SOURCE: Vanderbeets, Richard. “The Indian Captivity Narrative as Ritual.” American Literature 43, no. 4 (January 1972): 548-62.

[In the essay below, Vanderbeets urges readers to view captivity narratives as a unified genre built upon common rituals.]

All civilized peoples have recognized the value of tempering their joys with a play or story chronicling the misfortunes and tragedies of others. Because the earliest Americans countenanced neither play-acting nor the unhealthy influences of the novel, they wrote and read true tales of tragedy and horror in the form of disasters, plagues, and shipwrecks—and of Indian massacres and captivities. As the frontier pushed westward under continuing conflict the tales of Indian captivity accompanied it, gradually becoming our first literature of catharsis in an era when native American fiction scarcely existed. The immense popularity of the Indian captivity narratives in their time is unquestionable. First editions are rare today because they were quite literally read to pieces, and most narratives went through a remarkable number of editions: there are over thirty known editions of the Mary Rowlandson narrative; John Dickenson's account went to twenty-one, including translations into Dutch and German; there are twenty-nine editions of the Mary Jemison captivity, and the popularity of Peter Williamson's narrative carried it through forty-one editions.¹

Over twenty-five years ago, Phillips Carleton made the point that the vast body of Indian captivity narratives was known mostly to historians, anthropologists, and collectors of Americana.² Regrettably, that observation is as true today as then. And in the rare instances where informed scholarship has turned its attention to the narratives, emphasis has been upon the historical and cultural rather than the literary value of the tales. In a pioneering and widely influential study, Roy Harvey Pearce in 1947 conceived of the Indian captivity narrative as but a thread in the loose fabric of American cultural history; consequently he discerned not a single genre but rather several “popular” sub-literary genres ranging from the religious confessional to the noisomely visceral thriller, their several significances shaped and differentiated largely by the society for which the narratives were intended.³ This approach places the narratives almost exclusively within the province of historical scholarship, and an unfortunate corollary to this conception holds that the captivity narratives have but “incidental literary value” and enter literary history proper only with the Indian episodes in Charles Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly (1799).

This fairly states the general view that has stood for over twenty-three years. The present intention is not so much to overturn that view as to effect an accommodation of its apprehension of several popular genres by considering the entire range of captivity narratives as a single genre—developing and demonstrating variations of cultural application—but nonetheless a single genre in terms of the shared literary, as opposed to historical and narrow cultural, significances of the narratives. The discrete historical and cultural significances of the Indian captivity narrative, however illuminating they may be in their religious, propagandistic, and visceral applications, are subordinate to the fundamental informing and unifying principle in the narratives collectively: the core of ritual acts and patterns from which the narratives derive their essential integrity. The variable cultural impulses of the narratives of Indian captivity are then but a part of their total effect, and the narratives are more than the simple sum of their parts. The result is a true synthesis. The shared ritual features of the captivity narratives, manifested in both act and configuration, provide that synthesis.

I

Unrelated to a particular time yet found in particular records of human experience, certain acts tend to have a common meaning and serve similar functions. Recurring acts recorded in the narratives of Indian captivity, given their underlying beliefs, can be seen as ritual reenactments of practices widely separated in time and place. Principal among these are cannibalism and scalping. Cannibalism, a practice rather more widespread among American Indians than is commonly understood, is reported in captivity narratives from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries and involves a geographical span of tribes ranging from New England forest Indians to tribes of the Great Lakes to the Plains and Southwest Indians: Mohawks, Delawares, Chippewas, Miamis, Ottawas, Shawnees, Chickasaws, and Comanches. For tribes that practiced it, cannibalism was a ritual of war, like their purification rites. The practice of eating the flesh of an enemy derived from the belief that the eater could acquire the courage and strength of his victim, a belief that is part of a primitive system of sympathetic or homoeopathic magic. This belief and consequent practice are reported among Indians not only of North America but of Ecuador and Brazil, among bushmen of Central Africa, East Africa, and Southeastern Australia, and even in the Norse Legends.⁴ In this connection, Northrop Frye observes that the metaphorical identification of vegetable, animal, human, and divine bodies has “the imagery of cannibalism” for its demonic parody, citing particularly Dante's Ugolina and Spenser's Serena.⁵ Further, the imagery of cannibalism is seen to involve images of torture and mutilation. American Indian cannibal practices tend to reinforce this imagery.

