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The Bulletproof George Washington
Colonial George Washington's perilous experiences in the French and Indian War are chronicled in this riveting account of God's providence and protection. The only officer on horseback to avoid being shot down, young Washington openly attributed his miraculous escape from harm to the intervention of a sovereign God. A story once founded in student textbooks, this awe-inspiring adventure is recaptured in a modern edition complete with maps and illustrations.
62 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 1990
32 people are currently reading
631 people want to read
About the author
David Barton
292 books264 followersDavid Barton is the Founder and President of WallBuilders, a national pro-family organization that presents America's forgotten history and heroes, with an emphasis on our moral, religious and constitutional heritage.
WallBuilders is a name taken from the Old Testament writings of Nehemiah, who led a grassroots movement to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem and restore its strength and honor. In the same way, WallBuilders seeks to energize the grassroots today to become involved in strengthening their communities, states, and nation.
David is the author of numerous best-selling books, with the subjects being drawn largely from his massive library of tens of thousands of original writings from the Founding Era. He also addresses well over 400 groups each year.
His exhaustive research has rendered him an expert in historical and constitutional issues and he serves as a consultant to state and federal legislators, has participated in several cases at the Supreme Court, was involved in the development of the History/Social Studies standards for states such as Texas and California, and has helped produce history textbooks now used in schools across the nation.
WallBuilders is a name taken from the Old Testament writings of Nehemiah, who led a grassroots movement to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem and restore its strength and honor. In the same way, WallBuilders seeks to energize the grassroots today to become involved in strengthening their communities, states, and nation.
David is the author of numerous best-selling books, with the subjects being drawn largely from his massive library of tens of thousands of original writings from the Founding Era. He also addresses well over 400 groups each year.
His exhaustive research has rendered him an expert in historical and constitutional issues and he serves as a consultant to state and federal legislators, has participated in several cases at the Supreme Court, was involved in the development of the History/Social Studies standards for states such as Texas and California, and has helped produce history textbooks now used in schools across the nation.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 68 reviews
August 11, 2013
Our politically-correct schools will never teach this story. The well-documented history of George Washington and the founding of America is something you're going to have to teach yourself. This book belongs in every patriot's home. Read it. Enjoy it. Share it.
March 2, 2018
This story used to be a part of history in the public schools, but because it includes George Washington's own letter to his wife, which includes his belief that God had saved him, it was removed from the history books.
Good read. History - real - not revised.
I read it with my kids when they were youngsters.
Good read. History - real - not revised.
I read it with my kids when they were youngsters.
October 19, 2012
This book can actually be read like a story rather than a informational text. I really underestimated it.
December 14, 2025
Good short book. Very interesting with a lot of things I had never heard before.
December 29, 2012
They say this true story of a young George Washington was included in American school textbooks until 1934. It takes only a couple of generations for a story to be lost, and so that has happened with this one. Seeing God's hand in history and Washington's powerful belief in divine providence is something my children did not miss. I read this aloud and talked about it with them.
July 3, 2011
Great book on the divine plan of God for those who came to this country for freedom OF religion, not freedom FROM religion. This story used to be in school kids history books, but, no more. Thanks to David Barton for keeping our Christian history alive and well!
March 11, 2010
We are currently reading this book with the kids each day. Wow...am I learning things!
April 20, 2013
One of my favorite accounts of George Washington and what guided this man to be the best president upon whose shoulders the United States of America was founded.
September 17, 2015
Dave Barton poses as a historian, but is widely recognized as a fabricator of pseudohistory by both the political left and right. I frankly never expected to read one of his books. The only reason I did was as the result of a kind of mistake on my part. The story of the Bulletproof George Washington is told in America the Beautiful: Rediscovering What Made This Nation Great, and I mistakenly thought that Ben Carson had left it unsourced. I thought that this book may have been Carson's source, but then I noticed that Carson cites America's God and Country Encyclopedia of Quotations. I enjoyed The Bulletproof George Washington more than I expected. Barton is a wonderful storyteller but a horrible historian. There is a complete lack of footnotes or endnotes except for a single one at the end of the book, and it is not a source! Consequently I was left totally on my own in figuring out where this material originated, but fortunately I found an internet message board that had done all the hard work for me. I would also add to what is below that the mention of rifles in the Indan Chief's quote is anachronistic. In fact, Barton himself mentions that Gage's forces were showered with musket balls, not rifle bullets. Here is the background of the Bulletproof George Washington from the message board:
I ended up purchased a small pamphlet called "The Bullet-Proof George Washington" (Hereafter BPGW) which is a recently-published tract on the legend that an Indian Chief once met with George Washington and proclaimed that his warriors had fired at him but kept missing, so they ascribed that to divine intervention and the chief then prophesized that Washington would a) never die in battle, b) become the leader of his nation and c) found a great empire...or words to that effect.
