SOURCE: "Mary Jenison and Rebecca Bryan Boone: At Home in the Woods," in The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630-1860, University of North Carolina Press, 1984, pp. 68-89.

[In the essay that follows, Kolodny examines the conflict between the nineteenth-century ideal of white womanhood and the captivity narratives authored by "Indianized" women.]

Always disturbing to a white society determined to replace the forests and their native inhabitants with "a civilized Manner of Living" was the specter of white children, once having experienced Indian ways, forever attached to them. At a prisoner exchange between the Iroquois and the French in upper New York in 1699, Cadwallader Colden observed that "notwithstanding the French Commissioners took all Pains possible to carry Home the French, … few of them could be persuaded to return." "The English had as much Difficulty. No Arguments, no Intreaties, nor Tears of their Friends and Relations, could persuade many of them to leave their new Indian Friends and Acquaintance." Even among those who were so persuaded, Colden continued, "several … in a little Time grew tired of our Manner of living, and run away again to the Indians, and ended their Days with them."¹ In the next century, Benjamin Franklin echoed Colden's observations, noting that

when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and have lived a while among them, tho' ransomed by their Friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a Short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first good Opportunity of escaping again into the Woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them.²

It was a situation that called into deepest question the Europeans' claim to a superior cultural organization, especially because, as Colden also noted (with no little chagrin), the reverse was never the case. "Indian Children have been carefully educated among the English, cloathed and taught, yet," he conceded, "I think, there is not one Instance, that any of these, after they had Liberty to go among their own People, and were come to Age, would remain with the English, but returned to their own Nations, and became as fond of the Indian Manner of Life as those that knew nothing of a civilized Manner of Living."³

As I have suggested earlier, the eagerness with which Americans purchased books like John Filson's Adventures of Col. Daniel Boon (along with its many reprintings), Alexander Henry's Travels and Adventures in Canada and the Indian Territories, Between the Years 1760 and 1776 (first published in 1809), and, beginning in 1823 with The Pioneers, James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking novels, was no doubt due—at least in part—to these texts' reassuring response to the gnawing Euro-American fear of Indianization and the accompanying distrust of "escaping … into the Woods." For all their temporary adoption into Indian families, and their knowledge of Indian woodcraft, both the real-life Boone and Henry clearly retained their white manners and their allegiance to the settlements; and Cooper's Natty Bumppo always insisted on his "white gifts."⁴ All three, moreover, refrained from sexual contact with the Indian. Boone asserted an adoptive family of parents and siblings; Henry lived and hunted with several tribes, but accepted only the brotherhood (and surrogate fatherhood) of Wawatam; and, in The Last of the Mohicans (1826), the single novel in which he approached the notion of miscegenation, Cooper had Natty repeatedly insist on his identity as "a man without a cross."⁵

If such were the heroes that white society would publicly take to its bosom, in private that same society wondered and gossiped about the others, those who had escaped "into the Woods" and embraced Indian life to its fullest. For over half a century, for example, Eunice Williams inspired both rumor and curiosity in her native New England. The daughter of the Reverend John Williams, Eunice was taken captive as a small child in the winter of 1704, during the famous French and Indian raid on the town of Deerfield, Massachusetts.⁶ She was then adopted by her Indian captors, and, despite many entreaties from various family members, it was more than thirty years before she returned to New England. When she did, first in the autumn of 1740 and then again the next summer, she came accompanied by her Indian husband and their two daughters. She would not, however, make any other concessions to the world of her birth. In consequence, for over fifty years following her visits, local legend attested that she had preferred the Indian blanket to the white woman's dress and had insisted on a tepee pitched on her brother's lawn rather than sleep within his house.⁷ But if stories like these—and there were many others—caught local fancies, they were never the stuff of legend or myth. There were no doubt several reasons for this. In the case of Eunice Williams, the story of her life with the Indians would have been difficult (albeit not impossible) to record since she no longer spoke English and had to communicate with her white family through an interpreter. More important, perhaps, though her marriage to an Indian may have fascinated the residents of Deerfield, few English colonials were as yet prepared to accept the fact of apparently willing miscegenation, especially where the white partner was a woman. (That male hunters and traders often took Indian "squaw wives," as they were scornfully termed, was common knowledge; but most whites preferred to see these as temporary unions of convenience, or else wrote off the white hunter as hopelessly "Indianized.") At the heart of such denials, however, may have been something more than the habitual white terror of interracial mixings. For, to accept a white woman's intimacy with the Indian was, as well, to accept her intimacy with the forest spaces he inhabited. And from the eighteenth century through the first quarter of the nineteenth, as we have seen, those spaces were imaginatively being wrested from the Indian in order to be given over exclusively to the white male hunter. In 1823, exploiting precisely this aspect of the burgeoning Boone mythology, Cooper's Natty Bumppo declared himself "form'd for the wilderness."⁸

Into Americans' studied literary silence on the subject of white-red intermarriage, and into the wilderness preserve of the white male hunter, there intruded in 1824 two landmark texts: Lydia Maria Child's historical romance, Hobomok: A Tale of Early Times, and James Everett Seaver's Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison. Completed in six weeks and signed only "by an American," Hobomok enjoyed immediate success and quickly established its nineteen-year-old author as the toast of the Cambridge and Boston literati.⁹ Daring as was its assertion of a white woman's willing marriage to an Indian, the novel nonetheless escaped censure by portraying its heroine as lonely and despondent—ill-treated by a narrowly Puritanical father, grieving over the recent death of her mother, and convinced that her true love (an Englishman) has been lost at sea. Her marriage to the Indian, whose name served as the novel's title, is thus an act of desperation rather than an assertion of love or desire. At the same time, since Hobomok leaves his native village in order to marry Mary Conant, now pitching his wigwam on the shore outside of Plymouth plantation, he and his bride inhabit neither the Indian wilderness nor the European settlement. Thus, Child was not called upon to imagine a white woman's accommodation to life in the forest.

In the end—despite the fact that the union results in a son, called "little Hobomok" (but named '"according to the Indian custom,… Charles Hobomok Conant'")—the heroine's white lover returns. Aware of his wife's unshakable attachment to her former fiancé, the noble Indian divorces her (Indian-style, by burning "'the witche hazel sticks, which were givene to the witnesses of my marriage'"), and disappears into the forest, never to be seen again. Mary Conant then returns to the Plymouth settlement, reconciles with her father, marries her white suitor and, at the last, sees her mixed-blood son "a distinguished graduate" from Harvard. Her marriage to the Indian is, in a sense, obliterated. The son's real father, we read, "was seldom spoken of; and by degrees his Indian appellation was silently omitted."¹⁰

Much though he might have preferred it, James Everett Seaver could succeed in no analogous obliteration because, as his subject insisted of her first husband, "strange as it may seem, I loved him!"¹¹ Indeed, at the heart of The Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison [MJ] was the experiential texture of the world that Child, for all her daring, simply could not imagine—the world of a white woman contentedly adopted into Indian society and happily adapted to life in the wilderness.

