[In the following essay, Pearce examines the evolution of the style and intent of captivity narratives, from religious confessional to pulp thriller, and argues that they provide a window into American popular culture.]

The narrative of Indian captivity has long been recognized for its usefulness in the study of our history and, moreover, has even achieved a kind of literary status. Generally it has been taken as a sort of “saga,” something which somehow is to be understood as expressive of the Frontier Mind—whatever that may be.¹ But this is to make of the captivity narrative a kind of composite, abstracted thing; this is to make a single genre out of the sort of popular form which shapes and reshapes itself according to varying immediate cultural “needs.” Certainly there is a natural basic unity of content in the many narratives which we have; but variation in treatment of content, in specific form, and in point of view is so great as to make for several genres, for several significances. Here matters of pure historical fact (a purity which is often suspect, as we shall see) and ethnological data—that is, of content abstracted from treatment—are beside the point; what is important is what the narrative was for the readers for whom it was written. The significances of the captivity narrative vary from that of the religious confessional to that of the noisomely visceral thriller. The distance between the two sorts of narratives is great; over that distance can be traced the history of the captivity narrative taken as a popular genre—or, more properly, genres. As popular genre, or genres, it comes to have a kind of incidental literary value, enters literary history proper in Edgar Huntly, and functions as a popular vehicle for various historically and culturally individuated purposes. And it is as such that I propose to consider it here.²

I

The first, and greatest, of the captivity narratives are simple, direct religious documents. They are for the greater part Puritan; and their writers find in the experience of captivity, “removal,” hardships on the march to Canada, adoption or torture or both, the life in Canada which so often seemed to consist in nothing but resisting the temptations set forth by Romish priests, and eventual return (this is the classic pattern of the captivity), evidences of God's inscrutable wisdom. Thus Increase Mather in the Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providences (1684) prefaces Quintin Stockwell's story of his captivity with these words:

Likewise several of those that were taken Captive by the Indians are able to relate affecting Stories concerning the gracious Providence of God, in carrying them through many Dangers and Deaths, and at last setting their feet in a large place again. A Worthy Person hath sent me the Account which one lately belonging to Deerfield (his name is Quintin Stockwell,) hath drawn up respecting his own Captivity and Redemption, with the Providence attending him in his distress, which I shall here insert in the Words he himself expresseth. …³

Thus too, John Williams, in dedicating his Redeemed Captive Returning to Zion (1707) to Joseph Dudley, indicates that he tells his story because “The wonders of divine mercy, which we have seen in the land of our captivity, and been delivered therefrom, cannot be forgotten without incurring the guilt of blackest ingratitude.”⁴ The Puritan narrative is one in which the details of the captivity itself are found to figure forth a larger, essentially religious experience; the captivity has symbolic value; and the record is made minute, direct, and concrete in order to squeeze the last bit of meaning out of the experience.

The Stockwell and the Williams narratives, along with Jonathan Dickenson's Quaker God's Protecting Providence Man's Surest Help and Defense (1699), are in the pattern of the best known (and deservedly so) of the narratives, Mrs. Rowlandson's Soveraignty and Goodness of God (1682). Here, it will be recalled, there is the fusion of vivid immediacy and religious intensity. At the very beginning Mrs. Rowlandson writes: “Now away we must go with those barbarous creatures, with our bodies wounded and bleeding, and our hearts no less than our bodies.” And later she pictures the Indians' triumphant celebrations: “This was the dolefullest night that ever my eyes saw. Oh the roaring and singing and dancing and yelling of those black creatures in the night, which made the place a lively resemblance of hell. …” Constantly she prays and considers her life one long terrifying religious adventure.⁵ There is even in the Rowlandson narrative, as in the others which I have instanced, a certain aesthetic quality which derives from the freshness and concreteness of detail with which the narrator explores her experience. Here we have the quality of the diary and that of, say, Edwards's Personal Narrative at their best. Here we have the captivity as a direct statement of a frontier experience, an experience which is taken as part of the divine scheme.

Such narratives were popular in their appeal when they first appeared and so continued.⁶ But gradually the quality of directness, of concern with describing an experience precisely as it had affected the individual who underwent it, of trying somehow to recapture and put down what were taken as symbolic psychic minutiae, began to disappear. Other interests predominated. The propagandist value of the captivity narrative became more and more apparent; and what might be termed stylization, the writing up of the narrative by one who was not directly involved, came to have a kind of journalistic premium.

Cotton Mather propagandizes. He presents in the Magnalia (1702) the direct, religiously intense narratives of Hannah Swarton and Mrs. Duston (Book VI, Chapter II, and Book VII, Appendix, Article XXV) and four “Relations” of “The Condition of the Captives that from time to time fell into the Hands of the Indians; with some very Remarkable Accidents” (Book VII, Appendix, Article VII). He concludes the “Relations” thus:

In fine, when the Children of the English Captives cried at any time, so that they were not presently quieted, the manner of the Indians was to dash out their Brains against a Tree.

And very often, when the Indians were on or near the Water, they took the small Children, and held 'em under Water till they had near Drowned them, and then gave 'em unto their Distressed Mothers to quiet 'em.

