SOURCE: Namias, June. “White Men Held Captive.” In White Captives: Gender and Ethnicity on the American Frontier, pp. 49-83. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1993.

[In the following excerpt, Namias explores the changing images of males in captivity narratives from 1608 through the nineteenth century.]

In the first and most famous captive story of an Englishman on the North American continent, Captain John Smith spent a month among the native people of tidewater Virginia. Admitting to some difficulties, Smith wrote of his experiences: “Yet hee so demeaned himselfe amongst them, as he not only diverted them from surprising the Fort: but procured his owne liberty, and got himself and his company such estimation amongst them, that those Savages admired him as a demi-God.”¹

Were men's experiences, behavior, perceptions, and story-telling style on the various American frontiers different from women's? The answer is yes. On the New England frontier, many more males than females were captured. Of captives taken by French, by Indian and French, and by Indian forces between 1675 and 1763, 771 were males and 270 were females. Men were also at risk because, as in most of human history, men made up the fighting forces. Men were the warriors and the shock troops. They were the leaders of the onslaught onto Indian lands. The codes for prisoners of native capture differed, but a male at adolescence or older might be subject to torture, death, or a combination of the two. Of 1,187 known male captives of French, Indians, and French-Indians in the various New England hostilities between 1675 and 1763, 132 (11 percent) of the male captive population died of all causes; of 392 women, only 16 (4.1 percent) died. Yet 18 males (1.5 percent) were killed as were 33 females (8.4 percent). For infants and children to age six, there was little numerical differentiation between the sexes for those who died or were killed by Indians. For adult males over fifteen, 119 (10 percent) died and 9 were killed; only 12 women (3 percent) died, while 14 (3.5 percent) were killed.²

The white male experience ranged from one extreme of torture and death to the other of adoption and acceptance. Torture was nearly always reserved for men, but accounts of torture are also related to religion and ethnicity. The most horrific spectacles of torture were reported by French Catholics. Father Isaac Jogues, a Jesuit, was captured with a group of Hurons and three other Frenchmen by the Mohawks in Quebec in 1642. Three were killed and twenty-two marched south through three Iroquois towns on the Mohawk River. Jogues's report is filled with the burning, biting, and ripping off of flesh; running gauntlet after gauntlet; nails being plucked out; thumbs and fingers cut and bitten off; and ashes and live coals thrown at French captives. The Huron chief and French convert Ahatsistari (Eustace) suffered the worst abuse, “burned in almost every part of his body and then beheaded.” On being rescued by the Dutch at Rensselaerswyck, Jogues wrote his observations back to Paris. Unfortunately, he returned to his mission in 1646 and was killed.³

There is certainly no lack of torture stories among the English and Americans of the new republic; which are true and which exaggerated is hard to know. The worst tortures seem to have occurred in times of war. The French reports appear to contain the most brutality, and one wonders whether the Catholic ideal of martyrdom or the need for continual financial support from the orders back home for further missionary activity might not account for the brutality detailed in the Jesuit sources. Certainly, men able to stand up under torture won both sympathy and heroic, if not martyr, status.⁴

White male behavior in captivity was not uniform. Age, time, place, and capturing Indian group were significant determinants. Surveying the captivity literature from the period 1608-1870 reveals two critical factors that shaped white male captives: the length of their stay among native people and their age at capture.⁵ As was true for women, the younger the age and the longer the stay with the Indians, the more likely it was that the male captive would become a “white Indian.” For some men and boys, adoption meant discovering a new world and new ways of understanding themselves, but to gain these perspectives, one was subjected to harsh tests.

The range of experience and the plight of male captives is reflected in the accounts of John Gyles, Quentin Stockwell, and James Smith. The first two were late seventeenth-century New England captives. Gyles was ten years old when he was captured along with his father, mother, and three other siblings at Pemaquid, Maine, in August 1689. He was held prisoner for nine years—six among the Abenakis, three with the French. When his brother James (held captive for three years) was caught deserting with an Englishman, both were recaptured “and carried back to Penobscot Fort, where they were both tortured at a stake by fire for some time; then their noses and ears were cut off and they were made to eat them, after which they were burned to death at the stake.” When captives were taken or deserters retaken, Gyles saw the Indians dance and “torture the unhappy people who fall into their hands.” Gyles himself was beaten with an ax and forced to dance around fellow captive James Alexander, “a Jersey man who was taken from Falmouth in Casco Bay.” In the third winter of his captivity Gyles watched as John Evans, a “most intimate and dear companion,” was given “a heavy burden … even though he was extreme[ly] weak with long fasting.” While walking, Evans broke through the ice, cut his knee, and was eventually left to freeze to death.⁶

Unlike Gyles's firsthand account, Quentin Stockwell's story entered the colonial war and propaganda literature in reports from Increase Mather. Captured at Deerfield September 19, 1677, Stockwell described being brought together with a group of Hatfield captives. He and they were “pinioned and led away in the night over the mountains in dark and hideous ways about four miles further before we took up our place for rest. … We were kept bound all that night.” They were spread out on their backs. “Our arms and legs stretched out were staked fast down and a cord about our necks so that we could stir no ways.” He was told that it was the custom to fasten captives for the first nine nights of travel to prevent their escape. Over the northern New England winter, Stockwell, like Mary Rowlandson, had his taste of bear's foot and horse meat. He nearly died of frostbite before being cured by a French surgeon; he finally escaped.⁷ Robert Rogers, a captive from Salmon Falls, New Hampshire, in 1690, was not so lucky. He was tortured and burned to death.⁸

Along with death, torture, and escape, adoption was a common experience, especially for young male captives. The first favorable account of this experience appeared after the close of the French and Indian wars. Colonel James Smith (ca. 1737-1814) was captured in Bedford, Pennsylvania, in 1755 and kept journals during his nearly six years of captivity. Smith observed that male captives, whether white or Indian, could undergo identical perils or ultimate good fortune. Smith was eighteen and on a road-building expedition in western Pennsylvania for General Edward Braddock just before the Battle of the Wilderness. He and other Indian enemies of the French were captured by Caughnawagas (Mohawks). Marched back to the Indian village, he was forced to run the gauntlet, flogged, had sand thrown in his eyes, and was beaten. He was then adopted and treated like a son.⁹

The violence and torture inflicted on male captives contrasts sharply with the experience of women. In the Northeast some women appear to have been tormented, and women and children were forced to march over miles of rough terrain and were tied down. But with the exception of a few reported cases in the seventeenth century, women were seldom killed except at the time of attack or occasionally, as in the case of John Williams's wife, Eunice, if they were sick and unable to make the required trek.¹⁰ Several captivity stories, however, tell of women or small children carried by Indian men. John Dunn Hunter indicates that the pattern of saving women and children and torturing men continued into the early nineteenth century in the central and western states. In his experience, women and children were “treated well,” but “the warriors, who were so unfortunate as not to fall in battle, were nearly all tortured to death” unless they were thought to be very brave, in which case they were allowed to live with their captors. Hunter and others discuss the socialization process that tried to mold stoic boys who, if captured, would go to their death singing, even if hot coals were applied to their genitals and skin stripped from their bodies.¹¹

In general, in the captivity literature for the period 1608 to 1870 white Anglo-American males appear to fall into two categories: the Hero and the White Indian.

THE HEROIC MODE

Male captives in the Heroic Mode came to the frontier to spread “civilization.” They were there to uplift “mankind,” bring the true God to the heathen, help the empire or the nation, and protect white women. Rarely, if ever, did they dwell on the advantages of their quest for their own personal gain; still, their exploits usually brought them the benefits of fame, fortune, and gratitude. Out of their capture by and contact with native peoples came a recognition of their own historic mission. Amusement, disdain, or contempt often accompanied the contact of these men with Indians; little appreciation or understanding of the other resulted.

“Heroes” of this type further subdivide into those who were inspired by God and those for whom empire, country, or “civilization” were the motivating force—along with occasionally saving women in distress. Captives in the Heroic Mode include Father Isaac Jogues, John Williams, Captain John Smith, Daniel Boone, and their dime novel spin-offs.

