Herringshaw's Encyclopedia of American Biography

Thousands of short American lives — soldiers, inventors, preachers, governors, novelists — each given a paragraph: born where, did what, and why anyone remembered.

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Allan, John

soldier, patriot, was born Jan. 13, 1746, in Scotland. He became a justice of the peace, and then clerk of the supreme court, and from 1770 to 1776 was a member of the provincial assembly. When the American colonies engaged in the struggle for independence he gave them active and efficient aid, securing the alliance of the Indian tribes of that region. Congress nominated him superintendent of the eastern Indians, and gave him a colonel's commission in January, 1777, and with his Indians he protected the otherwise exposed line of the northeastern frontier. The Nova Scotian authorities offered a price for his apprehension, while his house was burned and his wife thrown into prison. In 1784 Col.

Allan settled in Maine. The government of Massachusetts in 1792 granted him a tract of 22,000 acres, on which the town of Whiting now stands, and in 1801 congress gave him 2,000 acres in Ohio in compensation for the losses he sustained for the patriot cause. He died Feb. 7, 1805, in Lubec, Maine.

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