In 1912, a railroad crew in northeast Georgia uncovered a row of skeletons, several with broken necks, buried near the site of Nancy Hart’s frontier cabin. The find seemed to confirm one of the wildest legends of the American Revolution. This episode builds a profile of Nancy Morgan Hart, a tall, red-haired, smallpox-scarred frontierswoman, herbalist, and sharpshooter who ran her Broad River Valley household.

We break down the famous 1779 turkey dinner, when she slipped stacked Tory muskets through a gap in her cabin wall, shot two soldiers, and insisted the rest be hanged. We also cover her spying in men’s clothing, the boiling lye soap she threw at an eavesdropping spy, the myth behind the War Woman Creek name, and the legacy that inspired the Nancy Harts, an all-female Civil War militia in LaGrange.

• How frontier cabin design and misdirection made the musket trick believable
• Why hanging, not shooting, sent a message to Loyalists across the Georgia backcountry
• Her espionage, river sniping, and the grain sack confrontation recorded in an 1872 family letter
• Governor George Gilmer’s account of her post-war religious conversion
• Hart County, Lake Hartwell, and other places in Georgia named after her