Margaret

My Captive—its final title, the story of Margaret Erskine and the Shawnee—is at last in the hands of a capable New York agent. Of course it is impossible to foresee what its future may be, especially in a publishing business beset, as always, by the search for bestsellers, even as the taste of readers, especially women, continues to evolve.

Now, during the peaceful (or would-be peaceful) weeks or months of waiting, I continue to read, edit and add as more and more information emerges about the late 18th century lives of the Colonists and the parallel and far different lives of indigenous people living in lands the Colonists were invading. As our understanding and our research about Native people grows, replacing to a large extent the willful ignorance of earlier decades—ignorance that meant that, during my growing up years in Kentucky, the only mention of indigenous people there claimed there were none—I have a wealth of new information to include in Captive.

I have at hand Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s admirable An Indigenous People’s History of the United States, published by Beacon Press in Boston as part of their “Revisioning American History” series.

In its pages on the Shawnee in the Ohio Country, later the state of Kentucky, I find that a Shawnee leader named Blue Jacket “refused submission” to General “Mad” Anthony Wayne’s ultimatum: “In pity to you innocent women and children, come and prevent the further effusion of you blood.” Submission would have meant surrendering the whole Ohio Country to the invaders.

Blue Jacket plays a small role in my “Captive.” According to Margaret’s brief oral history, on which I base my narrative, she was taken to visit Blue Jacket at his nearby encampment by her Shawnee hosts sometime in 1780. She was astonished by the size of his Colonial house, the British tea she was served in a fine porcelain teacup, and the presence of two slaves. I have imagined her becoming a tutor to his two small sons; the Shawnee, like many other indigenous people, recognized the importance of reading and writing, especially so they could decipher the treaties they were being told to sign.

Now I will add a few more details to my description of Margaret’s visit to Blue Jacket: her tutoring of his sons. She had learned during her first days with the Shawnee that, even as the chief’s adopted daughter, her survival depended on her usefulness. Her darning and sewing, her teaching of reading and writing, endeared her to her captors and helped to ensure her good treatment.

This is part of the western myth, familiar to all of us because of Hollywood movies, that is never told. The part of the myth we all know and even admire is violence, and its enshrinement in the mythical lives of gunmen and Natives.

Its most recent and horrifying reappearance is at the Bonanza movie ranch south of Santa Fe, a reenactment site for western movies in a jumble of sets from earlier films set on the frontier. The murder of a photography director by the star, using a pistol that he didn’t know was loaded with live ammunition, has led to dismay—but not to a questioning of the basic premise of this and all other Westerns: the sanctification of violence. This needless death may lead to new rules about weapons used on sets, but it is unlikely to lead to new rules about the endless portrayal of violence in these popular films, an important contributor to our always-increasing incidents of murder in the streets. Hollywood takes no responsibility for that; producers and actors in these films take no responsibility; and parents, like me, who ferry their children to the latest attraction take no responsibility for the outcome.

We have no heroes and we blindly search for them everywhere. Women heroines need not apply.

Margaret is such a heroine. Not for her use of violence, although she uses her knees and teeth to fight off—successfully—a white rapist, but for her canny and determined fight to survive and her wisdom in seeing how she can become of value.

One of her problems when she is ransomed after four years and returns to her original home in the Greenbriar Settlement, in what would become West Virginia, is her family and neighbors’ rejection of her son John, born during her time with the Shawnee. Although she insists that she was pregnant with her white husband’s child when she was captured, the prevailing myth of Natives “ravishment” of white women defeats her effort and she must send her scorned son to live with an uncle.

It is true that some of the plains tribes raped their women captives, but the Shawnee were known for their abhorrence of that form of violence.

The facts of history never overcome myth. And so it seems we are condemned to live and die with—and by—the sanctification of violence.

In My Family, Writing Margaret Erskine Taken by the Shawnee