HEROES FOR GOD

The first Heroes for God in the North American wilderness were the Black Robes—Jesuit priests who moved through Quebec and New France and into New York and the Mississippi Valley. In the eyes of men like Father Isaac Jogues, no suffering was too great for himself or others to sustain for the glory of God. When the Hurons and fellow Frenchmen in his party were captured by the Iroquois (1642) one Frenchman was “stripped naked, all his nails torn out, his very fingers gnawed, and a broad-sword driven through his right hand.” Jogues wrote to his superior: “Mindful of the wounds of our Lord Jesus Christ, he bore, as he afterward told me, this pain, though most acute, with great joy.” Suffering blows to his own person, Jogues was no less willing to serve his God: when he entered a second Iroquois village gauntlet, “blows were not spared.” Even though they were struck “constantly on the shins to our exquisite pain,” Jogues comforted himself with a comparison between the work of the French Catholics and that of God's “apostle, who glories that he was thrice beaten with rods.” In the worst of times Jogues saw his mission keenly. Rather than escape torture and misery, he was happy to serve the French captives. To do so might inspire “the christened Huron of his duties.” Jogues found it “a peculiar interposition of divine goodness” to have “fallen into the hands of these Indians.” During his stay he “baptized seventy, children, young and old, of five different nations and languages, that of every tribe, and people, and tongue, they might stand in the sight of the Lamb.”¹²

Father Louis Hennepin, a Franciscan, was one of many French priests to go among the North American Indians. In April 1680, he and two other Frenchmen were captured by Mdewakanton Dakotas, probably on the Mississippi near the junction of the Illinois River. The recollect found it especially difficult to say his breviary and was told by one of the other Frenchmen to watch out or they would all be killed. He tried going into the woods, but the Indians followed him. “I chanted the Litany of the Blessed Virgin in the canoe, my book opened.” He got away with it because the Dakotas thought the breviary “a spirit which taught me to sing for their diversion, for these people are naturally fond of singing.” Hennepin was luckier than Jogues on several counts. First, though full of his mission to God, he could see his captors. They in turn gave him a large robe made of beaver skins and trimmed with porcupine quills. When he was sick, they fed him fish and brought him naked into a sweat lodge with four Indians. There in the “cabin covered with buffalo skins” around red-hot stones the Dakotas sang and placed their hands on him, “rubbing me while they wept bitterly.” He continued this regimen of sweats three times a week and soon “felt as strong as ever.” Finally, he was rescued by explorer Sieur Duluth not long after his capture. Duluth saw the treatment of Hennepin in a more negative light than apparently the recollect himself, whose memoirs some say underestimated his cruel treatment as “a captive and a slave.” Duluth says he told the recollect they must leave or else hurt the French nation “to suffer insult of this sort without showing resentment of it.”¹³ Hennepin, although a Hero for God, did not altogether spurn the Indian life, having something in common with both adventurous heroes for empire and White Indians.

Not so John Williams, an English Hero for God. Queen Anne's War began in the colonies in 1703 with an attack on Wells, Maine. Soon the two-hundred-mile area from Maine into western Massachusetts had become a battlefield. In late February 1704 a party of Abenaki and Caughnawaga Indians, with some Frenchmen, attacked Deerfield. John Williams (1664-1729) was minister of the Deerfield, Massachusetts, congregation, a Harvard College graduate (class of 1683), husband of Eunice Mather (niece of Increase), and father of ten children. During the attack, thirty-eight members of the Deerfield community were killed and about a hundred were captured. When the war party struck Deerfield, two of Williams's sons were killed. Williams and the rest of his family were among those taken prisoners. His wife died on the forced march to Canada.¹⁴

Williams's losses were considerable. Besides grieving over family deaths, he felt great anguish for his congregation. He tried to get protection for them before the attack, but the Massachusetts government ignored his pleas. After his nearly three-year captivity and return, he went back to Canada and worked to negotiate the release of captives from Deerfield and other New England towns. At the end of his narrative he gave thanks to God, “who has wrought deliverance for so many,” and asked for prayers “to God for a door of escape to be opened for the great number yet behind,” which amounted to nearly one hundred. He lamented that among the children, “not a few among the savages having lost the English tongue, will be lost and turn savages in a little time unless something extraordinary prevent.” Among those children was his ten-year-old daughter, Eunice.¹⁵

Williams's narrative is in the heroic mold because he turns captivity into a religious trial and holy crusade. Captivity is a matter of Divine Providence. It has lessons to teach. Rowlandson's and Mather's narratives assume this. Williams goes one step further by turning the captivity into a jeremiad and a personal crusade. Williams's twin enemies were the Indians and the French. He feared “popish country.” On the trek to Canada he was allowed to preach on the Sabbath, but on arrival in New France, he wrote, “we were forbidden praying one with another or joining together in the service of God,” and some captives had their Bibles taken from them by the French priests “and never re-delivered to them, to their great grief and sorrow.”¹⁶

Williams's heroism was most actively displayed in his struggles to get back his daughter Eunice and his son Samuel, the first from Indian, the second from Jesuit clutches. The Redeemed Captive, Returning to Zion (1707), Williams's narrative of the events, is given over to what today reads as esoteric religious debate. For Williams and the Puritan world, this debate was nothing if not a fight for the immortal souls of himself, his sons and daughter, and his flock. “All means,” he wrote, “were used to seduce poor souls.” Jesuits told him of wanting to baptize any of the unbaptized English, offering that, “if I would stay among them and be of their religion, I should have a great and honorable pension from the king every year.” He would also get all his children back with “‘enough honorable maintenance for you and them.’” Again and again he rebuffed them, although he admitted that their efforts “to seduce” him “to popery were very exercising to me.”¹⁷

More than a quarter of Williams's account consists of his correspondence with his son Samuel. Williams claimed that the boy was threatened continually by the priests, who sent him to school to learn French and then “struck him with a stick” when he would not cross himself. Williams “mourned” just thinking of this boy of fifteen or sixteen and a younger boy of six, both in Montreal being “turned to popery.” One letter admonished Samuel and prayed that he might be “recovered out of the snare you are taken in.” The father's letters were long and very specific on the subject of the apostles, the Virgin Mary, saints, and prayer. Repeatedly Williams declared that “the Romanists” answers were “a very fable and falsehood.” The business of the letters is minute textual analysis, and in each Williams cites chapter and verse of the Scriptures. In one letter, after fourteen long paragraphs, Williams writes, “Again, if you consult Acts 15 where you have an account of the first synod or council, you will find. …” The father appears to overlook that Samuel was not a theological student but a son whose mother and two brothers had recently died. The rest of his family were in an unknown state and place. Now his father wanted him to follow a very complex line of theological debate. At the close of another letter, Williams momentarily realized he might be overwriting his case: “There are a great many other things in the letter [you sent] that deserve to be refuted, but I shall be too tedious in remarking all of them at once.” But after a “yet” the minister continued in the same vein.¹⁸ That Williams saw fit to print these personal letters filled with biblical citations shows that to him they were not just private writings to his son but part of a greater crusade against Catholicism.

Williams's narrative went through six editions between 1707 and 1795. The Redeemed Captive, Returning to Zion was first printed in Boston in 1707 and was issued four more times, including one by his son Stephen Williams, published in Northampton in 1853. John Williams's heroism in the service of God was widely read about and much admired in New England. A children's version, The Deerfield Captive: An Indian Story, Being a Narrative of Facts for the Instruction of the Young, complete with a print of the Deerfield house in flames on the title page, went through several nineteenth-century editions.¹⁹

HEROES OF THE EMPIRE

John Williams, religious hero, was atypical of male captives even in British colonial America; he was more typical perhaps of some of his theological counterparts in New France and New Spain. But Williams, like Mary Rowlandson, became a popular and heroic figure to the Puritan community. Among the first English settlers, the adventurous, death-defying hero predated the religious one and is popular to our own day. As a swashbuckling Elizabethan, a world traveler, a man who was patronized by many women but married to none, an explorer, adventurer, historian, scientist, and weaver of tales, John Smith still cuts a heroic figure. It is to him that the heroic tradition of gunslinger, Indian fighter, and twentieth-century western hero hark back. He is a man alone, full of bravado, meeting with strange men and exotic women.²⁰

The text of Smith's work and the stories of his life are well known. But let us begin by looking at the pictures. Following in the tradition of his earlier exploits in the Middle East, Smith provides vivid illustrations of his North American exploits. His earlier works show knights jousting on horseback and Smith killing a man by battering him over the head with a club, whereas the six-part foldout of illustrations to The Map of Virginia (1612) portrays Smith among the Indians. In the top right and bottom left corners Smith is manfully confronting individual Indian men. In one he has a gun, in the other a large sword. In both cases he is taking Indians prisoner. In both cases the Indian is a big Indian, at least a head taller than the Elizabethan. In the two pictures that show him taken prisoner (bottom right and center left in the original) Smith is a smaller figure among many Indians; they overpower him with their numbers. These two renditions of his capture are much less distinct and take up less space than those of his exploits. “How they tooke him prisoner” is the smallest action shot of the group.²¹ “Their triumph about him” (top left) after he is captured is the same size as the drawing of him capturing Opechancanough, the king of Pamunkey (or Pamunkee), which shows him “bound to a tree to be shott to death,” but larger and more central is Smith surrounded by what appear to be dancing Indians, who, although carrying weapons, look more like figures out of Greek mythology. The top center picture shows Smith enjoying himself around a camp fire with several semiclad Indians, including a seated woman and a man wearing antlers. It all looks like a good deal of fun.²²

In the top right picture of Smith taking the king captive, Smith points a gun at the Indian's head. Sunflowers are growing below Smith's “peece.” Smith's left leg is close to the Indian's, almost in a fighting (or dance) pose. Each man has a long weapon pointing down and to the right, a sword in Smith's case, an arrow in the Indian's. The Indian's size and stature, plus his broad and seminaked physical frame, claim the center of the print. In comparison, Smith looks almost doll-like. He is pulling the king's braid, on one hand an ineffectual gesture, on the other one of mockery—something that a man might do to a woman, perhaps implying the “womanliness” of this tall, very masculine-looking bigger man. The “peece” becomes the great leveler. In the background, the English armies in two settings fire weapons at the Indians. In one case, the natives are wounded and run away; in the other, a few Englishmen fire on a larger number of Indians with many more in the background. The gun is thus an instrument of physical and sexual power. In the bottom right frame, we see how “Pokahontas beggs his life.”