In 1823, a small printer and bookseller in upstate New York arranged a meeting between a schoolteacher named James Everett Seaver and an Indianized white woman known locally as "the White Woman of the Genesee." Her name was Mary Jemison. On the Pennsylvania frontier in 1758, at the age of thirteen or fourteen, she had been captured by a raiding party of French and Indians and thereafter adopted into the tribal life of the Seneca. At the time of the interview, Jemison had been residing for over forty years on what had once been tribal land, near modern Geneseo, New York, attracting to herself, among her white neighbors, a reputation for being "the protectoress of the homeless fugitive" and locally "celebrated as the friend of the distressed" (MJ, p. viii). Since Jemison was believed to have "arrived at least to the advanced age of eighty years," the purpose of the interview was to elicit from her an accurate account of her life "while she was [still] capable of recollecting and reciting the scenes through which she had passed" (MJ, pp. v, ix). In this, Seaver served as amanuensis, for three days diligently recording "her narrative as she recited it" (MJ, p. x). For, though she spoke "English plainly and distinctly," Jemison could neither read nor write (MJ, p. xi).

In his preface to the narrative that appeared the next year, Seaver claimed a "strict fidelity," assuring readers that "no circumstance has been intentionally exaggerated by the paintings of fancy, nor by fine flashes of rhetoric; neither has the picture been rendered more dull than the original" (MJ, p. v). But, in fact, the very circumstances of its composition militated against the narrative's fidelity. The "many gentlemen of respectability" responsible for initiating the project, Seaver revealed in his introduction, did so, among other reasons, "with a view … to perpetuat[ing] the remembrance of the atrocities of the savages in former times" (MJ, p. ix). A glance at the title page suggests that the printer, J. D. Bemis, thought he had arranged for a conventional captivity narrative. "An Account of the Murder of her Father and his Family; her sufferings; her marriage to two Indians," it promises, and then—with a sensational flourish—the title page added, the "barbarities of the Indians in the French and Revolutionary Wars."

In agreeing to the interview, Jemison may have had her own, quite different purposes, to which Seaver only dimly alludes. "The vices of the Indians, she appeared disposed not to aggravate," he noted in his introduction, while she "seemed to take pride in extoling their virtues" (MJ, p. xiii).

Seaver, clearly, had his own agenda. Defining "biographical writings" as "a telescope of life, through which we can see the extremes and excesses of the varied properties of the human heart" (MJ, p. iii), Seaver claimed both a didactic and a moral import for the work. Jemison's story, he asserted, "shows what changes may be affected in the animal and mental constitution of man; what trials may be surmounted; what cruelties perpetrated, and what pain endured, when stern necessity holds the reins, and drives the car of fate" (MJ, pp. iv-v). "The lessons of distress" to be derived from Jemison's biography, he hoped, would have "a direct tendency to increase our love of liberty; to enlarge our views of the blessings that are derived from our liberal institutions; and to excite in our breasts sentiments of devotion and gratitude to the great Author and finisher of our happiness" (MJ, p. vi). That such lessons might not be lost on the children whom he counted in his audience, Seaver "render[ed] the style easy" and gave "due attention" to the "chastity of expression and sentiment." Above all, he promised, "the line of distinction between virtue and vice has been rendered distinctly visible" (MJ, p. v).

To insure these improving effects, Seaver exploited all the racial assumptions of his era, thus making certain that the subject from whose life the lessons were to be drawn would be clearly identifiable as white. Only then, he seems to have felt, could she attract a sympathetic reading, the image of the "squaw" or the Indianized white woman having as yet gained neither currency nor approbation. If he could not wholly camouflage the fact that both her dress and "her habits are those of the Indians"—since this was well known to the many whites living in the area—he could, even so, clothe her in sturdy virtue and a "naturally pleasant contenance, enlivened with a smile." He repeated the testimony of white neighbors who "give her the name of never having done a censurable act," and, for his own part, he called her demeanor during the three-day interview "very sociable" (MJ, p. xiv). He even attributed to her the stock responses of the sentimental heroine—as opposed to the stereotypic notion of the impassive Indian—by noting that "her passions" were "easily excited. At a number of periods in her narration," Seaver wrote, "tears trickled down her grief worn cheek, and at the same time a rising sigh would stop her utterance" (MJ, p. xi).

That Seaver resorted to such devices suggests that he was trying to prepare his audience for what he knew to be a most unusual text; but it suggests also that he himself may not have been fully prepared for the narrative he received. Certainly, nothing in his previous reading experience could have so prepared him. And the fact is, for all its wealth of detail derived from Jemison's experiences among the Seneca and for all its fascinating store of historical information, The Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison is an inconsistent, often perplexing document. At times, it simply echoes the conventions of the earlier female captivity narratives or introduces moralizing elements from the sentimental romances with which Seaver was obviously familiar. At other times, it seems almost gratuitously to focus on "the barbarities which were perpetrated upon" white prisoners by their Indian captors (MJ, p. 149), as though it were a standard Indian War narrative. But every now and then what seems authentically to have been Jemison's story breaks out of the molds to which Seaver and his backers would consign it, evading the narrative conventions of captivity and sentimental romance alike and becoming, instead, the story of a woman who, in the forested wilderness of upstate New York, knew how to "take my children and look out for myself (MJ, p. 74).

Unusual in a captivity narrative, the opening chapter offers information about Jemison's parents and their immigration from Ireland to a prosperous farm amid "the then frontier settlements of Pennsylvania" (MJ, p. 19). In the second chapter, this "little paradise" (MJ, p. 20), is rudely disrupted by a "party … of six Indians and four Frenchmen" (MJ, p. 25), at which point the conventional captivity design takes over. The Jemison family (with the exception of two older brothers) and some neighbors are taken prisoner and, with their Indian captors, "soon entered the woods" (MJ, p. 25). The cruelty of their captors and the hardships of their journey are carefully detailed, the language of these passages echoing, like a refrain, features that could be traced back to the earliest Puritan captivities. As they advance deeper into the forest and away from English settlements, for example, the landscape becomes increasingly threatening; on the second night, reminiscent of Rowlandson, they camp "at the border of a dark and dismal swamp" (MJ, p. 26).

At this second encampment, the Indians offer the first clue to their intentions. Mary's shoes and stockings are removed and, in their place, she is given "a pair of mocassins." The only other member of the party accorded this treatment is a young boy, son of a neighbor woman who has also been taken. Jemison's mother apparently correctly interpreted these gestures to mean that the Indians intended to "spare" the lives of the two children, "even if they should destroy the other captives." Accordingly, she took the first opportunity to bid her daughter a kind of admonitory farewell. Among other things, she adjured the girl "not [to] forget your English tongue" and to remember "your own name, and the name of your father and mother" (MJ, p. 27). The mother's premonitions proved correct. In short order the two children were separated from the rest of the captives, and within two days Mary's fears for the fate of her family are corroborated: the Indians clean and dry her parents' scalps ("yet wet and bloody") in her view (MJ, p. 30).