The tract had lots of and lots of references - over 30 - but unfortunately none of them were indexed with the narrative of the story. I despaired briefly having to track down all of these references that were really, really obscure (many of them were school textbooks from 1880s-1920s...not the sort of thing one finds in the local library...). Fortunately, I narrowed it down by focusing on the two main instances that are in the narrative to explain what happened.
The first was that a woman by the name of Mary Draper Ingles, who had been taken captive by an Indian raiding party at about the same time of the battle which featured the supposed frustrated Indian sharpshooters. BPGW recounts that while in captivity Mrs. Ingles heard two French traders talking and saying the name "Washington" over and over...when she asked them about Washington, they recounted the story of his remarkable bullet-dodging.
I might give many reasons why this is unlikely...not the least of which was how the Frenchmen - or Indian sharpshooters - would know who the heck Washington was (he was comparatively unknown at the time), but the most telling thing was that nowhere in BPGW's impressive bibliography is there the only record of Mary Ingles' captivity, a 40-odd page recollection written by Mary's grandson (in all likelihood she was illiterate) years after the event. Instead the author used has a reference the (in my humble opinion inexcusable reference of a novel. In this case, "Follow the River" by a Mr. Thom. While I shan't criticize Mr. Thom's novel, as I'm sure it is a good & entertaining work, it does lack a certain quality of scholarship.
The good news is that Mr. Thom acknowledges that he did use Mrs. Ingles' account as the base of his novel in the afterword. The bad news is that Mrs. Ingles' account never mentions the incident. One is forced to assume, then, that Mrs. Ingles' overhearing the Frenchmen talking is a product of Mr. Thom's fertile imagination, but then was used as a fact by the author of BPGW.
This is hardly in the tradition of good scholarship.
The second support, however, is much more fertile ground and I was able to ascertain through a bit of good google-luck the original author of the OP's lines from the Indian Chief. The Indian Chief's name is given as Menawa by the author but, sadly, it is kind of irrelevant since the name is probably made up...the only Menawa I found (and I admit I didn't look hard) was Cree who was born well after the supposed meeting.
The author of the OP was none other than George Washington's Step-Grandson George Washington Parke Custis. To borrow terminology from epidemiology, he is the Index Case for this legend. In his Recollections of George Washington (published 1857) the OP is written just about word for word. In a footnote to the story, Custis says that he was told the story after Washington's death by Dr. Craik, a long-time friend of GW's, who was at the battle, accompanied Washington to Ohio in 1772 or so and would have been at the alleged meeting, and may have inadvertently killed Washington by bleeding him during an illness.
Thankfully, the BPGW author cites that work. Unfortunately, he doesn't cite an earlier work, also by Custis, published about 30 years earlier...a play called "The Indian Prophecy". By modern standards this is a remarkably mediocre play. The lines in the OP are the final words of the play, delivered by the fictional Menawa just before the curtain comes down. In fact, as far as I can tell, the entire play exists simply to allow this Indian to deliver his lines. In the era that the play was put on, it probably went over incredibly well, though.
For those friendly non-Americans (and some Americans) that peruse these boards, Washington was a man who became quite literally a legend in his own time and in the 19th through the better part of the 20th Century, Washington had a heroic quality that would amaze many today. In the era that The Indian Prophecy played, it would have been very well received…doubly so as it was written by a member of that august family.
So the question becomes...how much do you trust Mr. Custis? Neither Washington nor Craik have left us a shred of evidence that the meeting took place. The former's journals account for the trip to the Ohio circa 1770, but include no mention of any such prophecy. The latter apparently left no known diary (or at least none I can find) and the good doctor died over 10 years before the play was published. This means that Mr. Custis has about zero corroboration and, to make things worse, he had a lot of good reasons to "fluff-up" the legend.
Custis was the de factor heir to the Washington legend. In the early 19th Century the Washington legend was rampant and patriotism was very much in vogue. He had strong ties to his step-grandfather and at least one reference I read referred to his "obsession" with Washington. Add to that that Mr. Custis could & did make money by presenting legends of Washington, and one can't help wondering about the validity of the legend.
Despite being a staple in American text-books from about 1860 to the early 1930s (along with stories of chopping down cheery trees and throwing coins across rivers), the lack of a paper trail doesn't hold water for this legend. Did it happen? Maybe....but the lack of contemporary accounts makes it very suspect. I'd have to give this one a thumbs down.
