
First Edition cover of The Matchlock Gun by Walter D. Edmonds, 1941.
It’s possible to argue that all history is fiction, strained through the point of view of the writer, until this century so nearly entirely male that the few female historians stand out as curiosities.
And the “history” I held in my hands, the few pages of typed manuscript that had come down to me in my mother’s Blue Box, were also transformed, translated, cut and edited by various of Margaret’s descendants. The manuscript that came to me as “fact” was probably partial. Family members may well have excluded elements of the story Margaret dictated to her nephew around 1830 as too disturbing.
But enough remained of her capture and ensuing four years in a Shawnee camp on the Ohio to set some readers’ teeth on edge. Like everyone she knew in the Greenbriar Settlement in Virginia in the 1790s, Margaret had absorbed and repeated words reprehensible today. The Natives were “savages,” their women were “squaws.” Her challenge, which became my challenge, was to exchange these stereotypes for neutral nomenclature: savages became—as she got to know them—warriors, squaws became keewee and the names she invented on her first days—Topknot, Brother One, Brother Two—were replaced with tribal names as soon as she learned to speak and understand Shawnee.
But I had no way to cut or deny or avoid the hideous violence she endured, or the violence the Shawnee suffered as they were overrun by colonial militia in these final days before they were driven out of their ancestral hunting grounds in the Ohio County. Historical accuracy and my integrity as a writer meant that these scenes had to be included. And Margaret lacked a historical context in which to place them; she did not know the Shawnee were making their last stand before being exiled to a barren patch of Oklahoma. She did not know that George Rogers Clark’s invasion that left dozens of murdered warriors in its path was part of the United States’ doctrine of Manifest Destiny. Its dictates would deprive Mexico of two-thirds of its territory and nearly eradicated Native American tribes. I could not include what Margaret did not know and save the integrity of her voice.
But she could watch, she could listen, and she could learn—and I learned along with her through research, thought, and writing and rewriting her story.
Integrity also demanded that I examine closely my own ignorance and prejudice. I’d grown up on a compelling tale called The Matchlock Gun and while it was the heroism of the settler mother that compelled me, the illustration I remembered was of her pinned by a tomahawk to the door of her burning cabin. No historical context there to explain the desperate struggle of the Hudson Valley Natives to repel the colonial invasion, just my child’s fascination with violence and mystery and female heroism. I had to learn along with Margaret to write Taken by the Shawnee.
It was so marvelous, so fulfilling, to weave together the brilliantly colored strands of history and imagination, but I could only do so after long study and thought, as a writer who is always an outsider.

First Edition title page of The Matchlock Gun
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