Combat· American Revolutionary War
Willing's Mississippi Expedition
In the winter of 1778 naval Captain James Willing took 35 Marines down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers and raided Loyalist settlements along the lower Mississippi.
The company, raised from volunteers at Fort Pitt, was the first Marine unit to operate on the western waters. It left Fort Pitt on January 10, 1778, with the armed boat Rattletrap. On February 19 the flotilla seized Loyalist Anthony Hutchins, his slaves and his property at his plantation above Natchez. South of Natchez, the crops of British planters were destroyed, their houses burned, their livestock killed and their slaves carried off. At Manchac on February 23 an advance party of 18 Marines under Lieutenants McIntyre and Harrison captured the British sloop Rebecca and took her to New Orleans. In April Natchez settlers fired on a detachment under Lieutenant Harrison, killing five men. A British force then garrisoned Manchac, interrupting shipments between New Orleans and Fort Pitt. The company later joined George Rogers Clark at Kaskaskia, where it was disbanded by June 1779.
Record no. 137