From the first, Smith wants us to see him “admired” as a “demi-God.” Traditional Indian practice has something to do with his success, but the true causes for their hospitality escape him. In A True Relation (1608), he gives more detail but is hardly more modest. First, he traveled upriver with a barge, two of his men, and two Indian guides. They stopped to eat. He then headed off with one Indian to test soil. Within fifteen minutes he heard “a loud cry, and a hollowing of Indians.” Figuring the Indian guide “betraid us,” he grabbed him and bound his arms, his pistol “ready bent to be revenged on him.” Smith was then hit in the right thigh with an arrow but was not hurt. So began a tradition in American literature, later picked up in film: a white man is in the wild with his men and an untrustworthy Indian, and he gets hurt. Some other men may die, but the Hero is fine—he can make it through. Smith spied two Indians “drawing their bowes” but made short work of them by “discharging a french pistoll.” He then fired again. (Where was the rest of his party?) After a moment twenty or thirty arrows flew toward him. Miraculously, they all fell short! He was then surrounded by the “king of Pamaunch” and two hundred men, who drew their bows but then laid them on the ground—the scene referred to in the illustration of dancing Indians with bows and arrows. The Indians demanded his arms and told him his other men were dead: only him “they would reserve: The Indian importuned me not to shott.” The Indian in question was the same one Smith had aimed a gun at and taken prisoner.²³

Once captured, Smith turned on the charm—or as he would say, “I resolved to trie their mercies,” hoping to buy his way to freedom by presenting the chief “with a compasse daill.” He then gave the man “a discourse on the roundness of the earth” with a discussion of the stars and the moon—no doubt one of the first English science lessons in the New World.²⁴

In Smith's subsequent travels though the wondrous kingdoms of Virginia, he charms us with complete descriptions of his captive but (according to him) honored guest status. The intercession by a young Indian princess and the lavish treatment he received will be discussed later, but his descriptions of men with “white Beads over their shoulders,” of emperors sitting upon “tenne or twelve Mattes” with chains of pearls around their necks and covered with raccoon skin furs, of men who “have as many weomen as they will,” must have tantalized the Elizabethans. They strike a twentieth-century reader as fare for movie moguls. Smith's captivity is the first big western without the silver screen.²⁵

It is too bad that no Chesapeake natives wrote down their stories of Smith's escapades. Certainly self-aggrandizement helped the captain to construct the most abiding captivity narrative, which, significantly, is not recalled as a captivity narrative at all. Smith's expert storytelling gives his European and later American audiences all they want to hear: an exotic but primitive culture meets the European representative, is completely awestruck by him, and falls at his feet. There are many adventures with new food, drink, women, and battle, and there are harrowing experiences, but in the end, he wins and there are few real losses, no reconsideration of the worth of the colonizing project, and no thoughts of what might be the personal consequences for the other.

A second figure among male captive heroes for the empire is Daniel Boone. Both Smith and Boone are well-recognized American folk heroes, but neither is known as a captive. Richard Slotkin has documented the impact of the Boone legend on shaping the American mythic hero. Boone's origins, however, appear to be well grounded in the English adventure traditions personified by Smith, and Boone's significance as folk hero, like Smith's, involves his three stints as an Indian captive. There he outsmarts the enemy and “opens” the continent west of the Appalachians. In two instances, Boone himself was captured; in a third, one of his daughters was captured and then rescued by Boone.²⁶

Between his introduction in 1784 as a bit player in the appendix of John Filson's Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucke … The Adventures of Col. Daniel Boon, to his 1856 starring role in Timothy Flint's First White Man of the West, or the Life and Exploits of Col. Dan'l. Boone, the persona of Boone undergoes a transformation. Its effect is important for showing how male and female roles on the frontier became more stereotyped in the nineteenth-century captivity literature than they had been in the colonial period.²⁷ Of the thirty-two pages devoted to Boone in Filson's account, one long paragraph, taking up about a page of print, gives the first account of Boone's capture and escape in May 1769. Four pages are devoted to Boone's second capture and escape from February to July 1778 and following. Boone's daughter's captivity on July 14, 1776, gets one-half of one paragraph. Each of these exploits forms a chapter in Flint's account seventy years later.²⁸

In Filson's account of the first escape, Boone and friends were enjoying the wonders of nature and admiring “a variety of flowers and fruits” when, late in the day, near the Kentucky River, “a number of Indians rushed out of a thick cane-brake upon us, and made us prisoners. The time of our sorrow was now arrived. … The Indians plundered of us what we had, and kept us in confinement for seven days, treating us with common savage usage.” Because they did not seem anxious to escape, the Indians were “less suspicious of us” and so “in the dead of night, as we lay in a thick cane-brake by a large fire, when sleep had locked up their senses, my situation not disposing me to rest, I touched my companion and gently awoke him.” They escaped. Escape and capture are not presented as major issues. One gets captured, undergoes some minor problems, uses one's wits, and outsmarts the “savages” to obtain freedom.²⁹

The second capture was more difficult as Boone was taken, according to this account, by “a party of one hundred and two Indians, and two Frenchmen, on their march against Boons-borough.” The similarity to the vast numbers who confronted John Smith is not accidental. How could a “hero” go into a second captivity out of stupidity or oversight? Apparently, only overwhelming odds could convince the reader of his undisputable prowess and the inferiority of “savage” tactics. Boone became the adoptee of a Shawnee family and was introduced to Indian ways. This second capture lasted from February 7 to July 15, 1778. It began the lore of Boone's out-Indianizing the Indians. Culturally, Boone became a White Indian, with the emphasis on the White because Boone—like Colonel James Smith, Caughnawaga captive of the 1750s—wanted to learn Indian ways for military purposes, to use them to wipe out Indians.³⁰

Besides being a hero for empire, Boone begins the romantic tradition of savior hero. Filson's account gives us the following information about Boone's rescue of his daughter Jemima from captivity: “On the fourteenth day July, 1776, two of Col. Calloway's daughters, and one of mine, were taken prisoners near the fort. I immediately pursued the Indians, with only eight men, and on the fifteenth overtook them, killed two of the party, and recovered the girls.”³¹ In the mid-nineteenth century, this story of paternal rescue became a popular tale of female weakness and white male prowess. In John Frost's Daring and Heroic Deeds of American Women … among the Pioneer Mothers of the Western Country, this one-sentence recapture gets the frontispiece illustration and another illustration in a related chapter—noteworthy in the context of a book about women who escaped trouble on the frontier by their own wits.

In Frost's Boone account, he first praised the father of Kentucky for his “hardihood,” ability to surmount “all perils,” boldness, and the like: “But whatever praise we concede to Boone, we must remember that his wife and daughters also deserve our eulogy.” Why? Because he “was a bold and skillful Indian fighter, and accustomed to scenes of danger and death. They belonged to what is commonly called a ‘weaker sex,’ were much unaccustomed to the wilderness, and to constant alarms of savage warfare,” but they went onto the frontier anyway.³² Of the triple capture of Jemima Boone and the Calloway girls, Flint notes that all three friends, “if we may take the portraits of the rustic time,” were “patterns of youthful loveliness, inexpressibly dear to their parents.” But as girls will “imprudently” do, they wandered into the woods too far from the protection of “their habitations, to gather flowers with which to adorn their rustic fire-places. They were suddenly surrounded by a half-dozen Indians. Their shrieks and efforts to flee were alike unavailing. They were dragged rapidly beyond the power of making themselves heard.” Once among the Indians, however, they were treated with “the utmost indulgence and decorum.”³³

Apparently, the author would not want anyone to believe that anything bad happened to these fair maidens. Flint followed with a paragraph assuring his reader that this is always the case with Indians: after their “demonic” cries and wild fighting antics they “are universally seen to treat captive women with a decorous forbearance.” Why is this so, he asks? “This strange trait, so little in keeping with other parts of their character, has been attributed by some to their want of the sensibilities and passions of our race.” Translation: the reason for this unusual characteristic of not raping women during or after battle is that Indians are not as sexual or masculine as white males.³⁴

