Eighteenth Century 

John Williams, The Redeemed Captive (1704); see also John Demos's contemporary work on the Deerfield captivities, The Unredeemed Captive.
Cotton Mather, Good Fetch'd Out of Evil (1706): John Williams and another Puritan captive, Mary French
Cotton Mather, A Memorial of the Present Deplorable State of New England (1707), an account of Hannah Bradley, who was captured in 1697 and again in 1703.

Nineteenth Century
A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison, dictated to James Everett Seaver (1824): Willing captivity.
Panther Captivity
Fanny Wiggins Kelly (1845 - ) Narrative of My Captivity Among the Sioux Indians (1874)(page images at MOA)
Oatman, Lorenzo D. & Olive A. Oatman The Captivity of the Oatman Girls among the Apache and Mohave Indians
Smith, Mary.  An Affecting Narrative of the Captivity and Suffering of Mrs. Mary Smith (1815) 
Larimer, Sarah L. The Capture and the Escape or Life Among the Sioux (1870) 
 Minnie Buce Carrigan, Captured by the Indians: Reminiscences of Pioneer Life in Minnesota (1903)
Bibliography of nineteenth-century captivity narratives about women on the Great Plains
Narrative of the capture and providential escape of the Misses Frances and Almira Hall . . .(1832)
 

revenge

ransom

replacement of tribal numbers decimated by war and disease

• According to Kathryn Derounian-Stodola's Introduction to Women's Indian Captivity Narratives (New York: Penguin, 1998), "Statistics on the number of captives taken from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries are imprecise and unreliable since record-keeping was not consistent and the fate of hostages who disappeared or died was often not known. Yet conservative estimates run into the tens of thousands, and a more realistic figure may well be higher. For some statistical perspective, however, incomplete, consider these figures: between 1675 and 1763, approximately 1, 641 New Englanders were taken hostage (Vaughan and Richter, p. 53); and during the decades-long struggle between whites and Plains Indians in the mid-nineteenth century, hundreds of women and children were captured (White, p. 327)" (xv; emphasis added). The full citations for the sources Derounian-Stodola cites are these:

  Vaughan, Alden T., and Daniel K. Richter. "Crossing the Cultural Divide:Indians and New Englanders, 1605-1763." Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 90 (1980): 23-99.

  White, Lonnie J. "White Women Captives of Southern Plains Indians, 1866-1875." Journal of the West 8 (1969): 327-54.

a. Spanish: Indians as brutish beasts 
b. French: Indians as souls needing redemption 
c. English in Virginia: innocent exotics 
d. Puritans: Satanic threat to religious utopia

a. Myth of Love in the Woods (Pocahontas and John Smith)
b. Myth of Good Companions in the Wilderness (Cooper's Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook)
c. Myth of White Woman with a Tomahawk (Hannah Dustan; inverts Pocahontas; kills 10 Indians and scalps them when she escapes.)

In 1675 Joseph Rowlandson. went to Boston to beg for help from the Massachusetts General Assembly, during which period Mary Rowlandson was captured. After her redemption, the couple lived in Boston and then moved 1677 to Wethersfield, Connecticut. Joseph Rowlandson died 24 November 1678 after preaching a powerful fast-day jeremiad. Mary Rowlandson remarried 6 Aug 1679 to Captain Samuel Talcott. He died in 1691; she lived until 1710. Disgrace later came to the family: her son Joseph got his brother-in-law drunk and sold him into servitude in Virginia.

While a prisoner, Mary Rowlandson travelled some 150 miles,  from Lancaster to Menamaset then north to Northfield and across the Connecticut river to meet with King Philip/Metacomet himself, sachem of the Wampanoags.  Next she traveled up into southwestern New Hampshire, south to Menamaset, and north to Mount Wachusett.

According to Kathryn Derounian-Stodola, "Introducing her work in all four 1682 editions was an anonymous preface to the reader, signed only 'per Amicum' (By a Friend), but almost certainly written by Increase Mather. In 1681, Mather had proposed to a group of Puritan ministers that they collect stories of 'special providences' concerning New England to be evaluated, sorted, and eventually anthologized. Quite probably Rowlandson's narrative was among the providential accounts he received, but owing to its length, local currency, and intrinsic worth, he may have suggested separate publication and agreed to help. . ."

© 1997-2013. Donna M. Campbell.

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