Fearful though she is, escape seems impossible. To leave the Indians would place her "alone and defenceless in the forest, surrounded by wild beasts that were ready to devour us" (MJ, p. 34). It was a situation that called forth all the pathos of the sentimental heroines into which the Puritan Judea capta had finally degenerated. However Jemison may have actually phrased her dilemma, Seaver had done his homework in other texts. In answer to her question, "But what could I do?," he put into his subject's mouth an assemblage of phrasings repeated from Hannah Swarton through Francis Scott: "A poor little defenceless girl; without the power or means of escaping; without a home to go to, even if I could be liberated; without a knowledge of the direction or distance to my former place of residence; and without a living friend to whom to fly for protection, I felt a kind of horror, anxiety, and dread" (MJ, p. 29). Like Rowlandson, Swarton, and the fictional Maria Kittle who followed them, Jemison tells us, "I durst not cry—I durst not complain…. My only relief was in silent stifled sobs" (MJ, p. 29).

Possibly because there were no available literary models for what followed, beginning with the third chapter Jemison's Life swerved radically from conventional formulae and freed itself from most of the rhetorical flourishes that had dominated the second chapter. For in Chapter 3, Mary Jemison is given new clothes, a new name, and is ritually adopted by two sisters of the Seneca tribe, by whom "I was ever considered and treated … as a real sister, the same as though I had been born of their mother" (MJ, p. 39). Slowly and patiently, her adoptive sisters teach her the Seneca language and train her to the tasks appropriate to Indian women. The Indians' earlier cruelties are now set aside, even effaced, as Jemison describes her new life with these "kind good natured women; peaceable and mild in their disposition; temperate and decent in their habits, and very tender and gentle towards me" (MJ, p. 40).

Although her adoptive "sisters would not allow me to speak English in their hearing," Jemison remained faithful to her mother's entreaties, taking the opportunity, "whenever I chanced to be alone … of repeating my prayer, catechism, or something I had learned in order that I might not forget my own language." This, along with opportunities to talk with whites who came among the Indians either as prisoners or as traders, permitted her to retain her spoken English. At the same time, with her "sisters … diligent in teaching me their language," Jemison soon found that she "could understand it readily, and speak it fluently" (MJ, p. 40). In short, despite efforts to hold onto the English tongue, she was fast becoming acculturated to her new life. Having been "with the Indians something over a year," she recalled, she became "considerably habituated to their mode of living, and attached to my sisters" (MJ, p. 43).

Only once during her first year among the Seneca does she seem to have regretted that habituation. When the tribe paid its annual trading visit to Fort Pitt, Jemison confided, "the sight of white people who could speak English inspired me with an unspeakable anxiety to go home with them, and share in the blessings of civilization." But when her adoptive family begins to suspect that the whites may have designs on the girl, they spirit her away and hide her. It "seemed like a second captivity," Jemison told Seaver, but, with "time, the destroyer of every affection," her "unpleasant feelings" faded, "and I became as contented as before" (MJ, p. 43). The contentment seems to have been genuine. For, contradicting then current notions of the arduousness of the Indian woman's life, Jemison described a world that—at least until the horrific disruptions of the Revolutionary War—appeared almost idyllic in its repeated seasonal routines.

Her new home, she says, was "pleasantly situated on the Ohio…. The land produced good corn; the woods furnished a plenty of game, and the waters abounded with fish." On the upper banks of the Ohio, "we spent the summer … where we planted, hoed, and harvested a large crop of corn, of excellent quality" (MJ, p. 40). In the autumn, the Seneca moved "down the Ohio … till we arrived at the mouth of the Sciota river; where they established their winter quarters" (thus making Jemison the first white woman known to have traveled the Ohio). Hunting—both for food and for "peltry" for trade—sustained the tribe through the winter. "The forests on the Sciota were well stocked with elk, deer, and other large animals; and the marshes contained large numbers of beaver, musk-rat, &c. which made excellent hunting for the Indians." When the hunting season was over, the Seneca "returned in the spring … to the houses and fields we had left in the fall before. There we again planted our corn, squashes, and beans, on the fields that we occupied the preceding summer" (MJ, p. 41). To these cyclical repetitions, in which "one year was exactly similar, in almost every respect, to that of the others," Jemison seems easily to have adapted, commenting approvingly that they were "without the endless variety that is to be observed in the common labor of the white people" (MJ, pp. 46-47).

During her first two years with the Seneca, Jemison was regarded as still a child, and so the only work she records is joining "with the other children to assist the hunters to bring in their game" during the winter months (MJ, p. 41). When she achieved the status of an adult, in her view, again her labor "was not severe." "Notwithstanding the Indian women have all the fuel and bread to procure, and the cooking to perform, their task is probably not harder than that of white women, who have those articles provided for them," she told Seaver, "and their cares certainly are not half as numerous, nor as great. In the summer season, we planted, tended and harvested our corn, and generally had all our children with us; but had no master to oversee or drive us, so that we could work as leisurely as we pleased" (MJ, pp. 46, 47). The same theme is repeated in a later chapter. While males of the tribe attended to ritual functions and hunting, "their women," she noted, "attended to agriculture, their families, and a few domestic concerns of small consequence, and attended with but little labour." As far as Jemison was concerned, then, "no people can live more happy than the Indians did in times of peace" (MJ, p. 64).

What irretrievably tied her to life among the Indians was her marriage, after two years with the Seneca, to a Delaware named Sheninjee: "a noble man; large in stature; elegant in his appearance; generous in his conduct; courageous in war; a friend to peace, and a great lover of justice." Whether what follows indicates the interpolations of her uneasy scribe, or whether Jemison herself inserted the qualifications as a way of softening the implications of her subsequent declaration, we shall never know. "Yet," she hesitates in the narrative we now have, for all these fine traits, "Sheninjee was an Indian. The idea of spending my days with him, at first seemed perfectly irreconcilable to my feelings." Nonetheless, marry him she does, "according to Indian custom," and soon enough she finds herself won over by "his good nature, generosity, tenderness, and friendship towards me," so much so that he "soon gained my affection." "Strange as it may seem," she concludes, "I loved him!—To me he was ever kind in sickness, and always treated me with gentleness; in fact, he was an agreeable husband, and a comfortable companion" (MJ, p. 44).

Though the union with Sheninjee was happy, it was not long-lived. After three years of marriage (and the birth of a son), Jemison was persuaded by her Seneca brothers to join them on a trek from the Ohio to the tribal homeland on the Genesee, to winter there with her two sisters (who "had been gone almost two years"). To this, Sheninjee consented, determining in the meanwhile "to go down the river [and] … spend the winter in hunting with his friends, and come to me in the spring following" (MJ, p. 51). For Jemison, the trip to western New York proved long and difficult. Her clothing was inadequate to the rain and cold weather she encountered and, as a result, she recalled being "daily completely wet, and at night with nothing but my wet blanket to cover me, I had to sleep on the naked ground, and generally without a shelter, save such as nature had provided." "In addition to all that," she emphasized, "I had to carry my child, then about nine months old, every step of the journey on my back, or in my arms." "Those only who have travelled on foot the distance of five or six hundred miles, through an almost pathless wilderness," she concluded, "can form an idea of the fatigue and sufferings that I endured on that journey" (MJ, p. 53). Happily, her "brothers were attentive," helping her where they could, and, in due course, the little party "reached our place of destination, in good health, and without having experienced a day's sickness" (MJ, p. 54).

