John Duff (counterfeiter)

John Duff (c. 1759 – June 4 1799) was a counterfeiter, hunter, and scout who assisted in George Rogers Clark's campaign to capture the Illinois country for the Americans during the Revolutionary War. He had been leading a group of hunters returning from Kaskaskia, Illinois, when intercepted by Clark's soldiers near modern-day Paducah, Kentucky. After taking an oath of allegiance, Duff and his men joined Clark's forces. He later rose in rank to sergeant in Clark's Illinois Regiment.

In the 1780s he was in business with two brothers of the later river pirate Samuel Mason. In 1790 he was associated with the counterfeiter Philip Alston at Cave-in-Rock.

Genealogy

Duff was born John McElduff sometime between September 1759 and August 1760 in South Carolina, according to his testimony in court in August 1781, when he was 21 at the time. His father died and his mother remarried. His new stepfather moved the family to the area of Natchez, Mississippi prior to the start of the Revolutionary War. The French records at Kaskaskia often spell his name as Jean Michel Duff or John Michael Duff.

He's believed to be a grandson of a Thomas McElduff, Sr., who received two land grants on the south side of the Tyger River in Union Co., South Carolina in the 1750s. In 1786 John and Daniel, another grandson of Thomas, sell the tracts in two different deeds. There was a Daniel who was also at Kaskaskia in the 1780s and is likely John's brother.

John's father may have been the Thomas McElduff killed by Philip McElduff some time prior to November 1761.

On June 4, 1799, a group of three Shawnee Indians hired by the commandant at Fort Massac assassinated Duff at his house which was either at Battery Rock (according to the newspaper account) on the Illinois side of the Ohio River, or across the river at what would later become Caseyville, Kentucky (as recalled in the "History of Union County, Kentucky").

References

* 1886. "History of Union County, Kentucky". Chicago: Goodspeed Publishing Co.
* Raymond H. Hammes Collection. English Summaries. Illinois State Archives. 81:2:27:1.
* Richard Eugene Willson, Indexing, Donald E. Gradeless, Ph.D., Editor. 1998. "Index to the George Rogers Clark Papers: The Illinois Regiment. Based on the Microfilmed George Rogers Clark Papers at the Virginia State Library and Archives". Chicago: Society of Colonial Wars in the State of Illinois. Online at http://www.execpc.com/~sril/clark.