And the Indians in their Frolicks would Whip and Beat the small Children, until they set 'em into grievous Outcries, and then throw 'em to their amazed Mothers for them to quiet 'em again as well as they could.

This was Indian Captivity!

If the Magnalia is the record of godly New England's triumph over the wilderness, part of that record is of a triumph over the evil dwellers in the wilderness. Even as Mather rejoices over Christianizing the Indian (Book VI, Chapter VI), so he promotes hatred of the Indian. And in the Magnalia the captivity begins to become explicitly a vehicle of Indian-hatred.

The development of variant texts of God's Mercy surmounting Man's Cruelty, Exemplified in the Captivity and Redemption of Elizabeth Hanson (1728) indicates clearly the pattern of what I have termed stylization of the captivity narrative. The edition of 1728 is direct and colloquial, in the pattern of Mrs. Rowlandson's narrative. The nominal reprint of this (1754) is somewhat more “correct.” And the Account of the Captivity of Elizabeth Hanson which first appeared (so far as I have been able to discover) in 1760 as “Taken in Substance from her own Mouth, by Samuel Bownas,” although it still is in the first person, is made into something even more acceptably “literary”; freshness and direct emotional value have all but disappeared. The beginnings of the three versions will illustrate satisfactorily this matter of stylization:

1728:

As soon as they discovered themselves (having as we understood by their Discourse, been sculking in the Fields some Days watching their Opportunity when my dear Husband, with the rest of our Men, were gone out of the way) two of the barbarous Salvages came in upon us, next Eleven more, all naked, with their Guns and Tomahawks came into the House in a great Fury upon us, and killed one Child immediately, as soon as they entered the Door, thinking thereby to strike in us the greater Terror, and to make us more fearful of them.

Then in as great Fury the Captain came up to me; but at my Request, he gave me Quarter; there being with me our Servant, and Six of our Children, two of the little Ones being at Play about the Orchard, and my youngest Child but Fourteen Days old, whether in Cradle or Arms, I now mind not: Being in that Condition, I was very unfit for the Hardships I after met with, which are briefly contained in the following Pages.

1754:

As soon as the Indians discovered 'emselves (having as we afterwards understood, been sculking in the fields some days watching their opportunity when my dear husband, with the rest of our men, were gone out of the way) two of them came in upon us, and then eleven more, all naked, with their guns and tomahawks, and in a great fury killed one child immediately as soon as they entered the door, thinking thereby to strike in us the greater terror, and to make us more fearful of them.

After which, in like fury the captain came up to me; but at my request, he gave me quarter. There was with me our servant, and six of our children; two of the little ones being at play about the orchard, and my youngest child but fourteen days old, whether in cradle or arms, I now remember not; being in this condition, I was very unfit for the hardships I after met with, which I shall endeavor briefly to relate.

1760:

On the 27th of the Sixth Month, called August, 1725, my husband and all our men-servants being abroad, eleven Indians, armed with tomahawks and guns, who had some time been skulking about the fields, and watching an opportunity of our mens absence, came furiously into the house. No sooner had they entered, than they murdered one of my children on the spot; intending no doubt, by this act of cruelty, to strike the greater degree of terror into the minds of us who survived. After they had thus done, their captain came towards me, with all the appearance of rage and fury it is possible to imagine; nevertheless, upon my earnest request for quarter, I prevailed with him to grant it.

I had with me a servant-maid and six children; but two of my little ones were at that time playing in the orchard. My youngest child was but fourteen days old; and myself, of consequence, in a poor weak condition, and very unfit to endure the hardships I afterwards met with, as by sequel will appear.

And so it goes throughout the entire narrative. Bownas, as a traveling, ministering Quaker, has reworked the Hanson narrative into something which, although its main intent is still to illustrate “the many deliverances and wonderful providences of GOD unto us, and over us,” is essentially a journalistic piece, and as such prefigures the stylistic form of the later captivity narrative.⁷

II

What one sees developing in Cotton Mather's use of the captivity narrative and in Bownas's version of the Hanson narrative became formally characteristic of the genre by the mid-eighteenth century. Religious concerns came to be incidental at most; the intent of the typical writer of the narrative was to register as much hatred of the French and Indians as possible. In order to accomplish this, he produced a blood-and-thunder shocker. Hence the captivity narrative was shaped by the interests of the popular audience towards which it was directed; French and Indian cruelty, not God's Providences, was the issue. The writing of the hack and the journalist, not the direct outpourings of the pious individual, became the standard of, and the means to, this new end. By 1750 the captivity narrative had become the American equivalent of the Grub Street criminal biography. To say all this is not to deny the fact of suffering and hardship and tremendous courage on the part of captives. It is only to record the cultural significance of what the captives had to say about their experiences and of the way in which they said it.

