Small Towns Remember Indian Captivity

Frances Slocum and Maconaquah

Late enough in the evening that the only light in the house came from the flickering hearth fire, the Miami Indian widow Maconaquah sat in silence. It was January of 1832, and her houseguest, Colonel George W. Ewing, had found himself traveling and without a white home to stop in for the night. Conveniently, Ewing spoke Miami and chose to pass the night in this, the house of a "better sort of Indian." As the evening wore on, he tried three times to leave the room, for although the widow had asked him to sit up with her long after the rest of the family had gone to bed, she had not spoken of anything of significance for more than an hour. But when Colonel Ewing again said he would retire for the night, she told him to stay. "I shall not live long," she said, "and I must tell it. I cannot die in peace if I do not."

Although Maconaquah's great-niece, Martha Bennett Phelps, would write 84 years later that Ewing knew Maconaquah was no Indian, Ewing told others that he "could not of course divine what her secret was." In the dim firelight, after all, she must have seemed wholly Indian, even if, earlier in the day, a certain lightness to her hair and a glimpse of the pale skin under her sleeve may have hinted at her secret. When the Colonel rose to leave the room for the third time, telling her that she could speak to him later if she preferred, the elderly woman resisted. "No," she said, and, again, "I may die, I may die; and then I will have no rest in the Spirit World."

Maconaquah told Ewing a shocking tale. Captured by Miami Indians in the aftermath of the Revolutionary War Battle of Wyoming, Pennsylvania, on July 3, 1778, the five-year-old white child Frances Slocum ceased to exist. That night she told Ewing all she could remember of her former life. She had been taken as a girl from a family she thought perhaps Quaker, from a homestead in a valley whose name she could not recall. Maconaquah, as she came to be known, had hidden from her white relatives for her entire life as an Indian, although she admitted knowing that her white brothers were hunting for her. She had no interest in returning to the white world or in finding her lost family. She had a family; she had an identity, and she did not need to resurrect a dead one. But for the sake of her peace of mind in the afterlife, she believed she needed to tell the secret of her identity to some representative of the white world. Colonel Ewing was white and he was at hand.

To Martha Bennet Phelps, writing of her great-aunt in the early twentieth century, it might have been comforting to think that her relative could not have truly passed as Indian, but to Ewing at the time, in the half-light of the fading fire and the stillness of the house, the tale of the captured child must have seemed extraordinary. Ewing was impressed enough to repeat the story to his own mother, and her sympathy for Maconaquah's broken-hearted white mother prompted him to begin a three-year search for her lost white family, one that ended in precisely the way Maconaquah had feared it would: with hopeful white relatives on her doorstep begging her to return to their world, expecting so much of her, expecting her to be five. And white.

Indian Captivity in Small Towns

Small town Americans around the turn of the century sought to define and perpetuate their own importance in the development of the national character by symbolically joining themselves to their settler history through ancestral ties and family history. An Indian captive in the town's history could serve as the point of proof that this town, and the people who inhabited it, played a vital and necessary role in the creation of a single American character through contact with the wilderness and its inhabitants. The story of the Pennsylvania Slocums reuniting with their lost sister in Indiana in 1837 attracted some local newspaper attention at the time, both in Pennsylvania (where she was captured) and Indiana (where she then lived). A series of accidents, coincidences, and letters lost and found delayed the reunion of the Slocums and Maconaquah—so longed for by the Slocums, so dreaded by Maconaquah—by several years. When the Slocums did find Maconaquah, she did not speak English and could not remember her Christian name (Frances), and, although she did not deny her kinship to the Quaker Slocums, she seemed hostile to their presence and skeptical of their motives. She was 64 years old and had lived as an Indian for 59 years.

Starting in about 1890, a group of local boosters and historians from both Wyoming Valley, Pennsylvania, and Wabash County, Indiana, took a renewed interest in Maconaquah's history. Her story was republished five times by several different authors between 1891 and 1916, and in 1900 historians and family from both states joined forces to erect a memorial to her in Peru, Indiana. White descendants also dedicated the "Frances Slocum Playground" in Wilkes-Barre in 1907. This sudden curiosity about the history of Frances Slocum, or Maconaquah, might be attributed to the personal interest of a few relatives searching for an unexpected family connection created on a porous frontier, except for the fact that others less directly connected to any particular captive shared a fascination with such tales. The Slocums might have represented an early example of this kind of revived interest, but they were hardly alone.