Jesuit missionary-captive Father Isaac Jogues reports the sacrifice of a woman captive to a Mohawk “demon” god: she was first burnt all over her body and thrown onto a pyre; the body was then cut up, sent to various other villages, and devoured. On another occasion, Jogues's captors lamented not having eaten their most recent Huron captives and resolved, in a prayer to the demon-god, “if we shall ever again capture any, we promise thee to devour them.”⁶ Father Francis Bressani substantiates Jogues's observations on Mohawk cannibalism: the body of one of his slain Huron companions was dismembered—feet, hands, and “most fleshy parts of the body to eat, as well as the heart.” Bressani also witnessed an act of cannibalism when the burnt body of another slain Huron was brought into his cabin: “Before my eyes, they skinned and ate the feet and hands.”⁷ Alexander Henry's account of cannibalism among his Chippewa captors illustrates the customary rather than culinary significance of the act for most tribes: of seven dead white men, the Indians took the fattest, cut off the head and divided the rest into five parts; these were put into five kettles over as many fires. Henry's “master” ate a hand and a large piece of flesh, remarking that while he did not relish it, the custom among Indian nations when returning from war was to make a feast from among the slain. This is done, Henry was told, to inspire warriors with courage. On another occasion, he was informed that, in preparation for returning to the siege of Detroit, it was proposed that he should be killed in order to give the warriors “a mess of English broth to raise their courage.”⁸ In most tribes, eating of human flesh was acceptable only as ritual. John Tanner tells of an Ottawa who had eaten his dead wife because of hunger; the tribe considered him unworthy to live and wanted to put him to death.⁹ Yet, other tribes appeared to enjoy the practice. Charles Johnston's fellow captive, William Flinn, was burned at the stake and then devoured by Shawnees, one of whom later remarked to Johnston that Flinn's flesh was “sweeter than any bear's meat.”¹⁰ During Rachel Plummer's captivity, her Comanche captors engaged in a battle with Osages and, victorious, boiled and ate the dead Osage warriors. Rachel was offered the foot of one, but declined.¹¹

Blood-drinking was among many tribes considered generally salutary and often specifically medicinal. Charles Johnston tells of a fellow captive wounded in the attack that led to their capture. The wound was washed by a squaw who caught the bloody water in a cup and forced the injured man to drink it, saying it would hasten the cure (p. 47). Mary Kinnan witnessed Delawares “quaff with extatic pleasure the blood of the innocent prisoner” undergoing torture.¹² Jonathan Carver reports that during the massacre of men, women, and children at Fort William Henry, “many of these savages drank the blood of their victims, as it flowed warm from the fatal wound.”¹³ Alexander Henry observed at the massacre at Fort Michilimackinac that “from the bodies of some, ripped open, their butchers were drinking the blood, scooped up in the hollow of joined hands, and quaffed amid shouts of rage and victory” (p. 291). Cannibalism, as practiced among American Indians, was essentially a ritual enactment and, even in those instances where tribes developed a taste for human flesh, had its origins in deeply rooted primitive systems of sympathetic magic. Other Indian barbarities have equally primitive foundations.

The taking of scalps, a practice popularly thought to have originated with the American Indian, was in part a manifestation of far older beliefs ascribing magical powers to the hair. Anthropology attests the widespread primitive belief in the hair as the seat of the soul, and the hair is also a principal feature of the primitive and pagan conception of the external or separable soul: “The idea that the soul may be deposited for a longer or shorter time in some place of security outside the body, or at all events in the hair, is found in the popular tales of many races. It … is not a mere figment devised to adorn a tale, but is a real article of primitive faith which has given rise to a corresponding set of customs.”¹⁴ American Indians, like many other primitive peoples, attributed special powers to the hair and believed the scalp to be somehow connected with a person's fate. Consequently, the scalp often symbolized life itself. The practice of scalping scarcely requires elaboration and documentation here, and the narratives of captivity—like all other Indian histories, relations, and accounts—are replete with descriptions and commentaries upon it. It should be noted, however, that scalps were generally desired in a diameter of approximately two inches (although more than that was often taken in haste¹⁵), a fact that tends to substantiate the symbolic as opposed to merely evidential significance of the practice.