When the parents missed their wayward daughters, Boone declares, “By the Eternal Power that made me a father, if my daughter lives, and is found, I will either bring her back, or spill my life blood.” At this point, “every individual of the males crowded round Boone and repeated it.” “Seven selected persons were admitted to the oath,” and the rescue mission was on. The next day a few free men came to the camp, firing their rifles, “cutting down two savages at the first shot,” and sending the rest running away. In a moment, the daughters were in their fathers' arms and “in the unutterable joy of conquest and deliverance, were on their way homewards.”³⁵

In sum, by the Flint account of 1856, Boone was not only a great Indian fighter, scout, and hero of the future American empire but a savior of white womanhood. According to nineteenth-century norms, women needed to be saved because they were weak. Men had a sacred duty to protect them. It was an especially sacred duty for the man of the family to try to save his daughter or wife. Boone's several experiences with captivity all resulted in benefits to him and to society because they showed his agility in escaping or in mobilizing escape parties. They resulted in his befriending the Indians to learn survival skills, which proved him to be smarter than they were, tougher than they were, and able to use their own tools against them as he moved across the Appalachians and into the Northwest and South. But the importance of the Boone narratives and accompanying pictures is their assertion of a father's power as savior and preserver of the frontier family and the basic insecurity of the family without the white male protector. From Rowlandson's and Williams's dependence on the protection of God to save souls, the main lines of protection move with the Smith and Boone traditions to dependence upon weapons, “smarts,” and masculine prowess to save one's self and family.

THE ROMANTIC SAVIOR AND THE MARKET

By the mid-eighteenth century the religious figure faded as the clever, rough, and tough hero which Smith set, combined with the alleged “civilizing” and “rescuing” qualities of both Williams and Boone, emerged as the family figure that dominated the nineteenth-century male narratives of the Heroic Mode. These heroes “save” and protect the “weaker sex” and the patriarchal family. The evolution of this figure by the late nineteenth century can be observed in dime novel creations such as Edwin Eastman's narrative, Seven and Nine Years among the Camanches and Apaches (1873), one of many popular romantic savior stories, in which, after the capture of Eastman and his wife, the hero moves from a “consciousness” that he was “powerless to snatch her from her relentless captors” to organizing a rescue party and lifting “the curtain of dressed buffalo hide” and, after trembling “like an aspen” before his sleeping wife, “awakened the sleeper” and in “an instant” wrapped her in a robe, headed for the mountains, and was soon with the party “in full gallop down the valley.”³⁶

The combination of Smith and Boone themes, “pseudo-White Indian,” “hero,” and “savior of white womanhood,” was exaggerated in dime novels and mid- to late nineteenth-century accounts. The center of the American pantheon changed gradually but definitively. The strengthening of the male hero came at the expense of and concomitantly with the waning power of the female figure. That this shift occurred in a period that idealized the weak woman and the angel of the bourgeois household and stressed male assertiveness and national expansion is not a surprise. But why is the female heroine nearly obliterated, and how is this accomplished? Why and how does the western frontier become the ground of female trivialization and male supremacy? Certainly the unsettling nature of the process of westering itself is important here, but so is the potential challenge of others, women and Indians, who might challenge the direction of gender and national hegemony.³⁷

The dime novels' mass-market approach set the mode of the rough, tough, protector, rescuer male frontier figure packaged for an ever-widening audience. Erastus Beadle picked up where the Boston firm of Gleason and Ballou had begun in midcentury. The nickel and dime stories' novelty was in their characteristic packaging, advertising, and tendency to western themes. In the words of Henry Nash Smith, there were quite a few “subliterary” writers in the dime pool. Yet these works tended “to become an objectified mass dream, like the moving pictures, the soap operas, or the comic books that are the present-day equivalents of the Beadle stories. The individual writer abandons his own personality and identifies himself with the reveries of his readers. It is the presumably close fidelity of the Beadle stories to the dream life of a vast inarticulate public that renders them valuable to the social historian and the historian of ideas.”³⁸ Early dime novels repackaged the themes and dreams of frontier capture and rescue and sold them for big profits. Seth Jones, Edward S. Ellis's best-seller of the 1860s and 1870s, became the newest forum for an old frontier hero, creating a popular heroic figure as part-time captive and full-time savior of white womanhood and protector of advancing “civilization.”³⁹

Ellis was a twenty-year-old teacher in Red Bank, New Jersey, when he was called to New York to make the deal on the book. In a later interview he recalled that the success of the novel was based on its marketing. It was with Seth, he said, that the Beadle series really began. “It was not the merit of the book. … It was the ingenious way in which it was advertised.”⁴⁰ The technique was to print “a rush of posters” and “painted inscriptions” all over the country asking, “Who is Seth Jones?” Ellis claimed, “Everywhere you went this query met you. It glared at you in staring letters on the sidewalks. … In the country, the trees and rocks and the sides of roofs of barns all clamored with stentorian demands to know who Seth Jones was.” When everyone was just about fed up with the question, the answer was presented in the form of “big and little posters bearing a lithographic portrait of a stalwart, heroic-looking hunter of the Fenimore Cooper type, coon-skin cap, rifle and all. And above or below this imposing figure in large type were the words: ‘I am Seth Jones.’” The book was published on October 2, 1860. When soldiers went to the front, the Beadles sent them novels by the tens of thousands.⁴¹

Seth Jones is a “civilizer,” savior of white womanhood, and easterner turned frontiersman. The work shows how the medium may change, but the message lingers on. As Seth's story begins, we hear the sounds of an ax and see “an athletic man” swinging it, “burying his glittering blade deep in the heart of the mighty kings of the wood.” The settler's cabin is soon attacked and his “beautiful blue-eyed maiden” daughter stolen from him by “dusky beings.” To the rescue comes Seth Jones, mysterious woodsman, to save “that purity daughter.”⁴² In a comic Boone-like replay, Seth out-Indians the Indians and amuses his captors as well. As with John Smith, his “air of conscious superiority” wins the day. He escapes, returns to the white territory to organize a rescue party, and rescues the maiden.⁴³ In this gendered, nineteenth-century way of looking at capture, the brave, smart, and tough American white male beats out the Indians. By contrast, the frail, childlike white female must wait for her father, husband, frontier hero, or some combination of white men to save her from misery. In the triumph of the romantic savior, nineteenth-century cultural frontier history thus juxtaposes the ascendancy of white male supremacy from the mountain to the prairie, while simultaneously depicting a weak, infantilized female needing male protection against the evil of Indian wildness.

WHITE INDIANS

If the fictional models for the heroic figure in the captivities go back to the adventuring Odysseus and on to the “real” world of Captain Smith, those of the White Indian probably go back to the children raised by wolves in prehistoric Rome. Fortunately, the raising of white children by North American Indians is more easily documented. There are several narratives of adoptees who became White Indians. Those who assimilated rarely returned to write memoirs, but some did, and others recounted or dictated their stories.

Unlike the stolid, singular, and tough figures that came down in the heroic Boone and Leatherstocking lore, the male captives who lived among the Indians from an early age did not define their manhood by singularity and individual prowess but, not surprisingly, rather more in an Indian context of interrelationship. In many cases, that interrelationship was a bond between (Indian) mother and (white adopted) son. This was the case in two of the longest nineteenth-century captivities of white boys captured at a young age. Other elements that differentiated males in the White Indian mode from their “heroic” brothers (or fathers) was their sympathy for Indian ways and, even when they were not adopted as young children, their ability to see the group in which they found themselves, not as monsters but as people like themselves. Still another feature of these men and boys was the way in which they observed, respected, and became part of the natural world.