Having spent the winter "as agreeably as I could have expected to, in the absence of my kind husband," Jemison then suffered "a heavy and unexpected blow." "In the course of the summer" she received "intelligence that soon after he left me … [Sheninjee] was taken sick and died." The "consolation" of her Seneca family helps her through this period so that "in a few months my grief wore off and I became contented" (MJ, p. 58). Sufficiently contented that, when a year or two later, the king's bounty offered her the opportunity to be returned to the whites, she remained "fully determined not to be redeemed at that time" (MJ, p. 58). Sticking to her resolution, she successfully eludes both the white man and the Indian chief who have decided to return her. Chapter 5 then ends with the information that when her son "was three or four years old, I was married to an Indian, whose name was Hiokatoo, … by whom I had four daughters and two sons" (MJ, p. 62).

With Chapter 6, the cyclical idyll of Indian life is forever disrupted by warfare between the would-be independent colonies and the English, a contest in which the Seneca sided with the crown. And, at the same time, this chapter reveals that Jemison's second marriage enjoyed little of the mutuality of affection that had marked the first. "During the term of nearly fifty years that I lived with [Hiokatoo]," Jemison insisted, "I received, according to Indian customs, all the kindness and attention that was due me as his wife." But this hardly bespeaks the quality of attentiveness she had received from Sheninjee. Even so, Jemison was apparently reluctant to speak negatively of her second husband (certain, perhaps, that her biographer, on his own, intended to cast the man in no favorable light), and so she simply insisted that Hiokatoo "uniformly treated me with tenderness and never offered an insult" (MJ, p. 104). Intent, however, on exploiting the Revolution as the basis for a traditional Indian War narrative, Seaver sought other sources of information about Hiokatoo and, from neighbors and former military men, pieced together the portrait of a formidable "warrior, [whose] cruelties to his enemies perhaps were unparalleled" (MJ, p. 104). Large sections of Chapters 7 and 11, in fact, are given over to sometimes lurid details of Hiokatoo's exploits against the Americans.

The same Revolutionary War that gave ample scope to Hiokatoo's prowess as a warrior also forced Mary Jemison to make good use of every survival skill she had learned among the Indians. For her, the test came during General Sullivan's campaign against the tribes of western New York State in 1779. "A part of our corn they burnt, and threw the remainder into the river. They burnt our houses, killed what few cattle and horses they could find, destroyed our fruit trees, and left nothing but the bare soil and timber" (MJ, pp. 73-74). The Indians themselves, however, had earlier escaped across the river. After ascertaining that Sullivan's troops were gone from the area, the Seneca returned, only to discover "not a mouthful of any kind of sustenance left, not even enough to keep a child one day from perishing with hunger" (MJ, p. 74).

From the war narrative that Seaver now seems eager to pursue, Jemison's own story insistently emerges. With the weather "cold and stormy" and the remnant of her tribe "destitute of houses and food too," Jemison resolves "to take my children and look out for myself, without delay. With this intention," she continues, "I took two of my little ones on my back, bade the other three follow, and the same night arrived on the Gardow [or Gardau] flats, where I have ever since resided" (MJ, p. 74). Her independent removal from the rest of the tribe advances the narrative to yet another recounting of adaptive survival—only this time, it is not a white woman's adaptation to life among the Indians but, in its place, an Indianized white woman's successful adaptation to fending for herself on the cleared and open "flats" along the banks of the Genesee River. (Hiokatoo, for most of the war, was away, leading raiding parties against the American frontier settlements.)

Upon her arrival at the Gardau flats, Jemison encounters "two negroes, who had run away from their masters…. They lived in a small cabin and had planted and raised a large field of corn, which they had not yet harvested." In exchange for food and shelter for herself and her children, Jemison husks their corn "till the whole was harvested." Residing with the blacks through the "succeeding winter, which was the most severe that I have witnessed since my remembrance," Jemison and her family survive, while other Indians, for want of food, do not. "The snow fell about five feet deep, and remained so for a long time, and the weather was extremely cold; so much so indeed, that almost all the game upon which the Indians depended for subsistence, perished, and reduced them almost to a state of starvation…. Many of our people barely escaped with their lives, and some actually died of hunger and freezing" (MJ, p. 75).

The following spring she builds her own dwelling on the flats and here, on "extremely fertile" land (MJ p. 96), she has continued to reside until the time of the interview with Seaver. The blacks had remained only two more years and then taken off (probably for Canada). (Hiokatoo had died in 1811.) Though relatively few whites had even seen the area when Jemison first removed there, by the time of the narrative it is well populated, and Jemison now leases part of her considerable holdings (deeded to her by the Indians) "to white people to till on shares" (MJ, p. 96).

What is striking about her description of the intervening years—aside, of course, from the drama of their warfare—is the relative absence of Hiokatoo as a presence in the household and the sense that, with Jemison's arrival, the Gardau flats ceased to be part of the wilderness. "My flats were cleared before I saw them," Jemison explains, proffering the Indian legend that they had once been inhabited by "a race of men who a great many moons before [the Indian], cleared that land and lived on the flats" (MJ, p. 76). Whether or not a reader accepts such speculation, the impact is immediate and undeniable: the uninhabited flats become a part of the human world, and the reader thereafter ceases to think of Jemison as living in an unremitting wilderness.

No less striking is her emphasis upon her ability to manage for herself. "For provisions I have never suffered since I came upon the flats; nor have I ever been in debt to any other hands than my own for the plenty that I have shared," she boasts (MJ, p. 143). With the aid of her children only, she insists, she carried the boards that were to become her permanent home; with her children, she built that home; and even into the present year, she continues the yearly planting of corn:

I learned to carry loads on my back, in a strap placed across my forehead, soon after my captivity; and continue to carry in the same way. Upwards of thirty years ago, with the help of my young children, I backed all the boards that were used about my house from Allen's mill at the outlet of Silver Lake, a distance of five miles. I have planted, hoed, and harvested corn every season but one since I was taken prisoner. Even this present fall (1823) I have husked my corn and backed it into the house. (MJ, p. 142)

Of the eight children to whom she has given birth, three now survive—all daughters. The youngest, with her husband and their three children, also live on the Gardau Tract, while the rest of her family, including "thirty-nine grand children, and fourteen great-grand children," live nearby, "in the neighborhood of Genesee River, and at Buffalo" (MJ, p. 143). "Thus situated in the midst of my children," Mary Jemison concluded the narrative of her uncommon life (MJ, p. 144).