These ritualized acts—cannibalism and scalping—are themselves significant ritual features of the Indian captivity narrative; yet they but surround and support the primary unifying and informing pattern that lies at the heart of the narratives, the configuration of greatest meaning that binds them collectively into a coherent whole: that of the Hero embarked upon the archetypal journey of initiation. The quest, or ancient ritual of initiation, is a variation of the fundamental Death-Rebirth archetype and traditionally involves the separation of the Hero from his culture, his undertaking a long journey, and his undergoing a series of excruciating ordeals in passing from ignorance to knowledge. In the Monomyth, this consists of three stages or phases: separation, transformation, and enlightened return.¹⁶ The pattern of the Indian captivity experience, in its unfolding narrative of abduction, detention/adoption, and return, closely follows this fundamental configuration.

II

“Ah, poor man, Rip Van Winkle was his name, but it's twenty years since he went away from home with his gun, and never has been heard of since … whether he shot himself, or was carried away by the Indians, nobody can tell.” That such separation from one's culture was symbolic death, and return (from either cave in the Kaatskills or captivity in the forest) a symbolic rebirth is implicit in Irving's tale. Those who were literally torn from their homes and carried into Indian captivity were for the most part dead to their families and friends. In one narrative after another, the returning captive is met in an affecting scene by relatives who confess that they had never expected to see him alive again. But it is in the captivity experience itself—the transformation by immersion into an alien culture accompanied by ritualized adoption into that culture—that constitutes the initiatory process and prepares for the enlightened return or rebirth of the initiate. This process of transformation in the captivity experience involves first a ritual initiatory ordeal, followed by a gradual accommodation of Indian modes and customs, especially those relating to food, and finally a highly ritualized adoption into the new culture.

The ritual ordeal faced by almost all captives was the gauntlet, the initiation into captivity that Heckewelder in his early Indian History gives name to and describes: “On entering the village, [the new captive] is shewn a painted post at the distance from twenty to forty yards, and told to run to it. … On each side of him stand men, women, and children, with axes, sticks, and other offensive weapons, ready to strike him as he runs, in the same manner as is done in the European armies when soldiers, as it is called, run the gauntlet. … Much depends upon the courage and presence of mind of the prisoner.”¹⁷ The Indian gauntlet ritual pervades captivity accounts from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century and was practiced by tribes of wide geographical divergence. Fathers Jogues and Bressani attest the Mohawk ordeal. Jogues describes being required to run the gauntlet in 1642 and being beaten senseless to the ground by clubs, noting that the Indians forming the gauntlet are called “saluters” (p. 31). In 1644 Bressani endured a similar experience to which was added the refinement of a knife-wielding brave who cleft open the Jesuit's hand between two fingers (p. 109). Thomas Brown, taken upon capture in 1757 to an Indian village near Montreal, was met by a crowd of men and women who stripped him naked and told him to run toward a wigwam: “They beat me with sticks and stones all along the way” (p. 16). Henry Grace describes his having to “run the Gantlope” between two rows of Indians, “some beating me with Sticks, and some with their Hands, while others flung any Thing they could lay their Hands on. …”¹⁸ John Slover tells of captives running the ritual gauntlet and having loads of powder fired on their bodies as they ran.¹⁹ Daniel Boone ran a Shawnee gauntlet in 1778, but by ducking, zigzagging, and bowling over some of the Indians on the line, emerged with only bruises and the admiration of his captors.²⁰ Jackson Johonnot reported that all captives entering a new Kickapoo Indian village immediately underwent initiation to the camp by beating.²¹ Major Moses Van Campen ran an Iroquois gauntlet in 1781.²² James Smith was told by his Delaware captors that his gauntlet ordeal was “an old custom, like saying how do you do.”²³ And, as late as 1866, Frank Buckelew was forced to run a gauntlet of whips and clubs wielded by his captors, Lipan Indians in Texas.²⁴

Having suffered this initial ordeal and introduction to captivity, the captive then underwent the second phase of transformation by a gradual accommodation to Indian practices and modes. The most striking and consistently recorded of these accommodations is at once the most fundamental: that of food. In narrative after narrative, captives describe an initial loathing of Indian fare, then a partial compromise of that disgust under extreme hunger, and ultimately a complete accommodation and, in many cases, even relish of the Indian diet. Captives, of course, were given very little to sustain them (Quintin Stockwell reports, for example, that he and four others subsisted on one bear's foot a day among them²⁵), and the food was loathsome to the white palate (“what an Indian can eat is scarcely credible to those who have not seen it,” observed Thomas Morris, a captive during Pontiac's Conspiracy in Ohio²⁶).