I ended up purchased a small pamphlet called "The Bullet-Proof George Washington" (Hereafter BPGW) which is a recently-published tract on the legend that an Indian Chief once met with George Washington and proclaimed that his warriors had fired at him but kept missing, so they ascribed that to divine intervention and the chief then prophesized that Washington would a) never die in battle, b) become the leader of his nation and c) found a great empire...or words to that effect.
The tract had lots of and lots of references - over 30 - but unfortunately none of them were indexed with the narrative of the story. I despaired briefly having to track down all of these references that were really, really obscure (many of them were school textbooks from 1880s-1920s...not the sort of thing one finds in the local library...). Fortunately, I narrowed it down by focusing on the two main instances that are in the narrative to explain what happened.
The first was that a woman by the name of Mary Draper Ingles, who had been taken captive by an Indian raiding party at about the same time of the battle which featured the supposed frustrated Indian sharpshooters. BPGW recounts that while in captivity Mrs. Ingles heard two French traders talking and saying the name "Washington" over and over...when she asked them about Washington, they recounted the story of his remarkable bullet-dodging.
I might give many reasons why this is unlikely...not the least of which was how the Frenchmen - or Indian sharpshooters - would know who the heck Washington was (he was comparatively unknown at the time), but the most telling thing was that nowhere in BPGW's impressive bibliography is there the only record of Mary Ingles' captivity, a 40-odd page recollection written by Mary's grandson (in all likelihood she was illiterate) years after the event. Instead the author used has a reference the (in my humble opinion inexcusable reference of a novel. In this case, "Follow the River" by a Mr. Thom. While I shan't criticize Mr. Thom's novel, as I'm sure it is a good & entertaining work, it does lack a certain quality of scholarship.
The good news is that Mr. Thom acknowledges that he did use Mrs. Ingles' account as the base of his novel in the afterword. The bad news is that Mrs. Ingles' account never mentions the incident. One is forced to assume, then, that Mrs. Ingles' overhearing the Frenchmen talking is a product of Mr. Thom's fertile imagination, but then was used as a fact by the author of BPGW.
This is hardly in the tradition of good scholarship.
The second support, however, is much more fertile ground and I was able to ascertain through a bit of good google-luck the original author of the OP's lines from the Indian Chief. The Indian Chief's name is given as Menawa by the author but, sadly, it is kind of irrelevant since the name is probably made up...the only Menawa I found (and I admit I didn't look hard) was Cree who was born well after the supposed meeting.
The author of the OP was none other than George Washington's Step-Grandson George Washington Parke Custis. To borrow terminology from epidemiology, he is the Index Case for this legend. In his Recollections of George Washington (published 1857) the OP is written just about word for word. In a footnote to the story, Custis says that he was told the story after Washington's death by Dr. Craik, a long-time friend of GW's, who was at the battle, accompanied Washington to Ohio in 1772 or so and would have been at the alleged meeting, and may have inadvertently killed Washington by bleeding him during an illness.
Thankfully, the BPGW author cites that work. Unfortunately, he doesn't cite an earlier work, also by Custis, published about 30 years earlier...a play called "The Indian Prophecy". By modern standards this is a remarkably mediocre play. The lines in the OP are the final words of the play, delivered by the fictional Menawa just before the curtain comes down. In fact, as far as I can tell, the entire play exists simply to allow this Indian to deliver his lines. In the era that the play was put on, it probably went over incredibly well, though.
For those friendly non-Americans (and some Americans) that peruse these boards, Washington was a man who became quite literally a legend in his own time and in the 19th through the better part of the 20th Century, Washington had a heroic quality that would amaze many today. In the era that The Indian Prophecy played, it would have been very well received…doubly so as it was written by a member of that august family.
So the question becomes...how much do you trust Mr. Custis? Neither Washington nor Craik have left us a shred of evidence that the meeting took place. The former's journals account for the trip to the Ohio circa 1770, but include no mention of any such prophecy. The latter apparently left no known diary (or at least none I can find) and the good doctor died over 10 years before the play was published. This means that Mr. Custis has about zero corroboration and, to make things worse, he had a lot of good reasons to "fluff-up" the legend.
Custis was the de factor heir to the Washington legend. In the early 19th Century the Washington legend was rampant and patriotism was very much in vogue. He had strong ties to his step-grandfather and at least one reference I read referred to his "obsession" with Washington. Add to that that Mr. Custis could & did make money by presenting legends of Washington, and one can't help wondering about the validity of the legend.