Beginning in about 1890, after the U.S. census declared the frontier closed and the tragic episode at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, signaled the end of the Indian wars, and well after the genre might have been thought dead, American publishers and readers developed a renewed interest in tales of Americans who had been captured by Indians on the frontier. Scholars of captivity narratives have outlined several phases of captivity narratives, including Puritan narratives that served the religious and colonial project of earlier American settlers; Revolutionary-era narratives that linked Indian captivity to national captivity under the English crown; early national narratives that justified national expansion and the subjugation of Indians; and narratives that appeared between the Civil War and the end of the frontier that legitimized increased violence against Indians and the project of "Americanizing" them. Moreover, in each period, captivity narratives established standard cultural interpretations of nationhood and identity, while at the same time allowing both reader and narrator to break away from restrictive cultural norms and imagine a different way of living. Scholars have drawn a connection between rising national and imperial identity and captivity narratives, and have emphasized that captivity narratives allowed experimentation within cultural standards of gender and racial roles.

In the Progressive Era, captivity narratives likewise became one vehicle by which Progressive Era Americans sought to preserve and renew those national characteristics many feared were on the verge of extinction: independence of spirit, love of hard work, and an amorphous thing many called "manliness." Americans in the early twentieth century looked in earnest for ways to maintain their status as a frontier nation. They might, for example, sustain the farmer legacy of the Jeffersonian ideal through irrigation of the arid West; they might gain new frontiers overseas.

Americans might also define and perpetuate their national character by symbolically joining themselves to their settler history through ancestral ties and family history. This act of joining present to past (albeit a past often obscured by myth or perhaps made up altogether) took place in many ways. Buffalo Bill's Wild West, for example, allowed audiences to relive the settling of the West. Ancestor-based organizations such as the Daughters of the American Revolution (and its progeny, Children of the American Revolution), the Sons of the American Revolution, the Colonial Dames of America, the Mayflower Society, and United Confederate Veterans, all founded in the last 12 years of the nineteenth century, provided members the public opportunity to display and celebrate their link to America's past. Other Americans turned to historical pageantry or to the building of monuments to assure themselves that the American past was not forgotten and remained important. Artists like Charlie Russell painted the West of the 1880s, rather than the West of the twentieth century in which he lived, because, in his own words, he was "dedicated to the West of his youth." In doing so, this "least progressive" of men became "astonishingly up to date," as Americans since the Civil War had been searching for ways to cling to and perpetuate the frontier, which they believed had created them as a unique people and as important individuals. By the 1890s, and particularly by the turn of the century, with the frontier at least theoretically closed and Indian foes vanquished and vanishing on their reservations, Americans looked in all directions for their source of national identity. At the 1910 unveiling of the memorial to the Seneca captive Mary Jemison, Dr. Edward Hagaman Hall reminded his audience that the statue would "remind us of our debt to that hardy race of pioneers who, driven by a Destiny more powerful than human will, subdued the wilderness to the beneficent uses of a higher civilization." Later that day, Dr. Charles D. Vail read a letter from sculptor H. K. Bush-Brown, stating "Everyone is interested in history for it is the only means of understanding the present or providing for the future." In this milieu, tales of Indian captivity gave meaning and importance to contemporary family histories as well as to current actions to remember the Indians.

Progressive Era Americans were particular in their choice of which Indian captives deserved their attention. They did not turn to the most sensational or graphic stories. In fact, they turned most often to those captives with the strongest connections to the Indians who captured them. Mary Jemison and Frances Slocum, whose stories were the most reprinted captive stories of the era, both "became Indian," refusing to return to white society even when begged to. Cynthia Ann Parker, on the other hand, famous and historically significant, was only briefly mentioned in Texas histories. Theodore Roosevelt dedicated his history The Winning of the West to Comanche Chief Quanah Parker, but the story of the Chief's mother, the captive Cynthia Ann Parker, saw only one retelling between 1886 and 1934. Perhaps Cynthia Ann's "recapture" by whites, as well as other aspects of her story, as outlined below, made her a less appealing figure to Progressive Era Americans seeking to find importance for themselves in captivity stories.

Progressive Era readers did not look just to the most popular or most well-known captives and repeat their tales. Indeed, several of the most well-known stories of Indian captivity earned little print attention in the Progressive Era. This lack of interest in the more notorious captives signals that it was not just Indian captivity alone that grabbed the imaginations of so many readers in the early twentieth century; rather, readers wanted a personal connection, in the form of a local community link, to the captive individual.