After several months' captivity, Father Jogues found rotten oysters, whole frogs (unskinned and uncleaned), and deer intestines full of blood and half-putrified excrement to be “I will not say tolerable, but even pleasing” (p. 54). Mary Rowlandson's experience was typical: during the first two weeks of her captivity she ate hardly anything, disdaining the Indians' “filthy trash”; but thereafter, “though I could think how formerly my stomach would turn against this or that, and I could starve before I could eat such things, yet they were sweet and savoury to my taste.” Among Indian dishes she ultimately found “savoury” were partially cooked horse liver (“as it was, with the blood about my mouth, and yet a savoury bit it was to me”); boiled bear meat (“that was savoury to me that one would think was enough to turn the stomach of a brute creature”); and boiled horses' feet and pieces of “small guts” (“the Lord made that pleasant refreshing, which another time would have been an abomination”).²⁷ Elizabeth Hanson considered want of food “the greatest difficulty, that deserves the first to be named” in her captivity account. Many times she had nothing to eat other than pieces of beaver-skin cut into strips, laid on fire until the hair had been singed away, and then eaten “as a sweet morsel, experimentally knowing that ‘to the hungry soul every bitter thing is sweet.’” Mrs. Hanson lived largely on nuts, tree bark, and roots, though occasionally her captors caught a beaver and gave her “the guts and the garbage,” which she found tolerable even though she was not allowed to clean and wash the offal. Like Mrs. Rowlandson some fifty years before, Elizabeth Hanson knew the extent of her accommodation, that what she had to eat “became pretty tolerable to a sharp appetite, which otherwise could not have been dispensed with. … none knows what they can undergo until they are tried; for what I had thought in my own family not fit for food, would here have been a dainty dish and sweet morsel.”²⁸

Henry Grace relates that it was five days before he could bring himself to stomach the “filthy and wretched” diet of his Indian masters (raw or quarter-done meat “with the Hairs sticking about it”), but ultimately confesses that “Hunger will make a Man eat what he could not think on” (p. 17). Charles Johnston describes eating the flesh of bear cubs during his captivity. The entrails were taken out, the hair singed from the carcasses, and they were roasted whole: “To me it was excellent eating, although it would hardly suit a delicate taste” (p. 56). On the first day of his capture by the Northwest Nootkas, John Jewitt found his meal of clams and whale oil unpalatable: “Both the smell and taste were loathsome to me.” After several months of captivity, he was able to boil whale blubber in salt water and nettles and think it “quite tolerable.”²⁹ Oliver Spencer was given hawk meat and boiled leaves when first captured, but could not eat it (“the taste was not only insipid, but sickening”). Gradually, however, Spencer accommodated and survived.³⁰ Fanny Kelly, offered a slab of raw buffalo flesh, declined it “thinking then it would never be possible for me to eat uncooked meat”; some days later, though still “painful to contemplate,” Indian food was at least palatable. Subsequently, during a sustained Sioux flight from pursuing cavalry, she subsisted for a week on leaves and grass.³¹ Frank Buckelew's accommodation to Indian fare seemed complete: “The raw liver which had been so detestable to me, I soon learned to crave and could eat with as much relish as the savages themselves” (p. 35).

