Betty Zane

Betty Zane was a frontier woman associated with the Zane family settlement at Fort Henry, in present-day Wheeling, West Virginia, during the American Revolutionary era. She became famous in later accounts for carrying gunpowder to the fort’s defenders during an attack in 1782, an episode that turned her into one of the best-known female figures in the folklore of the upper Ohio frontier.

Betty belonged to the Zane family whose settlements helped establish the community around Fort Henry on the upper Ohio frontier. The powder-run episode was preserved through family and local tradition and became increasingly famous in nineteenth-century frontier memory. Her descendant Zane Grey later made her the central figure of his historical novel Betty Zane, further popularising the story.

In Zane Grey’s Betty Zane, set in Fort Henry at present-day Wheeling, West Virginia in 1769–1782, Betty Zane the Zane family helps build and defend a frontier settlement while Betty grows into the young woman remembered for a desperate act during the final Revolutionary-era attack on Fort Henry.