So William Fleming in his Narrative of the Sufferings and Surprizing Deliverances of William and Elizabeth Fleming (1750) records in adventurous detail how he was taken captive on his Pennsylvania farm and was forced by the Indians to guide them to his wife, how she was taken captive, and how after seeing others tortured and killed, the two of them managed to escape. For all of this, he is willing to exculpate the Indians; hence the subtitle of the Narrative reads: “A NARRATIVE necessary to be read by all who are going in the Expedition [against the French], as well as by every BRITISH subject. Wherein it fully appears, that the Barbarities of the Indians is owing to the French, and chiefly their Priests.” The French, their priests, and the French-inspired Indians are the objects of the hatred of many others, among them Nehemiah How (A Narrative of the Captivity of Nehemiah How [1748]), John Gyles (Memoirs of the Odd Adventures, Strange Deliverances, &c. in the Captivity of John Gyles, Esq. [1736]), Joseph Barlett (A Narrative of the Captivity of Joseph Bartlett among the French and Indians [1807, written ca. 1754]), Robert Eastburn (The Dangers and Sufferings of Robert Eastburn [1758]), and Thomas Brown (A plain Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings, and Remarkable Deliverance of Thomas Brown [1760]).

The natural shift from this sort of narrative is to the out-and-out sensational piece. Here the problem for the historian who would wish to make use of such information as the narratives contain would be one of verification. For these stories are truly wild and woolly. One of the best is the immensely popular French and Indian Cruelty Exemplified, in the Life and Various Vicissitudes of Fortune, of Peter Williamson (1757). According to his narrative, Williamson was kidnaped “when, under the years of pupillarity” and taken from his native Scotland to America. There he was sold as a bond servant and eventually, falling into all sorts of good fortune, acquired a wife, a wealthy father-in-law, and a fine frontier Pennsylvania farm. But then came captivity.

He recounts in great and gory detail his struggles, his marches with his captors, and his being tortured. But he adds: “… yet what I underwent was but trifling, in comparison to the torments and miseries which I was afterwards an eye-witness of being inflicted on others of my unhappy fellow creatures.” As the Indians proceed, they murder and pillage and scalp; such prisoners as they take they torture mercilessly. Then Williamson makes his point:

From these few instances of savage cruelty, the deplorable situation of these defenceless inhabitants, and what they hourly suffered in that part of the globe, must strike the utmost horror to a human soul, and cause in every breast the utmost detestation, not only against the authors of such tragic scenes, but against those who through perfidy, inattention, or pusillanimous and erroneous principles, suffered these savages at first, unrepelled, or even unmolested, to commit such outrages and incredible depradations and murders: For no torments, no barbarities that can be exercised on the human sacrifices they get into their power, are left untried or omitted.

He continues, giving a simple illustration of what he means. He describes three persons whom the Indians decided to torture. They were tied to a tree “where one of the villains, with his scalping knife, ript open their bellies, took out their entrails, and burnt them before their eyes, whilst others were cutting, piercing, and tearing the flesh from their breasts, hands, arms, and legs with red hot irons, till they were dead.” Since one was still alive, however, he was buried so that only his head remained above ground; then he was scalped, still alive, and fire put to his head so that “his brains were boiling.” Then, “inexorable to all his plaints, they continued the fire, whilst, shocking to behold! his eyes gushed out of their sockets; and such agonizing torments did the unhappy creature suffer for near two hours, till he was quite dead.” On such details Williamson lovingly dwells. Later he even points out that it is an Indian custom to let children train themselves for warfare by beating out the brains of the useless old people of the tribe!

Williamson continues his own story in this vein. Eventually he escapes, enlists to fight the French and the Indians, records his rejoicing when the soldiers were “cutting, hacking, and scalping the dead Indians” and when they quarreled over possession of Indian scalps. Williamson says that he fought all over the colonies in the middle fifties; he seems to have been in on every major campaign; one wonders how he got around so handily. At any rate, the bulk of his story exists only to exemplify French and Indian cruelties. And its significance here is mainly vulgar, fictional, and pathological.⁸

Other narratives of the type of Williamson's seem also to be mélanges of fact and fiction. To point this out is not to indulge in a kind of historical sophistication, not to forget that captivity and torture and death were hard facts of frontier life. Rather it is to suggest that the writers of these later narratives are not concerned with working up accurate records of their (or others') captivities, but with the salability of penny dreadfuls. Thus the blood-and-thunder History of the Life and Sufferings of Henry Grace (1764) records a ten-year captivity in which Grace was carried back and forth from Canada to the Mississippi country and saw all tribes from the St. John's Indians to the Cherokees. A Brief Narration of the Captivity of Isaac Hollister (1767) has as its high point Hollister's detailing how he cut off five or six pounds of a recently dead fellow-prisoner; one is left to assume that Hollister was thus kept from starving. The Narrative of Mr. John Dodge (1779), in which hatred is shifted from the French- to the British-inspired Indian, is marked by a minute description of the “thoughts that must have agitated the breast of a man, who but a few minutes before saw himself surrounded by Savages,” and who now was being saved in proper melodramatic style. Thus, too, finally, it is with A Narrative of the Capture of certain Americans (1780?), with William Walton's Captivity and Sufferings of Benjamin Gilbert and His Family (1793), and with The Remarkable Adventures of Jackson Johonnot (1793); all are most likely at bottom true, but are built up out of a mass of crude, sensationally presented details.

The journalistic extremity of language and style of these later narratives is typified by that of A True Narrative of the Sufferings of Mary Kinnan (1795). Here, however, it is sensibility which takes over. She begins thus:

Whilst the tear of sensibility so often flows at the unreal tale of woe, which glows under the pen of the poet and the novelist, shall our hearts refuse to be melted with sorrow at the unaffected and unvarnished tale of a female, who has surmounted difficulties and dangers, which on a review appear to be romantic, even to herself?