The final phase of transformation, as represented in the captivity experience, is that which effects the deepest immersion into the alien culture and completes the initiation of the Hero: symbolically “becoming” an Indian by ritualized adoption into the tribe. As Leslie Fiedler has accurately perceived, archetypal tensions tend to translate the tale of captivity into one of adoption;³² and it is this stage of the captivity that holds the greatest transforming significance. For some captives, adoption and immersion into Indian culture were so complete that they chose to remain, refusing redemption or release when offered. Most of these captives were, of course, taken at a very early age and quickly forgot their own culture. One of the earliest recorded instances of complete immersion is in the example of Anne Hutchinson's daughter, who was captured by Pequots in Connecticut in 1643 at the age of eight. She was four years in captivity and had forgotten how to speak English; when ransomed she refused to be taken from the Indians and was eventually returned to white civilization against her will.³³ The later but more widely known case of John Williams's daughter Eunice is even more compelling. Williams, in the narrative of his own captivity, relates his initial attempt to redeem his daughter but ultimately must tell the reader very simply, “she is there still; and she has forgotten to speak English.”³⁴ John Slover, taken into his first captivity in 1761 at the age of eight, spent twelve years with Delawares and Shawnees and gave up the life of a savage, he confesses, “with some reluctance—this manner of life had become natural to me” (p. 9). Frances Slocum, taken at the age of five, concealed for fifty years her white identity because she feared that her relatives, of whom she still had recollection, would come and take her away if they knew she was alive. When finally discovered by her surviving sister and brothers, she refused to go with them: “I cannot,” she said. “I am an old tree. … I was a sapling when they took me away. It is all gone past.”³⁵ She died in 1847 at the age of seventy-four. John Tanner seemed all his life torn between both worlds. Captured at the age of nine, he lived with Chippewas and Ottawas in Ohio until 1817 when he emerged from the wilderness at age thirty-seven. In 1846 he disappeared without a trace and, though his end is a mystery, was believed to have returned to the Indians. It is with the other captives, however, those who came back and whose captivity experience can be regarded in the context of the separation, transformation, and return pattern of the Hero's initiation, that the ritual of adoption effects its archetypal significance.

As Father Jogues noted during his captivity, it was the custom of savages “when they spare a prisoner's life, to adopt him into some family to supply the place of a deceased member” (p. 36). Jogues's fellow captive-missionary Father Bressani was himself given to an old Mohawk couple to replace a relative killed by Hurons. Bressani does not describe the ritual attending his adoption, but does say that it took place “with all the usual ceremonies” (p. 116). John Tanner was adopted by an Ottawa whose youngest son had recently died and whose wife had complained that unless he “brought her son back,” that is, brought her a captive whom she might adopt, she could not go on living (p. 55). Charles Johnston's experience among the Shawnees reveals another function of Indian adoption—not only to replace the lost or dead but also as payment for killing a member of the tribe. Johnston relates that it was the custom of the Shawnees, as well as many other tribes, that when a man took the life of another he was obliged to make amends to the dead man's family either by payment or by furnishing a substitute for him. In this manner, Johnston was given to a Mingo to be substituted for a slain Wyandot (pp. 87-88). For whatever reasons, adoption was a widespread, almost universal practice among American Indians, a practice that involved elaborate ceremony and ritual.

Alexander Henry, saved from death even as the tomahawk flashed in his face because one brave decided to adopt him to replace a lost brother, underwent such a ceremony. First his head was shaved except for a spot on the crown. Then his face was painted red and black. Two bead collars were placed about his neck, and his arms were decorated with bands of silver. Finally, a red blanket was given him to complete the ritual (p. 305). Nelson Lee was stripped of his clothes and outfitted in Comanche dress, was required to paint his face daily, and took part in a “covenant” ritual with the chief wherein he opened a vein on his hand and marked in blood his bond to that sachem.³⁶ The adoption ceremony accorded James Smith was even more elaborate. Every hair was pulled out of his head except for a three-inch scalp-lock, which was then decorated Indian fashion. Holes were bored in his ears and nose, and he was given rings and nose jewels. After his head, face, and body were painted, the ceremony was completed by three squaws who dipped him into a river. By this last part of the ritual, Smith was told, “every drop of white blood was washed out of your veins” (pp. 185-186). John M'Cullough's adoption ceremony began by repeated immersion into a river. After being pulled out and told that he “was then an Indian,” he was given the Indian name “Isting-go-weh-hing.”³⁷ Daniel Boone, adopted by Shawnees because the chief wanted him for his son, was dressed in Indian garb, given the name “Sheltowee” (Big Turtle), and had all his hair plucked out except for the traditional scalp-lock (pp. 64-65). Frances Slocum's adoption by Delawares as daughter to a couple who had lost their own child included Indian clothes and an Indian name, as did the ceremony of Hugh Gibson during his five-year captivity.³⁸ Mary Jemison was stripped, taken into a river and washed, and dressed in Indian clothes. This was followed by ritual weeping for the deceased relative whose place she was taking and, finally, bestowing of the Indian name “Dickewamis” (Handsome Girl).³⁹ Robert Eastburn's adoption was also accompanied by a ritualized weeping, after which his adoptive mother “dried up her tears and received me for her son.”⁴⁰ Some ritual adoptions included the practice of tattooing. After Thomas Brown was stripped, had his hair entirely cut off and his face and body painted, the back of his hand was pricked with needles and Indian ink to make a tattoo (p. 18). The adoption of the Oatman girls into the Mohave tribe was effected by the ritual of facial tattooing, after the fashion by which female Mohaves were marked: “They pricked the skin in small regular rows on our chins with a very sharp stick, until they bled freely. Then they dipped these same sticks in the juice of a certain weed that grew on the banks of the river, and then in the powder of a blue stone … and pricked this fine powder into the lacerated parts. They told us that this could never be taken from the face.”⁴¹ Olive Oatman bore these marks the rest of her life.