Richard Slotkin has observed that, "wittingly or unwittingly," Seaver designed this closing to imitate contemporary popular images of a patriarchal Daniel Boone, "seated," at the end of his life, "in the midst of his happy brood of unspoiled 'children of the woods,'"¹² It is an astute observation—except that, once again, Slotkin ignores the crucial fact of gender. A comfortable and secure life "in my own house, and on my own land" (MJ, p. 143) bespoke the reward for surmounting wilderness hardships that had previously been accorded to men—but never to a woman—in American literary history. As such, Jemison's Life was "revolutionary" not for the generic alterations Slotkin cites,¹³ but because it represented the first text in American literature to move a real-world white woman beyond the traditional captivity pattern to something approaching the willing wilderness accommodations of a Daniel Boone.¹⁴

With that switch in gender, moreover, the nature of the accommodation also changed. For, with Jemison, the baggage of familial and communal domesticity began to enter the wilderness preserve of the male hunter-adventurers. To be sure, following the Boone original, many narratives of western exploration had expressed their protagonist's eagerness to locate sites for future settlement, and, in this sense, they too made claims to familial and communal interests. But in point of fact, most of these narratives concentrated on the private pleasures of and solitary intimacy between the white male protagonist and his wilderness surroundings, thus emphasizing the romance of high adventure rather than the prosaic realities of cabin-building and hoeing corn.¹⁵ In sharp contrast to the Adamic paradisal longings of the men, and unlike her fictional prototype in the Panther Captivity, Mary Jemison brought home and family into the cleared spaces of the wild—an act of survival, if not of romance.

It was a transformation for which the American public was ready and eager. Originally conceived of by its first printer, James D. Bemis of Canandaigua, New York, as a volume that would attract readers in the northern and western sections of his home state, A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison did not for long remain "distinctively a New York state book." Publishers across the country recognized its wider appeal, and pirated editions by English printers were soon being sold on both sides of the Atlantic. According to Frank Luther Mott, Seaver had succeeded in producing the unrivaled best-seller of 1824, and throughout the rest of the decade his rendering of Jemison's life continued to sell as well as the novels of Scott and Cooper.¹⁶ In 1842 a revised and extended version was published, which also enjoyed several subsequent reprintings. And in 1856 there appeared yet another enlarged edition, also with supplementary and corroboratory materials, called forth, as its publishers noted, by "frequent inquiries … for the work."¹⁷

The public acceptance—indeed, acclaim—with which Child's Hobomok and Seaver's A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison had been received in 1824 may well have prompted James Fenimore Cooper's willingness to approach similar themes in The Last of the Mohicans, which appeared in 1826. But Cooper's was, at best, only a hesitant approach. Following Child rather than Jemison, he permitted his white heroine no taint of Indianization, let alone any real accommodation to the wild. And, drawing back from the consummation of Indian-white sexuality that had marked both Child and Jemison, Cooper preferred to have his protagonists die and reunite, if at all, in the "'blessed hunting-grounds of the Lenape'"—rather than grapple with the worldly implications of the suggested attraction between Uncas and Cora. So reticent was he on the subject, in fact, that even the unconsummated attraction had to be justified by the hint that the dark-eyed Cora herself carried the blood of darker races (her West Indian mother having been "descended, remotely," from slaves).¹⁸

Women writers did not share these reticences. Taking full advantage of what Child and Jemison had made imaginatively possible, Catherine Maria Sedgwick offered a white heroine whose romantic attachment to an Indian included a happy accommodation to life in the woods. To be sure, Sedgwick's Hope Leslie: Or, Early Times in the Massachusetts depicts almost nothing of the details of Faith Leslie's life among the Indians and thereby, as Dawn Lander Gherman has pointed out, it emphasizes little of "her attachment to the Indian culture in general."¹⁹ But it does at least assert, even if only sentimentally, the appeal of her woodland transformation. As the Indian maiden Magawisca explains to Faith's sister, "When she flies from you, as she will, mourn not over her … ; the wild flower would perish in your gardens; the forest is like a native home to her, and she will sing as gayly again as the bird that hath found its mate."²⁰ Sedgwick had apparently judged popular reading tastes correctly: upon its first appearance in 1827, Hope Leslie rivaled the sales of Cooper and Scott. Such was the legacy of Child and Jemison.

Because of its unique emphasis on a white woman's domestic accommodation to the wilderness, the Jemison narrative, by itself, may have also pointed the way to a renewed interest in the history of Rebecca Bryan Boone. For where Rebecca Boone shared with Jemison the stature of a white woman successfully adapted to life in the wilderness, as the wife of America's mythic frontiersman, she attained that stature without assuming any of Jemison's Indian associations. In preparing his Biographical Memoir of Daniel Boone [DB], then, Timothy Flint—a man whose eye was always on the main chance—undoubtedly took his cue from the continuing popularity of the Jemison narrative and attributed to his hero's wife "the same heroic and generous nature" he gave her husband.²¹ That he did not thereby succeed in delineating a radically new heroine for the frontier west, nor even achieve a portrait with the strengths of Seaver's Jemison, should not surprise. Flint's subject, after all, was Daniel, not Rebecca Boone; and Flint's purpose was to promote settlement of the agricultural frontier. As a result, Rebecca inevitably shrank to a symbolic appurtenance in the face of her husband's overpowering mythic resonances, just as she also shrank to an exemplary elder in the face of Flint's primary concern to attract readers westward. That said, Flint must nonetheless be credited with resurrecting Rebecca Bryan Boone in 1833 from what had then been a half century of almost nameless obscurity.

Although John Filson's 1784 narrative had recognized Boone's "wife and daughter [as] being the first white women that ever stood on the banks of the Kentucke river,"²² it never named either woman or otherwise gave them prominence. Throughout that spurious first-person narrative, in fact, Rebecca Bryan Boone is denominated simply as "my wife," and her participation in the initial difficulties and dangers of first settlement is nowhere detailed. Only once is she credited with independent action. "During my captivity with the Indians," Boone reports, "my wife, who despaired of ever seeing me again, expecting the Indians had put a period to my life, oppressed with the distress of the country, and bereaved of me, her only happiness, had, before I returned, transported my family and goods, on horses, through the wilderness, amidst a multitude of dangers, to her father's house, in North Carolina."²³ Boone then returns to his recounting of the Indian Wars along the Kentucky frontier and makes no further mention of the wife and family he had brought back from North Carolina and resettled again in Boonsborough in 1780. Filson's The Adventures of Col. Daniel Boon, of course, set precedents that subsequent Boone accounts would follow. Printer John Trumbull's shortened version of Filson, which appeared two years later, even further reduced Rebecca Bryan Boone's (still nameless) role in her husband's story. And in 1813, the year of her death, one Daniel Bryan, claiming kinship, published a verse epic celebrating Daniel's adventures, but Rebecca hardly figures in The Mountain Muse: Comprising the Adventures of Daniel Boone; and the Power of Virtuous and Refined Beauty.²⁴

Thus, until Daniel Boone's death in 1821, the only published information regarding his wife had to be gleaned from the various reprintings of the Filson or Trumbull narratives and the occasional newspaper interview granted by Boone or by one of his sons. Following Boone's death, the Providence, Rhode Island, printer, Henry Trumbull, brought out yet another version of the Filson text to which he added "a continuation of the life of Col. Boon, from the conclusion of the American and Indian Wars" to the time of his death, attributed "to a near relation of the Colonel … who received it from his own mouth." This 1825 expanded version of Boone's life and adventures underscored anew the image of Boone as a gifted hunter and "a great friend to the Indians," but it offered barely a word about Rebecca—beyond, that is, noting her acquiescence to her husband's preference for the "perfect Wilderness." Seeking the society of "the wild animals of the forest … in preference to that of his fellow countrymen," this "continuation" narrative explained, Boone removed "with his family," at age 65, "to the Tennessee Country, then almost a perfect Wilderness." Of the family's reaction to the move we learn only that "it is a remarkable fact that the family of Colonel Boon, which was comprised of his wife, two sons and a daughter, were not less pleased with a secluded life than himself."²⁵ Following Boone to the year of his death in 1821, the Henry Trumbull text did not even mention Rebecca's passing in 1813.