In this vein she goes on, relating how her captivity broke the pattern of her happy, pastoral life in Virginia: “Here I would mark nature progressing, and the revolutions of the season; and from these would turn to contemplate the buds of virtue and of genius, sprouting in the bosoms of my children.” In the Indian attack her children and her husband were killed:

Gracious God! What a scene presented itself to me! My child, scalped and slaughtered, smiled even then; my husband, scalped and weltering in his blood, fixed on me his dying eye, which, though languid, still expressed an apprehension for my safety, and sorrow at his inability to assist me; and accompanied the look with a groan that went through my heart. Spare me the pain of describing my feelings at this scene, this mournful scene, which racked my agonizing heart, and precipitated me on the verge of madness.⁹

Nevertheless, throughout the narrative she continues to dwell on Indian horror and cruelty and on her own torn sensibilities.

Tales of barbarity and bloodshed, however true at base and however “serious” in intent, were everywhere the thing. Hugh Henry Brackenridge, one of our great Indian haters, edited and caused to be published in the 1780's the garish narratives of Knight and Slover (Narrative of a Late Expedition, 1783). These are particularly interesting because of their verifiable authenticity. Knight and Slover describe their adventures as members of Crawford's expedition into the Ohio country in 1782. The story of their capture and of Crawford's being horribly tortured while Simon Girty looked on is too well known to require retelling here. It is sufficient to note that the narratives are printed mainly to point up Brackenridge's firm belief in the necessity of eliminating entirely those “animals, vulgarly called Indians.” The purpose of the publication of the narratives is put straightforwardly in the prefatory note “To the Public”:

… these Narratives may be serviceable to induce our government to take some effectual steps to chastise and suppress them; as from hence they will see that the nature of an Indian is fierce and cruel, and that an extirpation of them would be useful to the world, and honorable to those who can effect it.

So, too, the Affecting History of the Dreadful Distresses of Frederic Manheim's Family (1793?) is a hodgepodge of journalistic horrors aimed at proving that the Indians exercise “dreadful cruelties” on “persons so unfortunate as to fall into their hands.” The Affecting History is actually a little anthology of choice bits of captivity narratives, each bit selected for its blood-chilling potentialities. In the edition of 1794, issued by commercially wise Matthew Carey, there is a crude engraving, portraying Manheim's daughters, nude at the stake, while Indians dance madly about them. And even such narratives as Luke Swetland's Narrative (ca. 1780) and James Smith's Account of Remarkable Occurrences (1799), although they contain little of Indian horrors (their authors indeed were admittedly rather well treated), are aimed at giving Americans some practical ways of dealing with the Indian on the frontiers.

The various states of the narrative of Mercy Herbeson will sum up the fate of the captivity narrative towards the end of the eighteenth and at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Mrs. Herbeson's captivity came as an aftermath of the failure of St. Clair's expedition against the Indians of the Ohio country, who were now dangerously self-confident and daring. They had waited until her husband and the other men of the neighborhood were gone, awakened her in her sleep, murdered one of her children as they left the cabin, and killed another as they journeyed. She managed to escape on the third day out and, after great suffering, finally reached a settlement, almost naked, starving, with thorns driven all the way through her unshod feet. And the next morning, as she writes, “a young man employed by the magistrates of Pittsburgh came for me to give in my deposition, that it might be published to the American people.”

We have two versions of the deposition, both dated 1792; one of these (Capture and Escape of Mercy Harbison) is a direct, semi-literate narrative in the first person, the quality of which reminds one of the earliest captivity narratives; the other is a third person recounting of this, virtually a summary. This last forms one of the choice bits which is included in the Manheim Affecting History, described above. Then in 1825 the narrative was published as A Narrative of the Sufferings of Massy Harbison. Here the 1792 deposition is expanded into something like the Kinnan narrative. The editor (“J. W.”) points out in his introduction that Mrs. Herbeson is now a poor widow, that she has suffered heroically, and that it is the duty of every good American to keep her memory green. The narrative proper is still in the first person, but it is shot through with pleasantly sentimental bits. Mrs. Herbeson is made to make such comments as this: “Some seem to pass over the seasons of life, without encountering those awfully agitating billows which threaten their immediate destruction; while to others, the passage to the tomb is fraught with awful tempests and overwhelming billows.” Generally sensibility and melodrama take the place of simplicity and directness. Much miscellaneous material on the nature of the savage and on the Indian wars is added. And in the fourth edition (1836) of this version, the “editor's” name, John Winter, appears, the miscellaneous material has practically smothered the original narrative, and there is little or no pretense at authenticity. The publication of a captivity narrative had become an occasion for an exercise in blood and thunder and sensibility.

Moreover, it becomes apparent that towards the end of the eighteenth century American readers were not taking the captivity narrative very seriously. Even for a popular genre, it was quite old and quite tired. In 1796 Mrs. Susannah Willard Johnson felt it necessary to apologize for the publication of her recollections of her captivity in 1749:

Our country has so long been exposed to Indian Wars, that recitals of exploits and sufferings, of escapes and deliverances have become both numerous and trite.—The air of novelty will not be attempted in the following pages; simple facts, unadorned, is what the reader must expect; pity for my sufferings, and admiration at my safe return, is all that my history can excite.

