Margaret Erskine: “Taken by Indians”

Margaret Erskine

She was small, like most of the women in my birth family: my great-great-great-great grandmother whose story I’ve been writing for the past three years. Last Friday, I sent it to my editor at Turtle Point Press in New York with the hope of seeing it in print sometime in the next 18 months. Ruth Greenstein read two chapters a few months ago and immediately wanted the book. I’m enormously grateful to her. The fine small presses like Turtle Point and Sarabande Books are what keep my hope alive.

I started writing Margaret’s story, based on a brief memoir she dictated to her nephew many years after her taking, understanding that I have no understanding of the Shawnee and as an outsider needed to stress that Margaret, too, had nothing but prejudices about “savage Indians.” These were the prejudices common to the beleaguered settlers on the Virginia frontier. As the English, French, and the settlers battled for possession of what the Shawnee had always viewed as their sacred hunting grounds, the contest became more and more brutal. All those engaged resorted to scalping and burning at the stake; in fact Margaret after three years in a Shawnee camp witnessed the burning at the stake of a colonial general.

But I’m getting ahead of myself in my excitement. Margaret, a wife and mother at 26, was picked up by a Shawnee war party as she made her way west from the Greenbriar settlement on what would become West Virginia, heading for Kentucky. The men in her party, including her husband and brother-in-law, were murdered at once by the Shawnee and Margaret and her sister-in-law—whom she always called her sister—were taken to a series of Shawnee camps in the Ohio Valley country.

I needed to imagine, and then to understand, how Margaret adapted and survived; she was committed to preserving herself, and resentment and rage about the murders would not have served her well. She was adopted by White Bark and became an invested part of his community, sewing shirts for the men and teaching reading and writing. She knew from the start that she needed to be useful if she was going to survive.

As in all stories worth telling, there are mysteries here. I felt my way through an historical text that gave me the details of the colonial general’s torture and death. Much more difficult was to find my way through Margaret’s reaction, as an onlooker, especially when the suffering man begged her to shoot him. Is there a limit to empathy? Or was her well-acknowledged experience of her own helplessness—she had no weapons, and could only try, fruitlessly, to persuade the men of the tribe to stop the torture— enough? I will have to wait for reactions to know.

The other factor that is shrouded in mystery is the paternity of the boy she birthed after eight months in the Shawnee camp. My friend who is half-Cheyenne insisted that she would have been raped the night of her capture; but I envision this as an attempted rape by the “white Indian,” Simon Girty. After reading everything I could find about the Shawnee, I was persuaded that they did not rape their women captives, unlike the tribes of the plains like the Cheyenne and Sioux.

But then where did baby John come from? Margaret always insisted that she had been pregnant by her husband when they started out, but no one believed her—perhaps because of the deeply ingrained belief that all tribes were savages? And when she was ransomed after four years in 1792 and returned to the Greenbriar, her son was never accepted. After all, he spoke Shawnee rather than English and had been raised with the other boys to be direct, strong, and outspoken.

After her return, Margaret married again, had four more children, and lived until she was 97. I like to think that one reason for her longevity was her sparkling sense of humor; I think you can see this in the curve of her lips in this portrait, painted two years before her death.

Faithful readers, wish me luck as the book, Taken by Indians, makes its way through the publishing process.

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