Page 47 - Confronting Race Women and Indians on the Frontier, 1815 - 1915

FRONTIER PH ILOSOPHY: AMERICAN D I S C OURSE

years after 1783, the popularity of captivity narratives continued. The
story of Mary Jemison, taken prisoner by Indians in 1758, was released
in 1 8 24 and subsequently republished some thirty times. 92
By the mid-nineteenth century, captivity narratives originated all
over the West, including Mormon trails and the borderlands of New
Mexico. 9 3 The most usual setting for these horrifYing dramas, however,
was the prairie region of the trans-Mississippi West. In Iowa, the story of
the Spirit Lake Massacre of 1857 was written by survivor Abbie Gardner­
Sharp, who sold the book in a souvenir shop in the cabin where the
"depredations" reportedly occurred. In Minnesota, the New Ulm
1
Massacre of 8 62 also received its share of attention, especially from Mary
Renville in her Thrilling N a rrative of Indian Captivity (1863). In 1892,
Emeline Fuller, attacked by American Indians in 1 8 60, published her
(
story under the title Left by the Indians 1 892). Fuller recalled that she had
seen unburied bodies bearing "marks of torture too devilish for any
human beings to inflict except Indians." Still, Fuller concluded her story
on a charitable note: "Let those who have never suffered as I have pity
the fate of the noble red man of the forest." 94
Journalists also reported grim tales of captivity, lacing their accounts
with invective. In relating the return of two female captives to their family
in 1 8 66, the Leavenworth Daily Times noted that "they were in captivity
about ten weeks, and in that time suffered all the cruelties that the fiend­
like malignity and heartlessness of their cowardly captors could invent."
A few years later a correspondent for the Kansas Daily Tribune reported
that a Mrs. W h ite had lost a daughter to the "hands of merciless sav­
ages." 95 Eastern newspapers eagerly picked up news of captivities and
their attendant "outrages" on whites, especially women and children. In
1 8 59, the New Y o rk T i mes noted that the commissioner of Indian affairs
had identified seventeen children harmed as a result of the Utah "mas­
sacres" of 1 8 57. In 1868, the T i mes offered its readers a detailed report of
the execution of thirty-nine Indians in Minnesota for various crimes:
"capture of women and children," "took a white woman and ravished
her," "murder of a white woman and of design to ravish her daughter,"
and "shooting and cutting open a woman who was with child." In addi­
tion, the Times routinely informed its readers of Indian "uprisings," -
"atrocities," drunkenness, and continued captivities of whites. 9 6

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