Despite these printed omissions, as a rich fund of oral lore grew up around the great hunter, so too—if to a lesser degree—Rebecca Bryan Boone attracted popular interest. It was said by some that she was a fair shot, by others that she rivaled her husband in marksmanship; and the rumor persisted that she, not her husband (who was often away from home), had taught their sons the use of the gun. As Boone grew older and increasingly enfeebled by rheumatism, moreover, it became common knowledge that Rebecca accompanied him into the woods, helping her husband to bring down the game, aiming and firing when his knotted fingers could not, and generally proving as valuable a companion as any son or Indian might be.²⁶ But, beyond the occasional newspaper article, little of this made its way into print. Nor did Timothy Flint, when he essayed a comprehensive Biographical Memoir of Daniel Boone, make much use of this material—with one prominent exception: out of the oral tradition he plucked the fire-hunt story and thereby forever assured Rebecca a place in the mythic matrix surrounding her husband.

In addition to his literary pretensions, Timothy Flint saw himself as a beneficent promoter of western settlement. In this sense, the 1833 Biographical Memoir of Daniel Boone was simply a more dramatic continuation of his earlier, two-volume Condensed History and Geography of the Western States, or the Mississippi Valley (1828).²⁷ Both works, after all, celebrated the struggling early history of a frontier area and then made clear its current appeal to prospective settlers. Where Flint differed from other promotional writers of his day was in his understanding of the need to address women as well as men on the subject of emigration. He did not address them in the same way, however, since, in his view, "men change their place of abode from ambition or interest; women from affection" (DB, p. 30). For male readers, therefore, he elaborated the economic gains of emigration and played to their fantasies through the figure of Daniel Boone. For women, he offered Rebecca Bryan Boone, the exemplary model of a woman who, from affection, willingly "follow[ed] her husband to a region where she was an entire stranger" (DB, p. 30). Indeed, wherever Flint introduced women in the Biographical Memoir he introduced, as well, an embedded exemplum.

His account of the attack on Bryant's Station is a case in point. One of several fortifications along the Kentucky border (near present-day Lexington), Bryant's Station was attacked by Indians in August of 1782. Unable to penetrate the outer fencing, the Indians settled in for a prolonged siege, surrounding the little fort and cutting off its inhabitants from their single source of water, a spring located just outside the perimeter. When the station ran low on water, as Flint tells it, the women, "these noble mothers, wives, and daughters, assuring the men that there was no probability that the Indians would fire upon them, offered to go out and draw water for the supply of the garrison; and that even if they did shoot down a few of them, it would not reduce the resources of the garrison as would the killing of the men" (DB, p. 115). Following the historical facts, Flint then pictured the women marching "out to the spring, espying here and there a painted face, or an Indian body crouched under the covert of the weeds. Whether their courage or their beauty fascinated the Indians to suspend their fire," he does not pretend to guess (thus feigning ignorance of Indian fighting habits that—as the Kentuckians had rightly guessed—insured the women's safety). If, historically, the women probably made only a single trip to the spring, each filling her bucket once, Flint would have it "that these generous women came and went until the reservoir was amply supplied with water" (DB, p. 115). He was, of course, trying to heighten the drama of the scene.

But he was also, if illogically, designing his exaggeration so as to draw a moral for those "modern wives, who refuse to follow their husbands abroad." If the women of early Kentucky were willing to risk the dangers of Indian attack, he challenges, then how dare "modern wives" object to western migration only on the grounds "of the danger of the voyage or journey, or the unhealthiness of the proposed residence, or because the removal will separate them from the pleasures of fashion and society." These are but selfish and self-indulgent objections, he suggests, and, in their place, he admonishes his female readers, "contemplate the example of the wives of the defenders of this station" (DB, p. 115). Or, throughout the Memoir, he implies, contemplate the model of Rebecca Bryan Boone: "she" who "followed [her husband] from North Carolina into the far wilderness, without a road or even a trace to guide their way—surrounded at every step by wild beasts and savages" (DB, p. 247).

Flint's stories of the "noble" women of Bryant's Station, the women "running balls" in defense of McAfee's Station the following year (DB, p. 196), and his assertion that Rebecca Bryan Boone shared with her husband "the same heroic and generous nature" (DB, p. 247) should have generated images of strong, independent womanhood on the frontier. But such was not the case. Like his contemporaries, wary of what might be seen as the hardening, or masculinizing, effect of the frontier on women, Flint backed away from these implications of the historical record. And again, Rebecca Bryan Boone proved the vehicle for his intentions. Acknowledging that she had shared with her husband "in all his hardships, perils, and trials," Flint suppressed what might otherwise be concluded from that remark and asked readers to see Rebecca first as "a meek" and then, only secondarily, as a "yet courageous and affectionate friend" to her mate (DB, pp. 247-48).

He even discounted what was supposedly Boone's first-person testimony and denied Rebecca her role as the adult responsible for safely returning her little family to North Carolina after her husband's captivity (and presumed death) among the Shawnee. Flint wrote:

At the close of the summer of 1778, the settlement on the Yadkin [River in North Carolina] saw a company on pack horses approaching in the direction from the western wilderness.… At the head of that company was a blooming youth, scarcely yet arrived at the age of manhood. It was the eldest surviving son of Daniel Boone. Next behind him was a matronly woman, in weeds, and with a countenance of deep dejection. It was Mrs. Boone. (DB, p. 165)

Contradicting all the earlier Boone narratives derived from Filson, in which Boone clearly credited "my wife" with "transport[ing] my family and goods on horses through the wilderness, amidst many dangers,"²⁸ Flint here attributes leadership to a "youth" whom he must concede had "scarcely yet arrived at the age of manhood." The resourceful Rebecca, meanwhile, who in 1778 would have been forty-one, is reduced to "a matronly woman" in widow's weeds, passively following her son as she had once meekly followed his father. But so important was it for Flint to project an acceptable femininity, especially in the wilderness, that he thus rewrote what was already familiar and ignored any oral lore that might challenge his (he supposed) comforting stereotype.

