Category: Indian Captives

Indian Captive in Present-Day California Olive Oatman was a fourteen-year-old girl whose family was killed in 1851 in present-day Arizona by Native Americans, possibly the Yavapai, who captured and enslaved Olive and her sister. A year later Mojave Indians adopted the two girls. After four years with the Mojave, during which time her sister died of starvation, Oatman returned to white society. Her story has been told, retold and embellished so many times – in the media and in her own memoir and speeches – that the truth is not easy to discern. Image: Olive Oatman after she was ransomed Mojave blue cactus ink tattoo on her chin: Five vertical lines with triangles set at right angles Credit: Arizona Historical…

Indian Captive Image: Indians Returning English Captives to Colonel Bouquet November 1764 Elizabeth Archer, daughter of Rebecca Thompson and Sampson Archer, had come from northern Ireland in 1737 with her family, who took claim to 1000 acres near Natural Bridge, VA. In 1741, Elizabeth married Robert Renick, who had settled in Augusta County, VA, in 1740. They lived in what was then the Virginia frontier. Virginia records show that on June 10, 1740, Robert Renick received a patent to 400 acres of land on the Buffalo Lick Branch in Augusta County, VA, and on November 10, 1757, obtained a patent to 90 acres on Purgatory Creek, a branch of the James River.

Indian Captivity Narrative The Taking of Mary Jemison By historical artist Robert Griffing Mary Jemison was born in 1743 aboard the ship William and Mary in the fall of 1743 while en route from Northern Ireland to America. Upon their arrival in America, the couple and their new child joined other Scots-Irish immigrants and headed west from Philadelphia to what was then the western frontier (now central Pennsylvania). The Jemisons squatted on territory that was under the authority of the Iroquois Confederacy, and Mary grew up on that farm, 10 miles west of present-day Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Although life was hard on the western edge of the colony of Pennsylvania, Mary fondly recalled these “childish, happy days” full of hard work…

Virginia Woman Kidnapped by Shawnee Warriors Image: Map Showing the Journey of Mary Draper Ingles The red line shows her movement west as a captive of the Shawnee Indians, and the blue line her return east. The entire trip took place in the summer and autumn of 1755. Into the Wilderness Born in 1732, Mary Draper was the daughter of George Draper and Eleanor Hardin, Irish immigrants to Philadelphia. In the 1740s, the Drapers were among the first white settlers to scale the Allegheny Mountains, which were the western edge of colonial exploration and settlement at that time. They, along with Colonel John Patton, Thomas Ingles and his sons William, Matthew and John settled a natural glade that was well…

Indian Captive Image: Painting by Junius Brutus Stearns, 1847 Earliest known painting of the Hannah Dustin Story Hannah Dustin/Duston was a forty-year-old colonial New England woman who was captured during an Indian raid, and escaped from her captors by killing them in the night and fleeing in their canoe. She is believed to be the first woman honored in the United States with a statue. Born Hannah Emerson on December 23, 1657, Hannah Dustin, her husband Thomas, and their nine children were living in Haverhill, Massachusetts, when the town was attacked by Abenaki Indians on March 15, 1697. Thomas fled with eight of the children, but Hannah, her six-day-old baby Martha, and her nurse Mary Neff were captured.