If this prefatory note is genteel, Mrs. Johnson's Narrative is not. Taken captive while pregnant, giving birth to her child while on the march, adopted into an Indian family, and finally sold to the French and then ransomed by her family—she still cannot expect that her experiences will be taken as seriously as they should be.

And something analogous to this also seems to have been the experience of Mrs. Jemima Howe. For, objecting to the polished-up and hence commercially acceptable version of her captivity published by David Humphreys in his Essay on the Life of the Honourable Major-General Israel Putnam (1788), she allowed the Reverend Bunker Gay to edit a Genuine and Correct Account of her captivity in 1792; truth was more important than the journalistic appeal demanded by American readers. And later, to take another sort of example, Matthew Bunn, apparently finding that his Narrative (1806) was not being swallowed whole, appended a truth-swearing affidavit to editions of his story appearing after 1826. By 1800, then, the captivity narrative had all but completed its decline and fall.

III

It is as the eighteenth-century equivalent of the dime novel that the captivity narrative has significance for the history of our literature. We have already seen how in the latter half of the eighteenth century it had become more and more customary to work up the narrative into something exciting and journalistically worth while by stylizing and by adding as much fictional padding as possible. There are, of course, narratives which are out-and-out fakes—for example, A Surprizing Account of the Captivity and Escape of Philip M'Donald & Alexander M'Leod (1794), “Abraham Panther's” A Very Surprising Narrative of a Young Woman Discovered in a Rocky Cave (1788?), The Surprising Adventures and Sufferings of John Rhodes (1799), and “Don Antonio Descalves's” Travels to the Westward (1794?). But these narratives differ from such as those of Peter Williamson and Mrs. Kinnan only in the degree of their absurdity; and they are published as genuine and authentic accounts. What I should like to consider here are two specifically “literary” pieces, Ann Eliza Bleecker's History of Maria Kittle (1793) and Charles Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly (1799), both of which were intended to achieve much of their effects as they related to the captivity genre of the 1790's.

The History of Maria Kittle is simply a captivity narrative turned novel of sensibility. This, Mrs. Bleecker says, is a “true” story:

However fond of novels and romances you [she is addressing the novel to a Miss Ten Eyck] may be, the unfortunate adventures of one of my neighbours, who died yesterday, will make you despise that fiction, in which, knowing the subject to be fabulous, we can never be so truly interested.

The “unfortunate” adventures are the stock materials of the captivity, conditioned, as I have indicated, by female sensibility. Horror is piled on horror. The Indian raiders come, shoot Maria's brother-in-law (her husband is away, of course), tomahawk that brother-in-law's pregnant wife, and tear Maria's infant son from her arms and “dash his little forehead against the stones.” Her daughter hides herself in a closet and is burned alive when the Indians set fire to the house. Maria and another brother-in-law are taken prisoner; and the march begins. On all this she soliloquizes:

O barbarous! surpassing devils in wickedness! so may a tenfold night of misery enwrap your black souls as you have deprived the babe of my bosom, the comfort of my cares, my blessed cherub, of light and life—O hell! are not thy flames impatient to cleave the center and engulph these wretches in thy ever burning waves? are there no thunders in Heaven—no avenging Angels—no God to take notice of such Heaven defying cruelties?¹⁰

Pitched thus, the History goes on through suffering, struggling, and bloodshed to eventual rescue, ransom, and reunion. Mrs. Bleecker delights in gruesomeness—in, as she says, opening the sluice gates of her readers' eyes. She is interested, most of all, in—and this again is her phrasing—the luxury of sorrow. And she finds that this is to be achieved by actualizing the potentialities of the captivity narrative as novel of sensibility. Still, the distance between the two was, as we have already seen, really not very great.

Charles Brockden Brown similarly is interested in the luxury of horror and, perhaps more seriously, in the workings of a mind under abnormal stress. This American Gothicism he points up in Edgar Huntly by making marauding Indians representative of the terrors of existence on the frontier, thus attempting to domesticate the English genre from which his novel stems:

One merit the writer may at least claim: that of calling forth the passions and engaging the sympathy of the reader by means hitherto unemployed by preceding authors. Puerile superstitions and exploded manners, Gothic castles and chimeras, are the materials usually employed for this end. The incidents of Indian hostility, and the perils of the Western wilderness, are far more suitable; and for a native of America to overlook these would admit of no apology.

This, of course, is from Brown's famous preface. If English writers were to use medieval materials for their romances, American writers were to tap native Gothic sources.

It will be recalled that in Chapter XVI Huntly finds himself in an underground pit, with no knowledge of how he got there or how he is to get out. After a series of storm-and-stress adventures, he does find his way to a cave which will lead him out; but the cave is occupied by a party of raiding Indians with a girl captive. Huntly manages to kill the Indian sentinel and to escape with the girl to the deserted hut of an Indian crone whom he calls Queen Mab. Indians come to the hut, and Huntly kills them, meantime being wounded himself. When a rescue party arrives, Huntly is thought to be dead and is left alone. But his Indian adventures continue. And in the process of these adventures he kills another Indian, gets lost trying to make his way home through the wilds, is mistaken for an Indian and pursued, and finally discovers that the Indian raiders have killed the uncle with whom he has lived.