Finally, however, it was the myth of Daniel Boone that, in Flint's pages, overwhelmed and buried the reality of Rebecca Bryan. For Timothy Flint, a New Englander lately transplanted to the Ohio, as for others before him, the figure of Daniel Boone took shape around the image of a loner from his earliest days "formed to be a woodsman" (DB, p. vi). In the "solitary and trackless wilderness" of Kentucky, according to Flint, Boone experienced "a kind of wild pleasure" (DB, p. 44) that is nothing short of erotic. In the woods, "the paradise of hunters" (DB, p. 227), Boone grasps at a "fresh and luxuriant beauty" (DB, p. 36), enjoying there a solitary winter later recalled as "the happiest in his life" (DB, p. 64). Little wonder, then, that the legend that Flint preserved from the oral tradition, concerning Boone's courtship of Rebecca Bryan, projected yet another instance of the hero's "darling pursuit of hunting, … which in him amounted almost to a passion" (DB, p. 227).

Purporting to record Rebecca's and Daniel's first meeting, the "fire hunt" legend hints at much older literary sources even as it describes a method of stalking deer adopted by the whites from Indian practice. As it begins, a youthful Daniel Boone is engaged "in a fire hunt" one night with a young friend, and Flint carefully explains what this entails:

The horseman that precedes, bears on his shoulder what is called a fire pan, full of blazing pine knots, which casts a bright and flickering glare far through the forest. The second follows at some distance, with his rifle prepared for action…. The deer, reposing quietly in his thicket, is awakened by the approaching cavalcade, and instead of flying from the portentous brilliance, remains stupidly gazing upon it, as if charmed to the spot. The animal is betrayed to its doom by the gleaming of its fixed and innocent eyes. This cruel mode of securing a fatal shot, is called in hunter's phrase, shining the eyes. (DB, p. 26)

When two eyes had thus been shined, Boone—who was the second horseman, with his rifle at the ready—dismounted and approached his quarry. "Whether warned by a presentiment, or arrested by a palpitation, and strange feelings within, at noting a new expression in the blue and dewy light that gleamed to his heart," Flint declines to guess. "But," he continues, whatever the reason, "the unerring rifle fell," its bullet still in the chamber, "and a rustling told [Boone] that the game had fled. Something whispered him it was not a deer; and yet the fleet step, as the game bounded away, might easily be mistaken for that of the light-footed animal" (DB, p. 27).

Presuming "that he had mistaken the species of the game," the resolute hunter doggedly pursues his quarry—all the way to the house of his neighbor, "a thriving farmer, by the name of Bryan" (DB, pp. 27, 25). Here he discovers Bryan's daughter, "a girl of sixteen, … panting for breath and seeming in affright," because she believes she has just been chased out of the woods by a panther. The two are introduced and, as Flint describes it, "the ruddy, flaxen-haired girl stood full in view of her terrible pursuer, leaning upon his rifle, and surveying her with the most eager admiration." The moment takes on the colors of a Scott romance: "Both were young, beautiful, and at the period when the affections exercise their most energetic influence" (DB, p. 28). With the close of the chapter, the romantic expectations are fulfilled and the informing metaphor completed. As Boone "was remarkable for the backwoods attribute of never being beaten out of his track, he ceased not to woo, until he gained the heart of Rebecca Bryan. In a word," Flint concludes, "he courted her successfully, and they were married" (DB, p. 29).

If the fire-hunt legend calls to mind medieval allegories in which the hunting of the hart plays out a lover's pursuit of his dear, it does so with a difference. In medieval allegories, the hunt begins with the wounding of the hart and terminates with its capture, the symbolic uniting of the lovers thus displacing the prior pursuit. In Flint's Biographical Memoir of Daniel Boone, however, the hunting never ceases. The imputed consummation that closes the story does not, in fact, bind Daniel to Rebecca's side. For Boone's "darling pursuit of hunting" is not metaphorical: it is his controlling "passion" (DB, p. 227). The "unexplored paradise of the hunter's imagination" (DB, p. 48) is the forest here, not the marriage bed. As a result, the Rebecca Bryan of the fire-hunt legend emerges not as a person beloved in her own right but, instead, as a human cipher who has managed, if only briefly, to take on the erotic appeal of the wilderness that defined her husband's meaning.

Although family members have insisted that the Boones themselves often repeated the story, it is also said that their children refused to believe it. The Boone children were no doubt aware that their father had first seen his future bride when his older sister, Mary Boone, married into the neighboring Bryan family. Fifteen-year-old Rebecca Bryan, of course, had attended that wedding.²⁹ The modern reader must discount the story on other grounds. For its mythic and medieval sources notwithstanding, the "fire hunt" finally represents not a symbolic courtship but a travesty of courtship, reducing Rebecca to a fleeing incarnation of Daniel Boone's true and overriding love: the hunt.

But Timothy Flint seems to have been both unaware of the story's darker implications and unmindful of the Boone children's well-known skepticism. Therefore, when he included the fire hunt in what was to become what Henry Nash Smith has termed "perhaps the most widely read book about a Western character published during the first half of the nineteenth century,"³⁰ Flint forever attached the legend's symbolic significations to the woman, thus stylizing what others, after him, would make of her. To be fair to Flint, even if the modern reader cannot rest satisfied with the portrait, it must be said that he did, after all, grant Rebecca Bryan Boone her name and an attentiveness accorded in no previous text. In so doing, he at least made her available to history (even if not to literature).

In The Pioneer Women of the West (1852), for example, Elizabeth Fries Ellet repeatedly acknowledged Flint as the source for her chapter on Rebecca Boone.³¹ But even without that acknowledgment, Flint's influence would be obvious. Several passages from the Biographical Memoir are quoted whole in Ellet (including the fire-hunt legend), while elsewhere Ellet expands on hints taken directly from Flint. Where Flint had maintained the imaginative codes that defined the forests as "the paradise of hunters" (DB, p. 85) and relegated to women "a garden spot" (DB, p. 85), Ellet personalized Flint's generalization, assigning the "garden spot" specifically to the charge of "Mrs. Boone and her daughters": "They had brought out a stock of seeds from the old settlements and went out every bright day to plant them."³²

Where Flint and Ellet differed was where the feminine models of their respective decades differed. If, in 1833, Flint had harked back to the passively "meek" sentimental heroines of earlier decades, in 1852 Elizabeth Fries Ellet dropped the word from her description and, instead, cut Rebecca's figure to match the fashion of her own decade's reigning cult of domesticity: "A most faithful and efficient helpmeet had she proved to the pioneer, possessing the same energy, heroism, and firmness which he had shown in all the vicissitudes of his eventful career, with the gentler qualities by which woman, as the centre of the domestic system, diffuses happiness and trains her children to become useful and honored in after life."³³

The publication of Flint's Biographical Memoir of Daniel Boone meant that, as of 1833, Americans enjoyed—for the first time—published access to two real-life white women who had learned to survive in the wilderness and convert it into a home for themselves and their families. It did not mean that Rebecca Boone would henceforth inspire the kind of mythologizing that her husband had, or that either she or Mary Jemison would independently become figures of legend in the nation's shared cultural imagination. All her wilderness survival skills notwithstanding, Jemison had willingly married—indeed, loved!—where white society would see only savagery and brutality. Enormously and continuously popular though it was, therefore, Seaver's portrait of Mary Jemison fell short of myth, its white heroine forever tainted by her Indianization. In Flint's pages, an exemplary Rebecca Boone appeared all too infrequently and all too indistinctly to stand proof against the many and changing stereotypes in which others, in the future, would cast her. And by portraying her first and most dramatically as reflected in the flickering and distorting torchlight of her husband's predominating myth, Flint effectively annihilated any possibility that she might achieve mythic status on her own.