By whatever means and ceremonies, ritual adoption into the tribe and symbolically becoming a member of the new culture was the ultimate transforming experience of Indian captivity. It remained only for the captive to return to his former culture and complete the journey-adventure. Most captives, having been given up for dead or at best considered “lost” after capture, were received on their return by relatives and friends in the sense of having come from the grave, reborn to the world from which they had passed by means of symbolic death. Robert Eastburn arrived home to be told by his wife and family that they had “thought they should never see me again, till we met beyond the grave” (p. 69). When redeemed, Mrs. Rowlandson stayed for three months with Reverend and Mrs. Thomas Shepard, who, to the reborn captive, seemed “a Father and Mother” to her (p. 163). Peter Williamson was transformed by his captivity to the extent that, after escaping and reaching the home of an old friend, he was not recognized and was even taken for an Indian.⁴² And Charles Johnston, in a remarkable statement that could not be more to the point here, relates that he was ransomed from captivity “by a singular coincidence” on exactly the day he reached the age of twenty-one; in Johnston's own words, “It might be truly and literally denominated my second birth” (p. 98).

The journey of the archetypal initiate, then, proceeds from Separation (abduction), Transformation (ordeal, accommodation, and adoption), and Return (escape, release, or redemption). This ritual passage, one of the most fundamental of all archetypal patterns, finds expression in the narratives of Indian captivity to an extent that renders this configuration an essential structuring device of the tales. This basic pattern, when viewed in the light of such ritual practices as cannibalism and scalping, demonstrates the degree to which elements of distinctly archetypal nature have pervaded and informed the captivity narratives throughout their development. Further, these elements account in large measure for the remarkable pull the captivities have exercised upon readers, an appeal that transcends sectarian religious feeling, narrow chauvinism, or morbidity—the several “popular” subliterary significances. The narratives of Indian captivity are more than cultural indices or curiosities; they touch upon fundamental truths of experience. It is in this that the Indian captivity narratives collectively constitute a single and literary whole, and it is by this that they belong with those expressions of man which draw and shape their materials from the very wellsprings of human experience.

Notes

1. For assistance in acquiring primary materials for this study, grateful acknowledgment is here made to the Special Collections Division, The Newberry Library (Edward E. Ayer Collection); the Reference Department of the Huntington Library; the State Library and Archives, Sacramento, California; and the Documents and Loan Department of the San Jose State College Library. For a valuable compilation of titles and editions of captivity narratives published before 1800, see “Appendix” to R. W. G. Vail's The Voice of the Old Frontier (Philadelphia, 1949).

2. “The Indian Captivity,” American Literature, XV (May, 1943), 169-180. Carleton draws a parallel between the narratives and the Icelandic Sagas in their treatment of violent periods of first settlement, although unlike the Sagas the captivity narratives had no oral tradition.

3. “The Significances of the Captivity Narrative,” American Literature, XIX (March, 1947), 1-20.

