In a most unusual portrait of early America, a young mother’s years in captivity with the Shawnee prove to be the best years of her life.
It’s 1779 and a young white woman named Margaret Erskine is venturing west from Virginia, on horseback, with her baby daughter and the rest of her family. She has no experience of Indians, and has absorbed most of the prejudices of her time, but she is open-minded, hardy, and mentally strong, a trait common to most of her female descendants–Sallie Bingham’s ancestors.
Bingham had heard Margaret’s story since she was a child but didn’t see the fifteen pages Margaret had dictated to her nephew a generation after her captivity until they turned up in her mother’s blue box after her death. Devoid of most details, this restrained account inspired Bingham to research and imagine and fill the gaps in her story and to consider the tough questions it raises. How did Margaret, our narrator, bear witnessing the murder of her infant? How did she survive her near death at the hands of the Shawnee after the murder of the chief? Whose father was her baby John’s, born nine months after her taking? And why did her former friends in Union West Virginia turn against her when, ransomed after four years, she reluctantly returned?
This is the seldom told story of the making of this country in the years of the Revolution, what it cost in lives and suffering, and how one woman among many not only survived extreme hardship, but flourished.
Bingham recounts this fascinating story of capture, survival, progress, healing, and return with lush descriptions and respect for all involved with Margaret’s complicated story. She is a smart and empathetic writer, and has created an awesome account of female survival at a horrific time.” — Booklist
The novel paints a compelling portrait of womanhood in this era. Crucially, the author depicts the violence of the period as integral to the colonial project, dismissing any propagandistic delusions of one-sided “savagery” and instead depicting each culture without romance or bias.” — Kirkus Reviews
Praise For Taken by the Shawnee:
This is an amazing book, and I couldn’t stop reading it. What an extraordinary pocket of history this is—with two cultures in the colonial landscape bargaining and conversing and murdering—the story is full of spectacular turns. Sallie Bingham has done a brilliant job of imagining a reality stranger than I knew how to guess.” — Joan Silber, PEN/Faulkner and National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of Secrets of Happiness and Improvement
Sallie Bingham has imagined her ancestor’s history so graphically, so passionately, that every page of this astounding story electrifies. Bingham’s clear, powerful, sensuous prose details one woman’s canny struggles to survive, understand, and make sense of the shocking realities immersing her—even to find beauty and love in the long, wild, rich course of it. Cinematic and wondrous, Taken by the Shawnee proves an unforgettable saga.” —Joan Frank, author of Juniper Street: a Novel and Late Work: A Literary Autobiography of Love, Loss, and What I Was Reading
Thoroughly informed and daringly imagined, this gripping recreation of an ancestor’s captivity probes the most momentous period in North American history: the clash between Native people and the remorselessly expanding white world.” — William deBuys, author of The Trail to Kanjiroba: Rediscovering Earth in an Age of Loss
This stunning novel details the true story of a white woman’s capture and adoption into the tribe followed by her ambivalent return to a stern Christian community. The gifted pen of her descendant, author Sallie Bingham, reveals the good and bad of both societies and leaves us pondering which life we would choose. A masterpiece of women’s frontier experience!” — Kathy Schultz, author of The Underground Railroad in Ohio
Publishers are encouraged by early orders and the book is available for pre-order at Bookshop.org, Amazon.com, or even better, your local bookshop.
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