I’m honored and gratified that Taken by the Shawnee has received such a warm welcome in the six months since it was published by Turtle Point Press, and particularly pleased that my next book, a collection of short stories called Cowboy Tales, will be published by the same press next fall—but since I’m always a step ahead of myself, my mind is turning to the next book with so many choices floating and one that might particularly appeal to readers of Shawnee.
Margaret’s tale as I’ve imagined it is both tragic and heroic. Her son John’s story is, except for his early years with the Shawnee, tragic.
His early loss, murdered by Mandam Indians on a hunting expedition to the Yellowstone, and the misery of his growing up years once they had returned to the Greenbriar Settlement in Virginia, haunted Margaret for the rest of her life.
Could she have done more to help him adjust to life “back home,” which never seemed home to John because of the prejudice he encountered after it was assumed he was half Shawnee—a prejudice common on the frontier then and everywhere today?
Was she wise to arrange to send him to finish his adolescence with his uncle?
Those of us who, like me, have lost adult children wake up at night pierced by the same kinds of questions.
These questions have occurred to some of my readers. Several have asked me, couldn’t Margaret have taken John back to the Shawnee and lived permanently in one of their encampments?
I don’t think that was ever an alternative as Margaret viewed it. As she knew, John would have been trained as a warrior and would have lost his life in one of their final struggles with the white forces that drove the whole tribe in the early nineteenth century to a reservation in Oklahoma. And even if he had survived the fighting, what a wretched existence they would have faced in dire poverty on the reservation where they were deprived of their horses, their weapons, and the game they had always hunted, to be turned, the white government thought, into farmers on one of the most barren stretches of land in the continent.
Yet I’m fascinated by the idea of saving John, not only to spare Margaret life-long grief but to see what he would have become in maturity. A lawyer, like his uncle? A scout? An explorer like the men who were “opening the West,” an operator in the vast scheme of Manifest Destiny?
Would he have preserved some part of his Shawnee training, or would it all have been erased in the hurry and commotion of nineteenth-century life in the developing country?
Would he have married, possibly a native woman? Children? Margaret had many grandchildren but none from this particular beloved son.
Would the issue of his parentage have ever been resolved—or would it no longer matter?
His relationships with his mother’s increasingly prosperous relatives, the Pages and the Stiles, if he had maintained them, would have provided some interesting insights into the price of what we still call The American Dream.
With Margaret’s story, I had the skeletal framework of her brief memoir, dictated much later in life. With John, I have nothing except for Margaret’s account of his death.
Writing historical fiction means facing the enormous gap where there is no original research because nothing was written that was preserved.
But, as with Taken by the Shawnee a wealth of published, secondary sources abounds—the unfolding story of the remorseless spread of white settlers across the West.
Now I begin the tentative first steps in imagining what John’s life would have been if he had survived the attack by the Mandan Indians.
So many possible scenarios! So much fascinating reading!
And, foremost for me, what role would women have played in his life, given the example Margaret provided of pluck and endurance?
Well…
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