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An Uncertain Destiny: Indian Captivities on the Upper Connecticut River

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Colin G. Calloway
Colin G. Calloway
Affiliation:
Colin G. Calloway currently Adjunct Lecturer in United States History at Keene State College, 229 Main Street, Keene, New Hampshire 03431.
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Extract

The prospect of being taken captive by Indians was one of the greatest terrors for pioneers on the American frontier. From seventeenth-century Massachusetts to twentieth-century Hollywood, Indian captivity has been regarded as a fate worse than death, and western frontiersmen advocated saving the last bullet for oneself to prevent it. Whites inhabiting the trans-Mississippi west in the nineteenth century had in fact every reason to dread falling into Indian hands and a good idea of what was in store for them: among the nomadic tribes of the Great Plains, male captives were tortured (before being put to death), female captives were invariably subjected to sexual and physical abuse and generally condemned to a life of drudgery, while captive children might be killed out of hand or taken into the tribe. In the northeastern woodlands, however, the fate in store for whites captured by Indians was by no means so certain. A study of the experiences and narratives of captives on the upper Connecticut River during the era of Indian raids from Canada suggests that to be captured by Indians in northern New England was a terrifying and traumatic experience, but was certainly no guarantee of death, torture, abuse, or even mistreatment.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 17 , Issue 2 , August 1983 , pp. 189 - 210
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1983

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References

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39 Johnson, p. 151; Howe, p. 158; Hanson, pp. 14–15; cf. the experiences of a prisoner of war of the British, A Narrative of Captivity and Sufferings of Ebenezer Fletcher (New Ipswich, N.H.: S. Wilder, 1813), p. 8Google Scholar.

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45 Axtell and Vaughan and Richter disagree in their estimates of the numbers of people who became Indianized and opted to remain with their captors. Vaughan and Richter reckon that most of those who refused to return to New England remained with the French rather than the Indians. They find conclusive evidence of only 24 persons who became ‘white Indians’ and estimate that at most 52, or 3·2%, of the recorded New England captives underwent complete transculturarion. Axtell is prepared to accept a somewhat lower estimate than his own, but he does not agree with all of Vaughan and Richter's methods and conclusions. Vaughan and Richter, ‘Crossing the Cultural Divide’, pp. 60–62, 87, 96–99; Axtell, , The European and the Indian, pp. 162 and 351, fn. 66Google Scholar.

46 Vaughan and Richter, pp. 62–64; ‘Captivity of Mary Fowler’, in Drake, , ed., Indian Captivities, p. 142Google Scholar; Johnson, p. 157; McCoy, p. 50; Heard, p. 99.

47 Hanson, p. 10; Johnson, pp. 157–59, 165–68; Howe, pp. 159–60.

48 Vaughan and Richter, pp. 63–65; Ackernect, Erwin H., ‘“White Indians:” Psychological and Physiological Peculiarities of White Children Abducted and Reared by North American Indians’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 15 (1944), 15–36Google Scholar; Heard, pp. 102–04, 119–37; Axtell, ‘White Indians’, pp. 81–82; King, p. 17; Johnson, p. 175.

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50 Eunice Williams was educated at the Ursuline Convent in Three Rivers. There are many instances on record of English captives who converted to Catholicism at the French missions; many more were destroyed in 1759 when the mission registers of the Abenakis were burnt during Roger's raid on St Francis. Charland, , Histoire des Abenakis, pp. 54–59Google Scholar.

51 Vaughan and Richter, pp. 51, 60–62, 84–85; McCoy, p. 50; Howe, pp. 162–64; ‘Narrative of the Captivity of Francis Noble’, in Drake, , ed., Indian Captivities, pp. 170–71Google Scholar; Stockwell, p. 15; Hanson, pp. 20–21, 24.

52 Vaughan and Richter, pp. 68–69, reckon the death rate was five times higher!

53 Steele; pp. 273–74.

54 Jennings, , Invasion of America, pp. 146–70Google Scholar; Jaenen, , Friend and Foe, pp. 120–21, 148Google Scholar.

55 Shea, , trans. and ed., History and General Description of New France, 5, 209–10Google Scholar; 279; Coleman, , New England Captives, p. 3Google Scholar; Coolidge, ‘French Occupation of the Champlain Valley’, pp. 197–99.

56 It seems that Indian war parties occasionally carried mail from captives to anxious relatives: the Indians who raided Deerfield hung a bag of mail from a tree branch where it would be found and distributed in the settlements! Penhallow, , The History of the Wars of New-England, p. 25Google Scholar.

57 Avery, MS. 780900. 5, p. 5; Johnson, pp. 155, 159.

58 Avery, pp. 5–6; Johnson, pp. 177–78, 180; Rowlandson, pp. 23, 35; How, p. 128; Hanson, p. 24; Williams, Redeemed Captive, passim.