4. Sir James George Frazer, The Golden Bough (New York, 1959), pp. 132-133, 178 ff.

5. Anatomy of Criticism (New York, 1967), pp. 148 ff.

6. Captivity of Father Isaac Jogues, of the Society of Jesus, Among the Mohawks, in Perils of the Ocean and Wilderness: or, Narratives of Shipwreck and Indian Captivity, ed. John Gilmary Shea (Boston, 1857), pp. 58-59. Subsequent references will appear in parentheses following quotations.

7. Captivity of Father Francis Joseph Bressani, of the Society of Jesus, in Shea, Perils of the Ocean and Wilderness, pp. 106, 119.

8. Travels and Adventures in Canada and the Indian Territories Between the Years 1760 and 1776 (New York, 1809), in Samuel Gardner Drake, ed., Indian Captivities (Auburn, 1850), pp. 301, 322.

9. A Narrative of the Captivity and Adventures of John Tanner, U.S., During Thirty Years Residence Among the Indians in the Interior of North America (New York, 1830), p. 90.

10. A Narrative of the Incidents Attending the Capture, Detention, and Ransom of Charles Johnston (New York, 1827; reprinted, Cleveland, 1905), p. 104.

11. Narrative of the Perilous Adventures, Miraculous Escapes and Sufferings of Rev. James W. Parker, To Which is Appended a Narrative of the Capture and Subsequent Sufferings of Mrs. Rachel Plummer, His Daughter (Louisville, 1844), p. 27. Some captives were themselves almost driven to cannibalism by hunger. Thomas Brown, for example, escaped from Canada with a friend who subsequently died from starvation; Brown, near dead from hunger himself, cut off as much flesh from the body as he could tie up and carry, resolving to eat it if necessary. He was relieved of the need when he managed to kill three birds (A Plain Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings and Remarkable Deliverance of Thomas Brown, of Charleston, in New-England, Boston, 1760, pp. 20-21).

12. A True Narrative of the Sufferings of Mary Kinnan (Elizabethtown, N. J., 1795), p. 9.

13. Captain Jonathan Carver's Narrative of His Capture, and Subsequent Escape from the Indians, in Drake, Indian Captivities, p. 174.

14. Frazer, p. 599.

15. Rev. John Corbly, for example, relates that his two daughters were scalped alive, one “on whose head they did not leave more than one inch round, either of flesh or skin.” Miraculously, both survived and were living at the time Corbly wrote his account (The Sufferings of John Corbly's Family, in Affecting History of the Dreadful Distresses of Frederic Manheim's Family, Philadelphia, 1794, pp. 7-8).

16. Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces (New York, 1960), pp. 58-80, passim; p. 246. The first stage of the journey, separation, signals the fact that destiny has called the Hero and transferred his spiritual center from his own society to a zone unknown; one manifestation of this fateful region, among others such as a distant land or underground kingdom, is the forest or wilderness. Further, the Hero can go forth of his own volition or he may be carried off by some malignant agent. Once having crossed the threshold of his adventure, the Hero must survive a succession of trials. At the nadir of the mythological round the Hero undergoes a supreme ordeal and is transformed by the experience. The final work is that of the return, and the Hero reemerges from the kingdom of dread (return, resurrection).

17. Rev. John Heckewelder, An Account of the History, Manners, and Customs, of the Indian Nations, in Transactions of the Historical and Literary Committee of the American Philosophical Society (Philadelphia, 1819), I, 212.

18. The History of the Life and Sufferings of Henry Grace (Reading, Pa., 1764), p. 13.

19. Narratives of a Late Expedition Against the Indians; with an Account of the Barbarous Execution of Col. Crawford; and the Wonderful Escape of Dr. Knight and John Slover from Captivity in 1782 (Philadelphia, 1783), p. 22.

20. John Filson, The Discovery, Settlement, and Present State of Kentucke … To Which It Added, An Appendix, Containing I. The Adventures of Col. Daniel Boon (Wilmington, Del., 1784), p. 64.

21. The Remarkable Adventures of Jackson Johonnot, of Massachusetts, Containing an Account of his Captivity, Sufferings, and Escape from the Kickapoo Indians (Boston, 1793), p. 34.