Brown does not reproduce the captivity narrative as such; but he capitalizes on all that such narratives had come to mean for American readers—a meaning which rose out of emphasis on physical terror, suffering, and sensationalism. He is careful to account exactly for Huntly's fascination by and fear of the Indians: They had murdered his parents. As he has Huntly say:

Most men are haunted by some species of terror or antipathy which they are, for the most part, able to trace to some incident which befell them in their early years. You will not be surprised that the fate of my parents, and the body of this savage band, who, in the pursuit that was made after them, was overtaken and killed, should produce lasting and terrific images in my fancy. I never looked upon or called up the image of a savage without shuddering.¹¹

Brown was thus doing little that was new. He was simply legitimatizing much that was part of the captivity narrative and its sensational offshoots in the 1790's.¹²

IV

The captivity narrative continued to be a popular journalistic, terroristic vehicle through the first three quarters of the nineteenth century. New episodes came with new frontiers; yet patterns and themes were reproduced again and again. There is little need of detailing these, I think; for they simply define and redefine the captivity as we have seen it produced in the 1780's and 1790's. I have seen some forty narratives printed between 1813 and 1873, all of which seem to stem from real enough experiences, but all of which have been worked up into something terrible and strange. Their language is most often that of the hack writer gone wild. Even when they appear to be genuine productions of the nominal narrator, they tend to be formed according to the pattern of the captivity narrative as pulp thriller.¹³

As is to be expected, the problem of authenticity in some of the narratives of the first half of the nineteenth century is hopelessly confused. Thus the Narrative of the Captivity and Extreme Sufferings of Mrs. Clarissa Plummer (1839) seems to be worked up from A Narrative of the Captivity of Mrs. Horn and the Narrative of Mrs. Rachel Plummer, both of the same year. The writer of the first of these three simply put together the best (and wildest) parts of the second and third. The Narrative of the Capture and Providensial Escape of Misses Frances and Almira Hall (1832) is basically true, but the captives' names were Sylvia and Rachel and the details of the actual captivity have been highly colored in the narrative.¹⁴ And in An Affecting Narrative of the Captivity and Sufferings of Mrs. Mary Smith (1818), which is a tale of the Creek War and of Mrs. Smith's being rescued by a detachment of Jackson's army, the torture episode is lifted verbatim from the title narrative in the Affecting History of the Dreadful Distresses of Frederic Manheim's Family (1793).¹⁵ Faced with such a confusion of fact and fiction, the twentieth-century reader can only wonder.

Already, however, the captivity narrative had been looked on from something of a scholarly point of view. Certainly, if the coming of a document into the province of antiquarian scholarship and pseudo scholarship means that that document is no longer immediately vital, that its vitality has to be recovered, as it were—then the captivity narrative as a significant popular form was all but dead in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. The problem now was to “use” the captivity narrative, to see what it revealed about the frontier and the frontiersman, to broaden the scope of the American historical imagination.

In short, such narratives were collected and anthologized for what their editors (rather self-consciously, to be sure) insisted were scholarly reasons. The earlier collections seem to be equally sensational, propagandist, and academic. Archibald Loudon calls his two-volume collection (1808) A Selection of Some of the Most Interesting Narratives of Outrages Committed by the Indians in Their Wars, with the White People. He is proud that his is the first genuinely scholarly collection of such narratives and intends it for historians: “The historian, will here find materials to assist him in conveying to after ages, an idea of the savages who were the primitive inhabitants of this country; and to future generations of Americans, the many difficulties, toils, and dangers, encountered by their fathers, in forming the first settlement of a land, even at this day so fair, so rich, in every kind of cultivation and improvement.” And beyond this: “The philosopher who speaks with delight, of the original simplicity, and primitive innocence of mankind, may here learn, that man, uncivilized and barbarous, is even worse than the most ferocious wolf or panther of the forest.” Finally, Loudon quotes, approvingly of course, Brackenridge on the ignoble savage.¹⁶

Significantly, Loudon includes in his collection only narratives and anecdotes which support his thesis; but all these, he indicates, are “compiled from the best authorities.” Included are the Knight and Slover narratives, the whole of the Manheim Affecting History compilation, the narrative of Mrs. Herbeson, and many another such. Here Loudon sets the pattern for three other editors who follow him, Samuel Metcalf (A Collection of Some of the Most Interesting Narratives of Indian Warfare in the West [1821]), Alexander Withers (Chronicles of Border Warfare [1831]), and John A. M'Clung (Sketches of Western Adventure [1832]).