Notes

¹ Colonial observations on the successful adoption of whites by Indians are quoted and discussed in Frederick Turner, Beyond Geography: The Western Spirit Against the Wilderness (New York: Viking Press, 1980), p. 244.

² Ibid.

³ Ibid. For an excellent discussion of the successful adoption of whites by Indians, see also James Axtell's "The White Indians of Colonial America," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser. 32 (January 1975): 55-88.

⁴ See James Fenimore Cooper's "Preface to the Leather-Stocking Tales, New York, 1850," in The Last of the Mohicans (1826), ed. William Charvat (Cambridge, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1958), p. 12.

⁵ See John Filson, The Discovery, Settlement And present State of Kentucke … To which is added, An Appendix, Containing, The Adventures of Col. Daniel Boon, one of the first Settlers … (Wilmington, Del.: James Adams, 1784), p. 65; Alexander Henry, Travels And Adventures in Canada and The Indian Territories, Between The Years 1760 and 1776 (New York: I. Riley, 1809), p. 161; Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans, p. 284.

⁶ The details of the 1704 raid on Deerfield were preserved by John Williams, Eunice's father, who, upon being ransomed in 1706, composed a narrative of his captivity experience, The Redeemed Captive Returning to Zion: Or, A Faithful History of Remarkable Occurrences in the Captivity and Deliverance of Mr. John Williams, Minister of the Gospel in Deerfield, first published in Boston in 1707 and many times reprinted thereafter.

⁷ For a full discussion of the Eunice Williams captivity and the gossip aroused by her subsequent visits to Massachusetts, see Dawn Lander Gherman, "From Parlour to Tepee: The White Squaw on the American Frontier," Ph.D. dissertation, University of Massachusetts, 1975, pp. 70-91.

⁸ James Fenimore Cooper, The Pioneers; or, The Sources of the Susquehanna: A Descriptive Tale (1823; reprint, New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1893), p. 475.

⁹ See Susan Phinney Conrad, Perish the Thought: Intellectual Women in Romantic America, 1830-1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 105.

¹⁰ Lydia Maria Child, Hobomok. A Tale of Early Times (Boston: Cummings, Hilliard and Co., 1824; facsimile reprint, New York: Garrett Press, 1970), pp. 186, 182, 187, 187-88.

¹¹ James Everett Seaver, A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison, Who was taken by the Indians, in the year 1755, when only about twelve years of age, and has continued to reside amongst them to the present time (Canandaigua, N.Y.: J. D. Bemis and Co., 1824), p. 44 (hereafter cited in the text as MJ).

¹² Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), p. 450.

¹³ Slotkin finds the Jemison narrative "revolutionary" because its unconventional ending radically diverged from the "restoration scene that concluded the captivity tales of the Puritans" (p. 450). That the Jemison narrative did not offer the conventional restoration scene is true, but it was hardly the first captivity narrative to abandon the convention.

¹⁴ At the close of the Revolution, Jemison turned down yet another opportunity to be repatriated to the white community, preferring to remain near her Indian relations and on the Gardau flats. The reason she gives in Seaver, Narrative, is "that I had got a large family of Indian children, that I must take with me; and that if I should be so fortunate as to find my relatives, they would despise them, if not myself; and treat us as enemies; or, at least with a degree of cold indifference, which I thought I could not endure" (p. 93).

¹⁵ See Filson; also "A true and faithful Narrative of the surprizing Captivity and remarkable Deliverance of Captain Isaac Stewart," in E. Russell, comp., Narative of Mrs. Scott and Capt. Stewart's Captivity (Boston: E. Russell, 1786), pp. 19-24.

¹⁶ See Frank Luther Mott, Golden Multitudes: The Story of Best Sellers in the United States (New York: Macmillan Co., 1947), pp. 97, 96-97, 305.

¹⁷ James Everett Seaver, Life of Mary Jemison: Deh-He-Wä-Mis (New York and Auburn: Miller, Orton and Mulligan; Rochester, N.Y.: D. M. Dewey, 1856), p. 9.

¹⁸ Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans, pp. 364, 172.

¹⁹ Gherman, p. 193.

²⁰ Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Hope Leslie: Or, Early Times in the Massachusetts, 2 vols. (New York: White, Gallaher, and White, 1827), 2:262.

²¹ Timothy Flint, Biographical Memoir of Daniel Boone, The First Settler of Kentucky: Interspersed with Incidents in the Early Annals of the Country (Cincinnati: N. and G. Guilford and Co., 1833), p. 247 (hereafter cited in the text as DB).

²² Filson, p. 60.

²³ Ibid., p. 72.

²⁴ See The Adventures of Colonel Daniel Boon, One of the first Settlers at Kentucke … Written by the Colonel himself (Norwich, Conn.: John Trumbull, 1786). In Daniel Bryan, The Mountain Muse: Comprising the Adventures of Daniel Boone; and the Power of Virtuous and Refined Beauty (Harrisonburg, Va.: Davidson and Bourne, 1813), Rebecca Bryan Boone makes her most dramatic appearance when she attempts to dissuade her husband from first going off to explore Kentucky, crying "My Boone! / How can you leave your Home, your Wife and Babes" (p. 56).

²⁵Life and Adventures of Colonel Daniel Boon, The First White Settler of the State of Kentucky (Providence, R.I.: H. Trumbull, 1824), pp. 19, 27, 22.

²⁶ I am indebted in this discussion to materials in John Bakeless, Daniel Boone: Master of the Wilderness (New York: William Morrow, 1939), esp. pp. 26-30, 38, 347.

²⁷ Timothy Flint, A Condensed History and Geography of the Western States, Or the Mississippi Valley, 2 vols. (1828; reprint, Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1970).

²⁸Life and Adventures of Colonel Daniel Boon (H. Trumbull, 1824), p. 15.

²⁹ See Slotkin, p. 300; and Bakeless, pp. 26-27.

³⁰ Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (1950; New York: Random House, Vintage Books, 1961), p. 59; also see Mott, p. 318.

³¹ See Elizabeth Fries Ellet, The Pioneer Women of the West (1852); facsimile reprint, Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1973), pp. vii, 43. Although John Frost did not acknowledge Flint as his source, his debt to both Filson and Flint is clear enough in his remarks on Rebecca Boone in Heroic Women of the West: Comprising Thrilling Examples of Courage, Fortitude, Devotedness, and Self-Sacrifice, Among the Pioneer Mothers of the Western Country (Philadelphia: A. Hart, 1854), pp. 26-31.

³² Ellet, p. 49.

³³ Ibid., p. 56.