John Gyles became a White Indian. He was captured at about age ten on August 2, 1689, in Pemaquid, Maine, along with both of his parents and three siblings. Like many other white male captives, he experienced a good deal of beating and observed the death and torture of other white captives, both French and English. He admitted his fears; after all, he was a child. He mentioned whippings, the tossing of hot embers onto captives' chests, and the death of his brother. The difference between Gyles and almost all the female captives of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was his occasional understanding of why captives were badly treated or even killed. He explained that captive James Alexander was treated badly to “revenge” the Indians “having lost some friends.” This did not make Gyles happier or less fearful when they beat him, but at least he recognized the emotional intensity of the nature of war in any culture.⁴⁴

Shortly after his capture, when he underwent some torment, a little girl took him “by the hand” and led him out of the captive circle, and an older Indian gave him a pipe to smoke. He thought he would be killed, but this was the first of many protective gestures shown him. When a plague fell upon the Abenakis, “Indians applied red ochre to my sores which by God's blessing cured me.” And later, “an old squaw who was kind to captives” gave him hints as to what to beware of when watching male ceremonials and how to avoid the demons of the woods. After he watched one ceremony and came back to her, she “was glad that I returned without hurt.”⁴⁵

Gyles's approach was different from Williams's or Smith's. His writing shows an awareness of Indian humanity and an alternative way of looking at the earth. He explained how his Eastern Abenaki (Maliseet) family protected him by having him run off when he was in danger; they told him not to return until they said it would be safe. A young Indian girl jumped in the river to save him when the Indian men forced him to swim even though they knew he could not. Another time, when he suffered with severe frostbite, these Abenakis helped him. (He was about thirteen at the time.) Gyles's lengthy stay in the wilderness made him a keen observer of flora and fauna. He probably wrote his memoirs many years after his release, when he was in his late forties, and revised them in his early fifties after living with the French and becoming a hunter. Still, the earlier years affected him. He called the moose “a fine lofty creature about eight feet high with a long head and a nose like a horse, with horns very large and strong.” He included detailed descriptions of the beaver, the wolverine, the hedgehog, the tortoise, and the life of the salmon.⁴⁶ He described the ceremonies of the Indians of northern Maine from marriage to mourning and threw in a myth or two. For a seventeenth-century child of the Puritans, his openness to Abenaki ways and his lack of invocation of God and Providence are atypical of Puritan men and women alike. Gyles might well be called the prototype for the White Indian: a young captive living with Indians for many years, protected and cared for by them, especially by Indian women, learning to understand and appreciate the world around him. He was not a nineteenth-century figure and did not see his captors as noble. He would call them devil worshipers. He certainly expressed no interest in staying with them even though six of his first sixteen years of life were spent with them.⁴⁷

The two most famous White Indians of the nineteenth century were captured as children and raised as Indians. John Dunn Hunter was captured at a young age by the Kickapoo along with two other white children. He eventually wound up with (Plains) Kansas Indians and was adopted by a woman who had lost a son in a war with the Pawnees. He found that the Kansas treated him “with regard and tenderness” and that women and children captives were treated well “while every imaginable indignity was practiced on the [adult male] prisoners.” In such situations, women who lost a relative were joined by children. At the defeat of the Pawnee, Hunter said children “whipped the prisoners with green briars, and hazel switches, and threw firebrands, clubs, and stones at them as they ran between their ranks, to the painted post of safety.” In this particular instance, all the male Indian captives died with the exception of two Mandan chiefs. The opposing chief expected to be tortured and gave the following speech: “‘I am a man: the fate of war is against me:—I die like a warrior.’”⁴⁸

Hunter was adopted by several mothers. When he was among the Kansas, he felt a most “painful loss” when his mother drowned one day while collecting driftwood.

I sincerely and deeply felt the bereavement; and cannot even at this late day, reflect on her maternal conduct to me, from the time I was taken prisoner by the Kansas, to her death, without the association of feelings, to which, in other respects I am a stranger. She was indeed a mother to me; and I feel my bosom dilate with gratitude at the recollection of her goodness, and care of me during this helpless period of my life. This, to those who have been bred in refinement and ease, under the fond and watchful guardianship of parents, may appear gross and incongruous. If, however, the imagination allowed scope, and a lad ten or twelve years of age, without kindred or name, or any knowledge by which he could arrive at an acquaintance with any of the circumstances connected with his being, be supposed in the central wilds of North America, nearly a thousand miles from any white settlement, a prisoner or sojourner among a people, on whom he had not the slightest claim, and with whose language, habits and character, he was wholly unacquainted; but, who nevertheless treated him kindly; and it will appear not only natural but rational, that he should return such kindness with gratitude and affection. Such nearly was my situation. … I have no hope of seeing happier days than I experienced at this early period of my life, while sojourning with the Kansas nation, on the Kansas river, some hundred miles above its confluence with the Missouri.⁴⁹

Despite his grief, Hunter said he could not show his feelings because Indians “regard tears, or any expression of grief, as a mark of weakness in males, and unworthy of the character of a warrior.”⁵⁰ Hunter's spirits were revived, however, when he was adopted again, this time in Osage territory by the family of Shen-thweeh, whose wife, Hunk-hah, adopted him for her lost son and “took every opportunity … to engage my affections and esteem. She used to weep over me, tell me how good her son had been, how much she loved him, and how much she mourned his loss. ‘You must be good … and you shall be my son, and I will be your mother.’” The daughter of the family was equally attentive to his needs: “The greatest care was taken to supply my wants with the choicest things they had in their power to bestow.” Although he was still a boy, she made him ornamented moccasins, leggings, a beaver hat, a buffalo robe, and other clothes reserved for men. When he was wounded in a battle some time later, the “skill of our physicians and the kind attentions of my Indians mother and sister” cured him. At another point he could have returned to the Kansas but felt more kinship with his Osage “mother and sister, who were dear to me, and who loved me in return.”⁵¹ But though Hunter received much love and affection from Kansas and Osage mothers and sisters, his Kansas father showed him “little or no regard or tenderness.”⁵²

Hunter, like all white captive boys, was required to learn the meaning of manhood in the Indian context. The mother who was central to his care and comfort was the same woman who showed him the basic road to becoming a man and a warrior. His account shows the complex nature of the mother-son bond in those native societies in which he lived. He describes how boys at an early age were trained to withstand and inflict pain. In her rounds with the boy, the mother deliberately started fights with him, then took him home and, “placing a rod in his hand,” helped him to beat up the dog “or any thing else that may come in his way.” She also “teases and vexes him, creates an irritable temper, submits to the rod, and flees before him with great dread.” Afterward, she beat him and pulled his hair and he responded by hitting her back, “by which her pupil has learned to bear pain without dread.” These “trials of courage” were required by the mother before her son was allowed again to play with his friends.⁵³

Hunter was given his name for his hunting prowess. He was neither shy nor modest. His feats included a sixteen-month trip across the plains and the Rockies and back. He compared his life to Daniel Boone's and boasted of an acquaintance with him, saying they “became strongly attached to each other.”⁵⁴ But Hunter, like Gyles, demonstrates that living with the Indians helped some Euro-American men and boys find alternative ways of seeing their role as men in relation to women and living on the earth. In works like Hunter's, readers could see another way of living.

The life and work of John Tanner presents yet another example of a White Indian whose Indian mother reshaped the direction of his life. Tanner's father was a Virginia clergyman who settled on the Ohio River in Kentucky. Tanner's mother died when he was two. The family moved onto the edge of Shawnee territory, where his father's brother, with some other white men, killed and scalped an Indian. The family moved again after the father's remarriage, this time past Cincinnati “to the mouth of the Big Miami.” As Tanner told the story, “The earliest event of my life, which I distinctly remember is the death of my mother. This happened when I was two years old, and many of the attending circumstances made so deep an impression, that they are still fresh in my memory.” His clergyman father soon “removed to a place called Elk Horn.” The boy was expected to take care of younger siblings and at one point was beaten for not doing so. “From that time, my father's house was less like home to me, and I often thought and said, ‘I wish I could go and live among the Indians.’”⁵⁵ Shawnees captured him in 1785.

Tanner was first adopted by an old woman known as “‘the Otter woman,’ the otter being her totem.” She treated him well, but he was happier when he was readopted over her strong objections. His second Indian mother was chief of the Ottawa “notwithstanding her sex.” Her name was Net-no-kwa. She was able to use her status and “considerable whiskey” to get the young Tanner. He thought she was younger and “of a more pleasing aspect than my former mother. She took me by the hand after she had completed the negotiation with my former possessors, and led me to her own lodge which stood near.” He soon learned that she would indulge him a good deal. She fed him, gave him “good clothes,” and told him to play with her children. They went past Mackinac and when the corn was ripe arrived in Ottawa territory in northern Michigan. Net-no-kwa's husband was seventeen years her junior and an Ojibwa who treated Tanner “like an equal, rather than as a dependent.” Net-no-kwa led an Ottawa band at Arbre Croche on the northern part of the lower peninsula.⁵⁶ Tanner said he never met an Indian of either sex “who had so much authority as Net-no-kwa.”⁵⁷ He respected her understanding of the world of nature and her ability to interpret dreams. Tanner, however, was a braggart. He told of every bear and elk he killed and probably a good number he never saw. He claimed to have killed twenty-four bear and ten moose in one month and at another point, twenty moose and elk and forty-two beaver in a ten-day period.