22. A Narrative of the Capture of Certain Americans at Westmoreland, by Savages; and the Perilous Escape which they Effected, by Surprizing Specimens of Policy and Heroism (New-London, Conn., 1784), p. 8.

23. An Account of the Remarkable Occurrences in the Life and Travels of Col. James Smith, During his Captivity with the Indians (Lexington, Ky., 1799), in Drake, Indian Captivities, p. 183.

24. Lillie M. Ross, Life of an Indian Captive (Philadelphia, 1965), p. 55.

25. Increase Mather, An Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providences, Wherein an Account is Given of Many Remarkable and Very Memorable Events (Boston, 1684), in Drake, Indian Captivities, p. 63.

26. Journal of Captain Thomas Morris of His Majesty's XVII Regiment of Infantry, in Thomas Morris, Miscellanies in Prose and Verse (London, 1791), p. 15.

27. The Soveraignty and Goodness of God, Together With the Faithfulness of His Promises Displayed; Being a Narrative of the Captivity and Restauration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson. “The second Addition Corrected and amended” (Cambridge, 1682), reprinted in Narratives of the Indian Wars, ed. C. H. Lincoln (New York, 1913), pp. 131-37, passim; p. 149.

28. An Account of the Captivity of Elizabeth Hanson, Now or Late of Kachecky, in New England … Taken in Substance from her own Mouth, by Samuel Bownas (London, 1760), p. 6-7, 15-16.

29. The Adventures and Sufferings of John R. Jewitt; Only Survivor of the Crew of the Ship Boston, During a Captivity of Nearly Three Years Among the Savages of Nootka Sound (Middletown, Conn., 1815), pp. 9, 58.

30. Indian Captivity: A True Narrative of the Capture of the Rev. O. M. Spencer by the Indians, in the Neighbourhood of Cincinnati, Written by Himself (New York, 1835), p. 69.

31. Narrative of My Captivity Among the Sioux Indians (Hartford, 1871), pp. 76, 103.

32. The Return of the Vanishing American (New York, 1968), p. 90. Fiedler's apprehension of the mythos of Indian captivity, however, is shaped largely by his characteristic critical stance, e.g., seventeenth-century captive-turned-avenger Hannah Duston, tomahawk raised aloft, is seen to embody “the standard Freudian dream of a castrating mother,” an early avatar of “the Great WASP Mother of Us All” (pp. 91-95). In the light of such narrow formulae, Fiedler finds the “insufferably dull and pious journal of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson” quite irrelevant (p. 51).

33. Samuel Gardner Drake, The Aboriginal Races of North America (New York, 1880), p. 133.

34. The Redeemed Captive Returning to Zion: or, a Faithful History of the Remarkable Occurrences in the Captivity and Deliverance of Mr. John Williams (1707; 6th ed., Boston, 1795), p. 36. Eunice later took an Indian husband, a development especially dismaying to her Indian-hating uncle, Cotton Mather.

35. John F. Meginness, Biography of Frances Slocum (Williamsport, Pa., 1891), p. 182.

36. Three Years Among the Comanches, the Narrative of Nelson Lee the Texas Ranger; Containing a Detailed Account of His Captivity among the Indians (1859; reprinted, Norman, Okla., 1957), pp. 115, 122.

37. A Narrative of the Captivity of John M'Cullough, Esq., Written by Himself in Archibald Loudon, A Selection of Some of the Most Interesting Narratives of Outrages, Committed by the Indians, in Their Wars, with the White People, 2 vols. (Carlisle, Pa., 1808-1811), II, 322.

38. An Account of the Captivity of Hugh Gibson among the Delaware Indians, in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Third Series, VI (Boston, 1837), 206.

39. James E. Seaver, A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison (Canandaigua, N. Y., 1824), p. 153.

40. A Faithful Narrative of the Many Dangers and Sufferings, as well as Wonderful and Surprizing Deliverances of Robert Eastburn (Boston, 1758), p. 47.

41. R. B. Stratton, Life Among the Indians, or: The Captivity of the Oatman Girls Among the Apache and Mohave Indians (San Francisco, 1857; reprinted, San Francisco, 1935), p. 134.

42. French and Indian Cruelty; Exemplified in the Life and Various Vicissitudes of Fortune, of Peter Williamson, a Disbanded Soldier (London, 1759), p. 30.