One explanation for the lack of interest in Cynthia Ann Parker is the importance of her child, the Comanche Chief Quanah Parker. His notoriety overshadowed her importance. Moreover, other whites in the Parker family left their mark on Texas as well; the Parker clan had any number of connections between themselves and frontier history and to captivity by Indians. At 11 years of age, Cynthia Ann was taken by the Comanche from Fort Parker, Texas, on May 19, 1836, along with John Richard Parker (her brother), Rachel Plummer (her cousin), James Pratt Plummer (Rachel's son), and Elizabeth Duty Kellogg. Fort Parker still stands and is joined by Fort Parker State Park, the town and county of Parker, the city of Quanah, Quanah High School, Quanah Memorial Cemetery, and Quanah Parker Park in Fort Worth. The pedigree of the Parker family in the Texas Revolution, in the Mexican-American War, and in the early national and state political and cultural development of Texas can be well established without depending on the story of Cynthia Ann to prove the connection. Quanah Parker commanded much of the public attention in the Progressive Era, as he lived until 1911 and the family bickered for many years over his property. During the Progressive years, Quanah—not Cynthia Ann—was the primary cultural middleman to emerge from the massacre at Fort Parker. It fell to Quanah, not the white Parkers, to locate Cynthia Ann's remains in Texas and rebury her closer to him in Oklahoma in a small ceremony in 1910. The Indian Quanah, not the white Cynthia Ann, captured Progressive imaginations.

Moreover, there is the problem of the miserable quality of Cynthia Ann's life after recapture. Frances Slocum and Mary Jemison, Indian captives who chose to live permanently with their captors and later drew the attention of Progressives, largely controlled their own fate after captivity. The primary difference, then, between Cynthia Ann Parker and Slocum and Jemison was that the former suffered recapture by the American army at the age of 34, followed by deliverance to her white family and separation from her Indian sons, while the latter two, although they considered returning to white society, were allowed to remain with their Indian families when they decided not to. The rather pathetic end of Cynthia Ann's story, which included being passed from one white relative to another, escape attempts, and the death of her young daughter in 1864 and herself in 1870, probably made her tale less appealing than the stories of Slocum and Jemison, who remained in control of their own fates—quite frankly, they probably seemed stronger and more admirable than Cynthia Ann. Her lack of control over her adult fate, and the fact that the Parker family could prove its frontier pedigree without her, combined to make her less appealing to Progressive Era audiences than other assimilated captives like Slocum and Jemison.

The difference between Parker's family and the Slocum family may have come as well from their Progressive sentiments. Did these families see their connection to an Indian captive as primarily a personal family matter, or did they—as the Slocums certainly did—understand that link as a way to connect themselves to an elite, old-stock American heritage? Most of the Indian captive narratives reprinted or memorialized in the early twentieth century came from Northeastern or Midwestern old-stock families who took great pride in their pre-revolutionary ancestors. As Richard Hofsteader famously stated, many supported Progressivism because it sought "to restore a type of economic individualism and political democracy that was widely believed to have existed earlier in America ... restoration [of that old world would] bring back a kind of morality and civic purity that was also believed to have been lost." Small communities, and the middle-class men who ran them, experienced an "upheaval in status" as the newly rich eclipsed their power in their communities and on the national stage. The "aristocratic local gentry" longed to remind both themselves and the changing country around them that they were still important members—indeed, leaders—of American culture. Residents of smaller towns assumed that the rapidly industrializing cities were poised not just to eclipse their national importance but possibly to wipe them out altogether. In response, they found that they could use historical captive figures to justify their very existence, and certainly to argue for their cultural significance. Possibly the Parker family, having never exactly been part of the old gentry of the colonies, but rather frontiersmen and Baptists in the West, simply did not feel that their position in society was in danger and so did not focus on defending it.

But many Americans did defend their old-stock credentials. To this end, many narratives published in this era start with a long history of the family involved and sometimes the geographical place. Martha Bennet Phelps's tale of Frances Slocum, for example, starts with a chapter on the Slocum family's genealogy prior to Frances's captivity; likewise, it ends with appendices tracing the family genealogy since her rediscovery. As Minnie Buce Carrigan put it in the preface to her narrative, modern Americans owed their comfortable lives to the old-stock frontiersmen. Carrigan hoped that her "little book" would "instill ... a true appreciation for the pioneers" and "a like appreciation for the manifold comforts and advantages which are ours to enjoy at present." The 1906 retelling of the Burning of Royalton, Vermont, published after a monument was erected in the town, included the captivity narrative of Zadock Steele, and reminded its readers that the citizens of Royalton placed a special value on their collective history. When local citizens remember and celebrate their past, they find "in the glimpses into the life of the valley is seen the progress of a strong, able, people—the kind who make America the power it is in the world today." In other words, tales of captivity would engender admiration for those who suffered, as well as appreciation for modern comforts, and, by connecting the two, would further the understanding that the latter would not have developed without the former.