Although he had many words of love for his mother, he could say little good about his mother-in-law, whom he claimed tried to kill him. His marriages failed one after another. He complained constantly about his Ojibwa brother. No true sibling ever met a worse rival. Tanner spent more pages trying to tell how much better he was than his brother than John Williams did on the evils of popery.⁵⁸

Tanner lived with the Ottawa-Ojibwas for nearly thirty years. Born in 1780 and captured in 1789 by Saginaw Ojibwas, he returned with his white brother to Kentucky in about 1817. After his return, he lived in emotional turmoil, later settling in northern Michigan Territory around Sault Ste. Marie. He is thought to have married four times. Between 1837 and 1846 he was arrested several times for killing livestock, was in jail, had confrontations with various northern Michigan whites, and had his house set on fire. He became more and more disturbed and reclusive after the failure of his third marriage to an Ojibwa woman, was accused of murder, and finally disappeared and was never heard from again.⁵⁹

A nineteenth-century captive boy who remained with the Senecas was also deeply touched and shaped by his Indian mother. Renamed White Chief, he had been taken from the Susquehanna during the French and Indian War, at the age of four. He remembered losing his mother and finding himself in an Indian woman's lap. “Looking kindly down into my face she smiled on me, and gave me some dried deer's meat and maple sugar. From that hour I believe she loved me as a mother. I am sure I returned to her the affection of a son. … I always had a warm place at the fire, and slept in her arms. I was fed with the best food the wigwam could afford.” The boy learned to compete with the other Seneca boys with the bow “my Indian mother put into my hands.” He shot birds and squirrels, which she promised to cook. “I often gave her much pleasure by bringing her game and demanding the fulfillment of her promise. She never disappointed me.”⁶⁰

Stories of white male captives point out the necessity of dealing with a new culture. Adapting demanded a reassessment of all aspects of a boy's or a man's life: male behavior, family relations, and gender relations. In redefining or at least reassessing the “normal” behavior from which they came, men and boys were confronted with contrasting or perhaps more exaggerated (in their eyes) forms of male behavior. They were not to cry, not to show pain or fear, even under torture. Some were subjected to racial and ethnic taunts. Hunter's first memory is of a little girl captive being killed for crying. Tanner remembered Indian boys taunting captives with racial and sexual slurs. They “upbraided me with being white, and with the whites all being squaws; a reproachful term used generally among the Indians, in contradistinction to that of warrior.”⁶¹ This new view of cultures did not always bring an easier life. Some nineteenth-century White Indians, like Hunter and Tanner, suffered severe marital and personal difficulties when they returned to Anglo-American life.

Mathew Brayton was a child captive who, as an adult, searched for and found his brother and other family members. He went from Anglo-American childhood to Indian manhood only to rediscover his original identity. In the end, he found his white family, but in the process abandoned his Indian wife and two children, along with the extended family and tribe that raised him. These contradictions are not stated in the happy ending of his narrative, a story told by another because he could neither write nor speak English fluently. One guesses that the next chapter of Brayton's life, like that of some captives who changed cultures and crossed sexual boundaries, did not have a happy ending.⁶²

The captive experience forced both men and women to confront what they had thought were roles given by God and nature. For male captives it challenged their masculine definitions of strength and endurance. It required them to use every method available to withstand violence against them and against friends and family. It forced them to assume responsibilities for the women and children in their families, which tested them both physically and psychologically. It forced them to live in new ways and in relationship to other men and other women, which, in every century, challenged their society's conceptions of men, women, family, and sexuality. There were variations in men's and boys' individual behaviors and responses, for males of different ages, between French and Anglo-Americans, and over time. Although the religious hero is a seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century phenomenon, and the adventure hero evolves from Smith to empire-building hero Boone and later dime novel romantic savior descendants, of the fourteen men discussed (and the one fictive captive), the basic typology of Hero and White Indian is more persistent than changes over time.

As is true for their female counterparts, the juxtaposition of the white male captive on a field of red brought out certain adaptive reactions based on extreme circumstances. For both men and women, age of capture was an indicator of adaptation, with younger captives being more malleable and more open to seeing the other. In both cases, however, gender and attitudes toward the Indian other were critical as well. For women, the separation from their families, homes, and traditional male “protectors” and the dangers to themselves and their children put them in touch with their vulnerability but forced them to confront their own inner resources. For most women in the centuries under consideration, capture proved a prolonged test of faith, endurance, and self-reliance. Not underestimating the ways in which many Indian societies facilitated the integration of captives into their societies, these women were, at least for the first days, weeks, and months, and for Mary Jemison, years, subject to feelings of deep loneliness. It appears that the tests for male captives were more on the battlefield of prowess, religious or physical, and that even when other tests presented themselves, these were the ways in which many defined the task of their captivity.

The mode of writing shaped the story told by both men and women. From the earliest accounts, style was shaped by period, by religious or secular orientation, and by the particular audience reading the materials. But again, gender left its mark, as has been evident. In her study of pardon tales in sixteenth-century France, Natalie Zemon Davis reports that in both style and content, women's and men's attempts to gain pardon for crimes by appeal before French kings and magistrates differed.⁶³ The same is true of captivity narratives and writings. With the exception of Mary Rowlandson, women in the seventeenth and much of the eighteenth centuries told their stories to others, and others wrote them. Women's written stories differ in style and content from men's (and from men's renditions of women's stories). The telling differs in the way it appeals to the reader, its emotion, its language, and its subjects. For men, adventure, trials, physical pain, and the resistance to pain, learning from, outsmarting, or becoming Indian are at the center of the accounts. This bifurcation of sentiment versus adventure was most pronounced in the period from 1830 to the end of the nineteenth century and was shaped largely by the demands of the market, along with the emerging ideology of separate spheres.⁶⁴

But there were also physical and social realities that made capture different for each sex. For women there was the question of their physical vulnerability, the question of whether they had the stamina to go on, the mention of forced marriage to Indians, the fear of rape, and familial and psychic vulnerability. What will happen to the children? How will the woman, usually a wife and a mother, stand up under the stress? These are common questions beneath the plot and move the narration from the seventeenth century onward. Women are able to survive, though in some nineteenth-century cases they appear to revel in their frailty and vulnerability. In the Amazon stories, from Dustan and on through the nineteenth-century recountings, a few escape stories are told by these women themselves, but no violent stories or adventure narratives are written by them about their experiences. Similar stories of male prowess, from Smith to Eastman, are all written by the men themselves.

Why was this the case? To the extent that this literature served as nation-building propaganda, white male weakness always had to be both masked and overcome. Men who were too weak or could not outsmart the enemy would die. For men like Father Jogues, death meant martyrdom and the ultimate victory of Christ; for Englishmen and men of the new American nation, it meant defeat of the founding mission and of the westward expansion of that mission through the perpetuation of new families. Powerful figures of women and children could be used as backups against the Indians and fortify the courage of all. But they were also symbols of the growth and vigor of a new Zion and later a new republic.

What changes occurred over time? Female vulnerability was more salable in the nineteenth century than earlier, as were protective male heroics. The markets for fiction and nonfiction were not very different when it came to reports about the frontier.⁶⁵ But female vulnerability is a constant, a continuity embedded in all the captivity genres, even those in which women strike back. Women's generally more diminutive physical stature and role as childbearer and nurturer is used as a sign of personal and social vulnerability to evoke sympathetic response. An injured, raped, or unprotected woman (or child) calls out for help. Captive stories of women and children pointed out the vulnerability of the family and social fabric on the frontier. These stories served as cautionary tales. If mothers and children could disappear from a homestead, near a frontier fort, en route west, or in an uprising, “civilization” was precarious indeed.

Charles Johnston returned to Virginia in 1790 after five weeks with Shawnees. His family thought him dead. “The anxiety of the neighborhood, to hear the details of my capture, and of all my way-faring, brought them in great numbers, day after day, to my mother's house, and subjected me to narrations, which I was compelled so often to repeat, and which begat in me so many unpleasant recollections, that I almost dreaded the return of each succeeding day.”⁶⁶

From the earliest accounts of Smith, Rowlandson, Dustan, and Williams, Anglo-American colonists identified with the variety of struggles men and women faced on the frontiers of the New World. Their epic stories challenged listeners and readers to put themselves in the place of the captive, to ask themselves what they would have done. These stories asked, Who are you? Who might you become? What might this land become? Their answers contend that you cannot know what man you are, what woman you are, what child you are until you have seen another way, have become vulnerable, crossed boundaries. In that other land, you encounter dangers of every sort. The very social experiment of the New World is brought to the test. You will see a different world, a different self, and in the process you will reevaluate the society of which you are a part.

Notes

1. Alden T. Vaughan, American Genesis: Captain John Smith and the Founding of Virginia (Boston: Little, Brown, 1975), 37. For Smith's description of the events see John Smith, A Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles, The Third Booke, in Edward Arber and A. G. Bradley, eds., Travels and Works of Captain John Smith: President of Virginia, and Admiral of New England, 1580-1631, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: J. Grant, 1910), 2:397. Also see Philip L. Barbour, ed., The Complete Works of Captain John Smith (1580-1631) in Three Volumes (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986). For differing views on contact with Indians in Virginia see Nancy Oestreich Lurie, “Indian Cultural Adjustment to European Civilization,” in Interpreting Colonial America: Selected Readings, ed. James Kirby Martin (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), 36-45; Helen C. Rountree, Pocahontas's People: The Powhatan Indians of Virginia through Four Centuries (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990).

