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...