Later collections are somewhat more objective than these. So Samuel Gardner Drake refrains from comment when he includes two New England captivity narratives in his vastly popular Indian Biography (first printed in 1832 and reprinted many times thereafter in various versions under various titles). His large-scale work with the captivity narrative, however, is to be found in his Indian Captivities (1839), a collection which may be called truly scholarly in intent. As Drake indicates, he prints only “entire Narratives,” and he has not “taken any liberties with the language of any of them, which would in the remotest degree change the sense of a single passage. …” He realizes that these narratives will shock some of his readers, but he reminds them that the stories are only “pages of Nature”; and the fashion of studying those pages “has now long obtained, and pervades all classes.” And he points out that there is much to be learned incidentally about the Indian and his nature and customs in these narratives. Thus they are worth the study of historians and scientists.¹⁷

Interestingly enough, Drake takes time out to attack other “collections of Indian Narratives of a similar character to this.” They are similar in title only, he insists; for their editors tamper with the original texts. Drake will let the captives speak for themselves and thus preserve the integrity of their narratives. And then he presents his narratives, some twenty-nine of them, including those of Mrs. Rowlandson, Mrs. Hanson, Mrs. Howe, How, Williamson, Colonel Smith, and Manheim. Others he prints from manuscripts which he apparently obtained from local historical societies. He offers little comment on the individual narratives. He takes his task as editor very seriously.

So, too, one J. Pritts, following largely Withers's Chronicles of 1831, published in 1839 his Incidents of Border Life, Illustrative of the Times and Conditions of the First Settlements in Parts of the Middle and Western States. He indicates that he is publishing this collection as the result of a

determination on our part to collect as many of the printed fragments of that part of our country's history as a diligent research might enable us to procure; and from the collection, and such additional resources as might fall within our reach, to compile a volume embracing whatever might seem interesting and suitable to the design and scope of the desired work.¹⁸

Although this collection is localized, in form and intent it closely parallels that of Drake.

Finally, even the great Schoolcraft appended to his much reprinted The American Indians, their History, Condition, and Prospects (first issued in 1844-1845 under the title Onéata, or The Red Race of America) an “Appendix, containing Thrilling Narratives, Daring Exploits, Etc. Etc.” And there is serious editorial treatment of single captivity narratives in Edwin James's A Narrative of the Captivity and Adventures of John Tanner (1830) and in Lewis Henry Morgan's notes to editions of Seaver's Narrative of the Life of Mary Jemison appearing after 1847 (which, incidentally, contrast greatly with the materials and manner of the narrative itself). Thus, even as sensational narratives were being produced, the older narratives—sensational or not—were being considered for their possible historical and ethnological value.

V

From Mrs. Rowlandson through Williamson and Mrs. Kinnan and Mrs. Smith to Dr. Drake is indeed a long, long way. The captivity narrative as a popular genre varies with the quality of the cultural milieu in which it is produced; it comes finally into the province of historical scholarship, for the immediate cultural “need” for it is gone, or almost gone. Certainly, so long as the narrative continues to be produced, the experience which it records is at core vital; but to say this is only partially to describe both experience and narrative. For an experience and a narrative, as we have seen, can be vital for many different reasons. And the captivity narrative is interesting and valuable to us, I submit, not because it can tell us a great deal about the Indian or even about immediate frontier attitudes towards the Indian, but rather because it enables us to see more deeply and more clearly into popular America culture, popular American issues, and popular American tastes. As religious confessional, as propaganda, and as pulp thriller, the captivity narrative gives us sharp insight into various segments of popular American culture. Only a properly historical view, a consideration of form, impact, and milieu as well as of content, will enable us to see what the captivity narrative really was and came to be.

Notes

1. This thesis has most recently and most fully been worked out by Phillips D. Carleton, “The Indian Captivity,” American Literature, XV, 169-180 (May, 1943).

2. I base this study on an examination of the great collection of captivity narratives in the Ayer Collection of the Newberry Library and of various narratives, not in the Ayer Collection, which I have seen at the Library of Congress and the Huntington Library. Generally I have cited the narratives by short titles, quoting, when possible, from modern reprints which are relatively easy of access. I have not been concerned with problems of small-scale textual variants in those narratives which were widely reprinted; nor have I attempted, except incidentally, to make this a bibliographical study. This last is the enormous task on which Mr. R. G. W. Vail has been engaged for some years; completion of it will mean that it will be possible to write a satisfactorily detailed history of the narrative. Meantime, I have been able to see at least one exemplar of each of the great bulk of the known narratives; and I have attempted to consider each for its significance at the point of its publication. Finally, I should note that this essay is at once tangential and supporting to a much larger (and, I hope, comprehensive) study on which I am now engaged, a study of the impact of the Indian on the American mind and creative imagination from 1607 to ca. 1850.