2. Another twenty-one (2.5 percent) of the males probably died as compared to another two (1.2 percent) of the females. Eight male and three female children died or were killed. See Alden T. Vaughan and Daniel K. Richter, “Crossing the Cultural Divide: Indians and New Englanders, 1605-1763,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 90 (Apr. 16, 1980): 66-67. On assimilation see A. Irving Hallowell, “American Indians, White and Black: The Phenomenon of Transculturalization,” in Contributions to Anthropology: Selected Papers of A. Irving Hallowell, with introductions by Raymond D. Fogelson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 498-552; J. Norman Heard, White into Red: A Study of the Assimilation of White Persons Captured by Indians (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1973); Cornelius J. Jaenen, Friend and Foe: Aspects of French-Amerindian Cultural Conflict in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976); William A. Starna and Ralph Watkins, “Northern Iroquois Slavery,” Ethnohistory 38 (Winter 1991): 34-57; Richard VanDerBeets, “The Indian Captivity Narrative: An American Genre” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of the Pacific, 1973).

3. Jogues's letter was signed August 5, 1643. The work was first printed in French in 1655 and had a long print history on both sides of the Atlantic, in French and in English. Biographers report that Jogues's head was cut off and placed on a pole in a Mohawk village (“Captivity of Father Isaac Jogues, of the Society of Jesus, among the Mohawks,” [1655] taken from John Gilmary Shea, Perils of the Ocean and Wilderness [1857] in Held Captive by Indians: Selective Narratives, 1642-1836, ed. Richard VanDerBeets [Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1973], 3-40, esp. 4, 9-12, 19). For a comparison of savage behavior, the body of King Philip (Metacom, Metacomet) was quartered and decapitated after the 1675 war in New England. The head was placed on a pole in Plymouth and remained there for twenty-five years (Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., The Patriot Chiefs [New York: Viking, 1961], 61-62). One of Philip's hands was sent to Boston for display. His body was not buried but, “having been quartered, was hung upon four trees” (Samuel G. Drake, Biography and History of the Indians of North America, from Its First Discovery [Boston: Benjamin B. Muzzey, 1851], 227). For an analysis of the early Indian wars see Wilcomb E. Washburn, “Seventeenth-Century Indian Wars,” in Handbook of North American Indians, gen. ed. William C. Sturtevant, vol. 15, Northeast, Bruce G. Trigger, vol. ed. (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institute, 1978), 89-100; Washburn, “The Moral and Legal Justifications for Dispossessing the Indians,” in Seventeenth-Century America: Essays in Colonial History, ed. James M. Smith (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959), 15-32. For an analysis of the Huron people and Jogues's stay among them see Bruce G. Trigger, The Children of Aataentsic: A History of the Huron People to 1660 (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1976), 522, 541, 645-47, 654-57. Trigger also analyzes the capture and torture sequence among the Hurons. His work indicates that men, women, and children taken by the Hurons in the early and mid-seventeenth century were often taken alive and tortured. His descriptions relate primarily to Huron captures of Iroquois and other Indian enemies but also include French captives (ibid., 68-75).

4. Daniel K. Richter mentions the fund-raising issues of the Jesuits and “suggests a need for caution” in using the Relations as sources (“Iroquois versus Iroquois: Jesuit Missions and Christianity in Village Politics, 1642-1886,” Ethnohistory 32 [1985]: 1-16, esp. 1).

5. Vaughan and Richter, “Cultural Divide,” 66-67.

6. John Gyles, Memoirs of Odd Adventures, Strange Deliverances [1736], in Puritans among the Indians: Accounts of Captivity and Redemption, 1676-1724, ed. Alden T. Vaughan and Edward W. Clark (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), 93, 105, 106, 109, 81-83.

7. “‘Quentin Stockwell's Relation of His Captivity and Redemption’ Reported by Increase Mather,” in Puritans among the Indians, ed. Vaughan and Clark, 81-83, 89. On the literature of the pulpit as war propaganda see Richard Slotkin and James K. Folsom, eds., So Dreadfull a Judgment: Puritan Responses to King Philip's War, 1676-1677 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1978).

8. Indian Captivities: Life in the Wigwam, ed. Samuel G. Drake (New York: Miller, Orton, 1857), 109-10, 113.

9. An Account of the Remarkable Occurrences in the Life and Travels of Colonel James Smith [1799] in Indian Captivities, ed. Drake, 178-252, esp. 182.

10. W. M. Beauchamp says that cases of women (in this case enemies of the Iroquois) being burned and eaten were common in the seventeenth century. He cites Jogues's account among others (“Iroquois Women,” Journal of American Folk-Lore 13 [1900]: 81-91, esp. 84). Frederick W. Waugh, citing sources from the Jesuit Relations, says that “ceremonial cannibalism” was “quite a common practice” and body parts were eaten as part of rites of sympathetic magic (Iroquois Foods and Food Preparation [Ottawa: Government Printing Bureau, 1916], 134). Buell H. Quain, also using Jesuit sources, stresses the “ritualistic nature” of such practice (“The Iroquois,” in Cooperation and Competition among Primitive Peoples, ed. Margaret Mead [New York: McGraw-Hill, 1937], 253-54). William N. Fenton documents a number of cases of Indian men and women who committed suicide to escape harm from their Iroquois captors. Most of Fenton's cases are taken from the Jesuit records (Iroquois Suicide: A Study in Stability of a Culture Pattern [Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1941]).

11. John D. Hunter, Manners and Customs of Several Indian Tribes Located West of the Mississippi (1823; rpt. Minneapolis: Ross & Haines, 1957); also Garland Library, vol. 39 (New York: Garland, 1977), 27. For an account of the torture of an infant child reported by Rachel Plummer with the Comanches see Rachel Plummer, “Narrative of the Capture and Subsequent Sufferings of Mrs. Rachel Plummer, Written by Herself,” in Held Captive by Indians, ed. VanDerBeets. On torture see Nathaniel Knowles, “The Torture of Captives by the Indians of Eastern North America” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1940).

12. “Captivity of Father Isaac Jogues,” in Held Captive by Indians, ed. VanDerBeets, 9, 7, 38.

13. Rev. Edward V. Neill, The History of Minnesota from the French Explorations to the Present Time, 5th ed. (Minneapolis: Minnesota Historical Society, 1883), 128-33; Father Hennepin, The New Discovery of a Vast Country, 2 vols., ed. Reuben Gold Thwaites (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1903); “Memoir of Duluth on the Sioux Country, 1678-1682,” in Early Narratives of the Northwest, 1634-1699, ed. Louise Phelps Kellogg (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1917), 331-33, 332, n. 1. The validity of Hennepin's account is discussed in F. Sanford Cutler, “An Evaluation of Documents Useful to the Ethnohistorian: The Writings of Father Hennepin,” Proceedings of the Minnesota Academy of Science 23 (1955): 23-28.

14. John Williams, “The Redeemed Captive Returning to Zion,” in Puritans among the Indians, ed. Vaughan and Clark, 167; David Hawke, The Colonial Experience (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966), 329-30. For a museum and shrine to the captives of Deerfield, see the second-floor exhibit in the museum in Historic Deerfield, Massachusetts. For comparisons of British Protestant and French Catholic successes among the Indians, see James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 80, also chaps. 1-6. On the Deerfield experiences of Williams, Stockwell, and others see Richard I. Melvoin, New England Outpost: War and Society in Colonial Deerfield (New York: Norton, 1989), esp. chaps. 7-9, and the work of John Demos on Eunice Williams (forthcoming).

15. Williams, “Redeemed Captive,” in Puritans among the Indians, ed. Vaughan and Clark, 168, 225; Edward W. Clark, The Redeemed Captive: John Williams (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1976), 16.

16. Clark, Redeemed Captive, 9; Williams, “Redeemed Captive,” in Puritans among the Indians, ed. Vaughan and Clark, 173, 178, 180. For the language of Puritan New England's sermons see Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), and Mason I. Lowance, Jr., The Language of Canaan: Metaphor and Symbol in New England from the Puritans to the Transcendentalists (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980).

17. Williams, “Redeemed Captive,” in Puritans among the Indians, ed. Vaughan and Clark, 195, 197.

18. Ibid., 204, 209, 212, 215, 218; also 204-20 for correspondence.

19. The small book called itself a “narrative of facts, intended for the instruction and improvement of children and youth taken from an interesting portion of the early history of our country” (A. Phelps, The Deerfield Captive, 3d ed. [Greenfield, Mass.: n.p., 1837], 11-12, Newberry Library, Chicago, Illinois).

20. Vaughan, American Genesis, 117. Also see A. L. Rouse, The Elizabethans and America: The Trevelyan Lectures at Cambridge, 1958 (New York: Harper & Row, 1959).