Despite being a staple in American text-books from about 1860 to the early 1930s (along with stories of chopping down cheery trees and throwing coins across rivers), the lack of a paper trail doesn't hold water for this legend. Did it happen? Maybe....but the lack of contemporary accounts makes it very suspect. I'd have to give this one a thumbs down.
February 17, 2023
I liked the information in this book and how it covered the events of the French and Indian War in which George Washington was involved with efficiency and sufficiently. I just didn't love how it seemed like lots of costs were cut in the production of the book and I even found a couple of typos while reading through. It almost felt like things were rushed in the publishing process. Also it seemed like several gaps were left in the story that made it harder to completely understand the magnitude of these events.
August 13, 2020
I needed this review of the French and the Indian War...and the reminder of how much I loved George Washington. I also learned a lot (like Washington had just gotten over a fever in that 1755 battle? I knew he had two horses shot from under him but this was another level of cool).
May 18, 2022
I loved this short, but packed little book. God’s Providence truly protected young George Washington. Get the details here!
August 12, 2025
A nice little history lesson.
July 14, 2015
I was really excited about reading this book, but ended up being disappointed in it. George Washington is just a side character in the story until the last chapter or two. Since George Washington's name is in the title I would have liked it to be more about him, and I think his amazing escapes with death could have been better told.
November 6, 2016
What a wonderful book to read to children and help them understand more about Washington. "Washington was the directing spirit without which there would have been no independence, no Union, no constitution, and no republic. We cannot yet estimate him. We can only indicate our reverence for him and thank the Divine Providence which kept him to serve and inspire his fellow man. "
February 11, 2009
A must read for those who don't know the history of our nation's first president. This book looks at his years during the French Indian War where he was miraculously preserved and where the stage was set for his future leadership and courage.
March 31, 2018
Great book. Lots of historical facts that I had never heard before.
November 21, 2025
I picked up this book because I thought it would summarize all the times Washington survived battle without injury, but instead, its focus was Washington's experience in the French and Indian War. As it turned out, this was the best summary of Washington's role in that war that I've ever read. It's a very short book, but concisely written. It's supported by maps and illustrations (unfortunately some too small to read), as well as excerpts from letters written about the battles by Washington himself. It was also interesting to read about Benjamin Franklin's role in this war. The idea of providential intervention seems even more probable to me after reading this book! Sure-shot indians who futilely tried to kill him in battle revered him as someone who couldn't be killed in battle for being watched over by a greater power. Even his rise to prominence as the father of a great nation was imagined by those who couldn't defeat him in battle. If you want to understand Washington's early military career better and to learn about the French and Indian War, read this book. You'll learn a lot with only a small time investment.
December 17, 2017
I expected biography, but this is actually a rather thorough, if concise, overview of the major battles and political plays of the French and Indian War (1753-54). There are complete chapters with Washington completely absent, making the title (and back cover synopsis) misleading. I found myself constantly adjusting my expectations, which made it hard to enjoy as I otherwise would have. However, it was well written and about a period of history that I find fascinating.
February 15, 2021
David Barton gets a lot of heat but I found this a good quick read (only 60 pages) that centers on the Battle of Manongahela during the French and Indian War where a young (mid 20s) George Washington miraculously escapes and attributes his deliverance from the battle to "Providence".
Most people don't know this part of the Washington story and this is a good place to start.
Most people don't know this part of the Washington story and this is a good place to start.
July 10, 2019
This should be required reading in school
It is amazing to see the hand of God on the founding and protection of Washington and this Country. If only we would trust in God again. The British were a juggernaut and the colonists defeated them. Only with God.
It is amazing to see the hand of God on the founding and protection of Washington and this Country. If only we would trust in God again. The British were a juggernaut and the colonists defeated them. Only with God.
August 13, 2018
Sorry, this is a really good book, and I would leave a Higher rating if I was rating it against other history books, but here, for my purposes, two stars......
January 18, 2019
An account of God's providential care of George Washington during a devastating battle with the French and Indians. Candace read in 8/04.
March 29, 2022
Good history!
June 25, 2022
Amazing how God protected him so he could help found America!
February 7, 2023
This is a great book. I wish I had this book when I was teaching. It would be a great book for every student to read.
July 30, 2024
Perfect book to read when staying at your uber patriotic grandpa-in-law’s house
January 10, 2025
Always a pleasure reading (or in this case, rereading) a David Barton book. So many interesting and awesome stories from American history that the average citizen has never heard.
February 8, 2025
Es un libro que te muestra que si Dios tiene un propósito para tu vida, no haya nada que pueda evitar que cumplas con el.
December 27, 2025
Interesting read. Very wild to see how close he should have died several times and how if he did the world might have changed.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 68 reviews