3. P. 39.

4. I cite the edition of Springfield, Mass., 1908 (which reprints the text of the sixth edition, 1795), p. 2.

5. The Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (Boston, 1930), pp. 9-10.

6. The Rowlandson narrative, for example, had gone through fifteen editions by 1800.

7. It is worth noting here that all versions of the Hanson narrative seem heretofore to have been attributed to Samuel Bownas. Actually there appear to be two basic versions of the narrative, those stemming from the 1728 text (God's Mercy) and those stemming from the 1760 text (Account of the Captivity). Although Sabin (30264) adds Bownas's name to the 1754 edition of God's Mercy, the name does not appear on the title-page, as it does in editions deriving from the 1760 Account. Bownas himself, in his posthumously published journal (An Account of the Life, Travels, and Christian Experiences in the Work of the Ministry of Samuel Bownas [London, 1756]), notes that he visited Mrs. Hanson in 1726 and took down an account of her captivity “from her own Mouth.” Then he presents a summary, of about 250 words, of her narrative and follows it with this postscript: “The incredible and severe Trials the poor Woman and her Children went through during their Captivity, I cannot here describe to the full. … After my return to Europe, I saw at Dublin a Relation of this extraordinary Affair in a printed Narrative, which was brought over by a Friend from America” (Account of the Life [Philadelphia, 1759], pp. 179-180). Since Bownas was in Dublin in 1740 (Account of the Life, p. 215) and since he died in 1753, it would seem that he saw the 1728 edition of God's Mercy (which was printed at New York and Philadelphia) and later polished it up for the reading public and retitled it An Account of the Captivity of Elizabeth Hanson. One bibliographical problem remains: How can one account for the fact that the first known version of An Account was published in London in 1760, after Bownas's death? For this problem I can offer no solution except to point out that Bownas's journal was published (in a polished-up version too?) three years after his death; perhaps he left other religiously useful papers. Finally, I should note that I have seen editions of God's Mercy dated 1728, 1754, 1803, and 1824 (this last called The Remarkable Captivity and Surprising Deliverance of Elizabeth Hanson) and editions of An Account dated 1760, 1782, 1787, and 1815. The editions of God's Mercy are all American; those of An Account all English. Such, I might piously add, is the sort of problem which one prays that Mr. Vail can solve!

8. I have quoted here from the edition of Edinburgh, 1792, pp. 19, 24, 25. Incidentally, the Williamson narrative offers another very troublesome bibliographical problem. In such late editions as I have seen there are various complex appendices and many textual variants.

9. A True Narrative (Elizabethtown, 1795), pp. 3, 4, 5.

10. I quote from The History of Maria Kittle (Hartford, 1797), pp. 3, 21-22.

11. I quote from the edition of New York, 1928, ed. D. L. Clark, pp. xxiii, 219.

12. It is worth noting here that the captivity narrative finds poetic expression in The Returned Captive, A Poem Founded on a Late Fact (1787). Here poetic and subject matter are nicely complementary; both are gruesome. Too, Andrew Coffinberry's Forest Rangers (1842), as a poetic account of Wayne's campaign, derives much of its epical strength from its relation to the popular captivity narrative.

13. For examples of such narratives, see Narrative of the Captivity and Sufferings of Ebenezer Fletcher, of New-Ipswich (1813?); An Affecting Account of the Tragical Death of Major Swan, and of the Captivity of Mrs. Swan and infant Child by the Savages, in April Last (1815); Narrative of Henry Bird (1815); Zadock Steele, The Indian Captive (1818); James E. Seaver, A Narrative of the Life of Mary Jemison (1824); Charles Johnston, A Narrative of the Incidents Attending the Capture, Detention, and Ransom of Charles Johnston (1827); Ewel Jeffries, A Short Biography of John Leeth (1831); Narrative of the Captivity and Providential Escape of Mrs. Jane Lewis (1833); Captivity and Sufferings of Mrs. Mason, with an account of the Massacre of her Youngest child (ca. 1836); Narrative of the Captivity and Extreme Sufferings of Mrs. Clarissa Plummer (1838); Narrative of the Massacre, by the Savages, of the Wife and Children of Thomas Baldwin (1835); A Narrative of the Captivity of Mrs. Horn and Her two Children with Mrs. Harris, by the Camanche Indians (1839); Hiram Hunter, Narrative of the Captivity and Sufferings of Isaac Knight from Indian Barbarity (1839); Narrative of the Extraordinary Life of John Conrad Shafford, Known by Many by the Name of the Dutch Hermit (1840); four narratives by Josiah Priest; The Low Dutch Prisoner (1839), A True Narrative of the Capture of David Ogden (1840), The Fort Stanwix Captive (1841), and A True Story of the Extraordinary Feats, Adventures, and Sufferings of Matthew Calkins (1841); Indian Battles, Murders, Sieges, and Forays in the South-West (1853); Nelson Lee, Three Years among the Camanches (1859); Ann Coleson, Miss Coleson's Narrative of her Captivity among the Sioux Indians! (1864); Fanny Kelly, Narrative of my Captivity among the Sioux Indians (1871); The True Narrative of the Five Years' Suffering & Perilous Adventures, by Miss Barber, Wife of “Squatting Bear,” A Celebrated Sioux Chief (1873). Interesting in this light too are Indian Anecdotes and Barbarities (1837), which was reprinted virtually verbatim as Indian Atrocities! Affecting and Thrilling Anecdotes (1846).

14. See Narratives of Captivity among the Indians of North America, Publications of the Newberry Library, No. 3 (Chicago, 1912), pp. 67-68.

15. Cf. the Smith narrative (Williamsburgh, 1818), pp. 13-14, with the Manheim narrative, ed. 1794, reprinted in the Magazine of History, Extra No. 152 (1929), pp. 169-170.

16. I quote from the reprint of Harrisburg, 1888, p. iv.

17. I have seen reprints of this collection, with variant titles, dated 1841, 1846, 1850, 1851, and 1870. I quote from the first edition (1839), pp. v-vii.

18. (Chambersburg, Pa., 1839), p. iii. This was reprinted with additional material in Abingdon, Va., 1849, as the Mirror of Olden Time Border Life.