21. John Smith, “Part of the Travels of Capt. John Smith amongst Turks, Tartars and others,” and “A reprint, with variations of the First Part of the Map of Virginia,” 1612, both in Arber and Bradley, eds., Travels and Works, illus. 2:821-24, and illus. 1:342.

22. See Christian F. Feest, “Virginia Algonquians,” in Handbook of North American Indians, gen. ed. William C. Sturtevant, Vol. 15, Northeast, Bruce G. Trigger, vol. ed. (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1978), 253-70. Richard Drinnon suggests that relationships to the sensual both attracted and frightened Euro-Americans (“The Metaphysics of Dancing Tribes,” in The American Indian and the Problem of History, ed. Calvin Martin [New York: Oxford University Press, 1987], 106-13). Newberry Library, Chicago, Illinois photographer Ken Cain pointed out that the woman around the fire looked like a blond.

23. John Smith, A True Relation, in Virginia Reader: A Treasury of Writings from the First Voyages to the Present, ed. Frances C. Rosenberger (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1948), 77, 78, 81, 84; Barbour, ed., The Complete Works of Captain John Smith, 1:43-45.

24. Father Hennepin also found that the mariner's compass dazzled the Dakotas (Neill, History of Minnesota, 152). In the film Dances with Wolves, actor and director Kevin Costner succeeds in a similar feat, dazzling the Lakotas with a magnifying field glass.

25. See Vaughan, American Genesis, 81, 84.

26. Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 294-301; Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (New York: Vintage Books, 1959), 54-63.

27. John Filson, The Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucke … The Adventures of Col. Daniel Boon (1784), Garland Library, vol. 14 (New York: Garland, 1978); Timothy Flint, The First White Man of the West (Cincinnati: H. M. Ruilson, Queen City Publishing House, 1856).

28. Filson, Discovery, 51-52, 60, 63-66.

29. Ibid., 52.

30. Ibid., 63.

31. Ibid., 60.

32. Frost gave a chapter to the capture and rescue of the daughters, Elizabeth Ellet gave Mrs. Boone a chapter in Pioneer Women of the West, and Timothy Flint devoted a chapter to each episode of capture. See John Frost, Daring and Heroic Deeds of American Women (Philadelphia: G. G. Evans, 1860), 26; E[lizabeth] F. Ellet, Pioneer Women of the West (New York: Charles Scribner, 1852), 42-57.

33. Flint, First White Man of the West, 85-86.

34. Ibid., 86.

35. Ibid., 87-88, 94-95.

36. Edwin Eastman, Seven and Nine Years among the Camanches and Apaches: An Autobiography (Jersey City, N.J.: Clark Johnson, M.D., 1873), 210, 216-17.

37. Richard Slotkin emphasizes the role of the other in nineteenth-century narratives and history in the period of industrialization in The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890 (New York: Atheneum, 1985).

38. Smith, Virgin Land, 101 and chap. 9. Smith discusses Seth Jones in the first section of the chapter.

39. Edward Sylvester Ellis, Seth Jones; or The Captives of the Frontier, 7th ed., Beadles Half Dime Library, vol. 30, no. 60 (New York: Beadle and Adams, ca. 1878).

40. Interview, June 24, 1900, in Albert Johannsen, The House of Beadle and Adams and Its Dime and Nickel Novels: The Story of a Vanished Literature, 2 vols. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1950), 2:32.

41. Ibid. Edward S. Ellis's admiration for Boone is apparent in his biography, The Life and Times of Col. Daniel Boone: Hunter, Soldier, and Pioneer (Chicago: Union School Finishing Co., n.d.).

42. Ellis, Seth Jones, 3.

43. Ibid., chaps. 3 and 5.

44. Gyles, Memoirs of Odd Adventures, in Puritans among the Indians, ed. Vaughan and Clark, 93, 101-2, 105-6.

45. Ibid., 107-9, 111, 113-14.

46. Ibid., 95, 116, 103n., 116-20.

47. Gyles spent three of his nine captive years with the French. On Maliseets and Eastern Abenakis see Vincent O. Erickson, “Maliseet-Passamaquoddy,” 123-36, and Dean R. Snow, “Eastern Abenaki,” in Handbook of North American Indians, gen. ed. William C. Sturtevant, Vol. 15, Northeast, Bruce G. Trigger, vol. ed. (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1978).

48. Hunter, Manners and Customs, 26-27, 34-35. See Father Jogues on the torture of the Huron chief cited earlier. Also see Richard Drinnon's introduction to his edition of Memoirs of a Captivity among the Indians of North America: John Dunn Hunter [1824] (New York: Schocken, 1973).

49. Hunter, Manners and Customs, 34-35. My emphasis on mothers and relationship with women differs from Leslie Fiedler's, who stresses the WASP male-Indian male bond (The Return of the Vanishing American [New York: Stein and Day, 1968], 24 and chap. 2).

50. Hunter, Manners and Customs, 35.

51. Ibid., 43, 62, 64.

52. Ibid., 44.

53. Ibid., 272-73.

54. Ibid., 135.

55. Edwin James, A Narrative of the Captivity and Adventures of John Tanner (1830), Garland Library, vol. 46 (New York: Garland, 1975), 1-2.

56. John T. Fierst, “Return to ‘Civilization’: John Tanner's Troubled Years at Sault Ste. Marie,” Minnesota History 50 (Spring 1986): 23.

57. Edwin James with Noel Loomis, A Narrative of the Captivity and Adventures of John Tanner (1830; rpt. Minneapolis: Ross and Haines, 1956), xii, 15, 16, 27.

58. Ibid., 115, 119, 120, 205, 230-32, x-xvi.

59. In 1846 he was accused of murdering James Schoolcraft, brother of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, Indian agent and compiler of a multi-volume work on North American Indians. On Schoolcraft see Robert E. Bieder, Science Encounters the Indian, 1820-1880: The Early Years of American Ethnography (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986), 146-94; Bieder, “Henry Rowe Schoolcraft,” in Handbook of North American Indians, gen. ed. William C. Sturtevant, Vol. 4, History of Indian-White Relations, Wilcomb E. Washburn, vol. ed. (Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1988), 680-81; P. Richard Metcalf, “John Tanner,” in Handbook of North American Indians, gen. ed. William C. Sturtevant, Vol. 4, History of Indian-White Relations, Wilcomb E. Washburn, vol. ed. (Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1988), 689; Fierst, “Return to ‘Civilization,’” 23-36. Fierst says Tanner may have had four wives and ten children (ibid., 27, n. 12).

60. The account is from Henry Sheldon of Vermont, who visited his sister Harriet Caswell at the New York Seneca Mission (Harriet Caswell, Our Life among the Iroquois Indians [Boston: Congregational Sunday School and Publishing Society, 1892], 51-62). Other white males who spent their youth among eastern Indians were John Slover among the Shawnees (from age eight to age twenty) in the 1760s and 1770s and John Brickell among the Delawares. John R. Swanton finds that among thirty captives, fifteen male and fifteen female, four males became chiefs and three or four females became the wives of chiefs. See Swanton, “Ethnology—Notes on the Mental Assimilation of Races,” Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences 16 (Nov. 3, 1926): 495-96, 501.

61. James, Narrative of John Tanner, 20. White Chief was also taunted for being white.

62. Matthew Brayton with John H. A. Bone, Indian Captive: A Narrative of the Adventures and Sufferings of Matthew Brayton (1860), Garland Library, vol. 76 (New York: Garland, 1977), 6-10. On the nature of as-told-to traditions among native people of the Americas see Gretchen M. Bataille and Kathleen Mullen Sands, American Indian Women: Telling Their Lives (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), 3-26.

63. Natalie Zemon Davis, “Bloodshed and the Woman's Voice: Gender and Pardon Tales in 16th Century France,” paper presented at Harvard University, Mar. 6, 1987; Davis, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales of Sixteenth-Century France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987).

64. Some scholars attribute a significant part of Rowlandson's narrative to her husband, minister John Rowlandson; others claim Cotton Mather had a hand in it. I would not deny these influences, but I think she was quite capable of doing the writing herself. In any case, John's piece in her original is not as well written as hers.

65. As Leslie Fiedler says, “It is hard to tell history from myth in such accounts, though these earliest attempts to create an image of the Indian for the American imagination usually presented themselves as ‘true relations’ of fact. Capt. John Smith may seem to have fabricated rather than recorded the story of his encounter with Pocahontas; but his early readers took as literal truth the fanciful tale [of his rescue]” (“The Indian in Literature in English,” in Handbook of North American Indians, gen. ed. William C. Sturtevant, Vol. 4, History of Indian-White Relations, Wilcomb E. Washburn, vol. ed. (Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1988), 573).

66. Charles Johnston, A Narrative of the Incidents Attending the Capture, Detention, and Ransom of Charles Johnston [1827] in Held Captive by Indians, ed. VanDerBeets, 314.