caste system even before their capture. Because they traded with Indians, they were held in lower esteem than indentured servants and known as “the Injun Girtys.”

The great Seneca leader Guyasuta brought his protege, Simon Girty, to Fort Pitt in 1764 in keeping with the treaty requirement that all English captives be returned following the French and Indian War. By then, the young man had fully embraced Indian culture. In that light, it’s understandable that in 1778, during the American Revolution, Mr. Girty left his station as an American officer and fought alongside Indians on the frontier.

He’d decided the British would likely treat the native people more justly. When the new American nation was born, he settled in Canada just south of the Detroit River, and was buried with military honors in 1818. By then, Americans had blamed him “for every atrocity on the frontier” even if he was nowhere near the trouble, Mr. Hoffman said.

Mr. Hoffman had already seen his research used to inform a historical marker on the Girty homestead in Canada in the mid-1990s. He came to Pittsburgh for the unveiling Sept. 30, along with Girty kin from as far as Manitoba, after getting a call from Mr. Marchbein.

Later this month, history lovers will dig a hole, plant the pole and hang the sign. Until then, it will rest in the Mary S. Brown-Ames United Methodist Church beside the cemetery at 3424 Beechwood Blvd.

“I set out to change the perspective of Girty in America and in Canada, and I did it,” Mr. Hoffman said. “And if [in the afterlife] I go to the same place Girty is, the sonuvabitch owes me.”

If you’re wondering, Girty’s Run in Millvale is named for Simon’s brother Thomas, who stuck around. Most local kin are descended from him, and some were there at the unveiling.

“You didn’t want to admit you were a Girty back in them days,” said Ken Girty, 84, of Butler. He made the trip with his son and grandson, all of them a Kenneth E. Girty. “Now everyone wants to be a Girty.”

Brian O’Neill: boneill@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1947 or Twitter @brotheroneill

First Published: October 8, 2017, 4:15 a.m.