Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 13.djvu/122

 native of the place, ‘in case it fall void at this time’ (Letters, p. 247).



CROFTS, JAMES,. [See .]

CROGHAN, GEORGE (d. 1782), captain or colonel, of Passayunk, Pennsylvania, British crown agent with the Indians, was born in Ireland, educated in Dublin, emigrated to America, and settled in Pennsylvania, where he was engaged as a trader among the Indians as far back as 1746. At this period about three hundred traders, mostly from Pennsylvania, a large proportion of them Irish, used to cross the Alleghanies every year, and descending the Ohio valley with pack-horses or in canoes, traded from one Indian village to another. Some of them roused the jealousy of the French by having, as was alleged, crossed the Mississippi and traded with the remoter tribes. Governor Dinwiddie of Virginia described them generally as ‘abandoned wretches,’ but there were a few men of better stamp among them, and Croghan, who had great influence over his own countrymen, appears to have been one. The confidence reposed in him by the Indians, which was largely due to his figurative eloquence in the Indian tongue, led to his employment as government agent. He served in that capacity, with the rank of a captain of provincials, in Braddock's expedition, and in the defence of the north-west frontier in 1756. In November of the latter year he was made deputy-agent with the Pennsylvania and Ohio Indians by Sir William Johnson, who in 1763 sent him to England to communicate with the government respecting an Indian boundary line. During the voyage he was shipwrecked on the coast of France. In 1765, when on his way to pacify the Illinois Indians, he was attacked, wounded, and carried to Vincennes, an old French post on the Wabash, in Indiana, but was speedily released and accomplished his mission. In May 1766 he formed a settlement about four miles from Fort Pitt. He continued to render valuable service in pacifying the Indians and conciliating them to British interests up to the outbreak of the war of independence. Although suspected by the revolutionary authorities, he remained unmolested on his Pennsylvanian farm, and there died in August 1782.



CROKE, ALEXANDER (1758–1842), lawyer and author, born 22 July 1758 at Aylesbury, was son of Alexander Croke, esq., of Studley Priory, a direct descendant of John Croke [q. v.], by Anne, daughter of Robert Armistead, rector of Ellesborough, Buckinghamshire. After spending some years at a private school at Burton, Buckinghamshire, he matriculated as a gentleman-commoner of Oriel College, Oxford, 11 Oct. 1775, and was called to the bar at the Inner Temple in 1786. He removed his name from the books of the college soon afterwards without proceeding to a degree, but on resolving to practise at the bar he returned to Oxford about 1794, and proceeded B.C.L. 4 April 1797, and D.C.L. three days later. He was admitted a member of the College of Advocates 3 Nov. 1797 (, Civilians, p. 138). Sir William Scott, afterwards Lord Stowell, whose acquaintance Croke had made at Oxford, employed him in 1800 to report one of his judgments. The case (Horner v. Liddiard) related to the marriage of illegitimate minors, and Croke published his report with an essay on the laws affecting illegitimacy. The publication brought Croke into notice, and he was employed in 1801 by the government to reply to a book by a Danish lawyer named Schlegel attacking the action of the English admiralty court in its relations with neutral nations. This service was rewarded with a judgeship in the vice-admiralty court of Halifax, Nova Scotia, which Croke held from 1801 to 1815. On his return to England in 1816 he was knighted. For the rest of his life he lived at Studley, entertained his Oxford friends, amused himself with drawing and painting, and wrote a number of books. He was a strong tory in politics and religion. He died at Studley 27 Dec. 1842 in his eighty-fifth year. Croke married in 1796 Alice Blake of