Indian Captivity
Being captured by American Indians was a dreaded possibility—both real and imagined—for early explorers and settlers on the ever-shifting American frontier. Their encroachment on Indian land and the Indians’ resistance to it made captivity an intensely feared historical reality.
Taking captives had been an established tactic of Indian warfare well before Europeans arrived in the New World. Indians took captives for a variety of reasons: primarily to take revenge on their enemies; to obtain ransom money; or to replace relatives who had died in intertribal or, later, colonial wars or because of European diseases such as smallpox. The precise number of captives taken from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries remains a matter of speculation, but it might easily amount to tens of thousands. Alden T. Vaughan and Daniel K. Richter report that over 1,600 people were taken captive in northern New England alone between 1675 and 1763. The fate of most captives, however, remains unknown. Hundreds may have died while en route with their captors or while in captivity; many were sold to the French or ransomed to the English; some converted to Catholicism and started new lives in French Canada; some were adopted by Indians, assimilated into their captors’ culture, and refused to return to white society. Only a small number of those who came back left accounts of their experiences.Those former captives who either penned their experiences themselves or dictated them to others, mostly religious officials, started the literary genre of the American Indian captivity narrative. Mary Rowlandson’s True History of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (1682) is considered the very first captivity narrative and a landmark text in early American literature. Tales of forced encounters with the continent’s native inhabitants have enjoyed enormous popularity ever since Europeans set foot on American soil, and accounts of white captives have been widely read on both sides of the Atlantic.
Many of them attained the status of best-sellers in their day; some of them were reissued several times. Scholars of early America have noted the importance of captivity narratives for literary and cultural history. The genre is credited with having played a crucial role in initiating a distinctive American literature.Most captives were of Anglo-Saxon origin, and most narratives were related, written down, and published in English. However, non-English speakers had the experience of being taken captive by Indians as well, and there are many captivity texts in languages other than English. The best- known stories of Germans in Indian captivity are those of Hans Staden, Barbara and Regina Leininger and Marie LeRoy, and Abraham Urssenbacher. Staden was presumably the very first German explorer who fell victim to Indians. In the midsixteenth century he set sail for the coast of Brazil, where the Tuppin Imba, a native tribe said to practice cannibalism, captured him. He managed to survive for months among his captors before finally escaping to freedom. His account of life among his captors is entitled Wahrhaftige Historia und Beschreibung eines Landes der wilden, nack- ten und grimmigen Menschenfresser, in der Neuen Welt Amerika gelegen (True History and Description of a Country of Wild, Naked, Terrible Man-eaters Who Dwell in the New World Called America). This two- part narrative was first published in 1557 in Marburg, Germany. It became an immediate best-seller and was later translated and reissued in many languages, including English, French, Portuguese, and Dutch.
Staden’s Wahrhaftige Historia represents one of the earliest American Indian captivity narratives—if not the earliest captivity narrative of all. It appeared 125 years before Mary Rowlandson’s True History, and it anticipates many of the later features of the captivity genre. It also bears similarities to John Smith’s account of his rescue by Pocahontas—described in his General History of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles (1624).
It is the first and probably most famous captivity story of an Englishman or, to be more precise, an English man. Both Smith and Rowlandson are credited with having initiated patterns of the genre. Unlike Rowlandson, but like Smith, Staden presents himself in the heroic mode, as an adventurous man full of bravado. Like later female captives (e.g., Gertrude Morgan), he managed to establish a reputation among his captors as a spiritual healer, or shaman. Part One of Staden’s narrative tells about his two disastrous voyages on Portuguese ships to the New World and includes the story of his captivity. Part Two contains detailed observations on the now-extinct culture of the Tuppin Imba tribe, including ethnographic descriptions of its villages, its traditions, and its religious practices and customs. Staden’s True History interweaves adventure and information about the native peoples he encountered, and it suggests some of the diverse styles of the captivity genre as they came into use afterward.An equally important later story is that of the Leininger family. The family of six migrated from Reutlingen, Wurttemberg, in the early 1740s and settled on the Pennsylvanian frontier. During the Penn’s Creek Massacre of 1755, Allegheny Indians attacked the family homestead. The family’s daughters, Barbara and Regina, ten and twelve years old, were abducted, while their father and one of their brothers were shot. Their mother and another brother were spared because they were absent at the time of the attack. On the forced march to the Ohio region, Barbara and Regina were forcibly separated. The experiences of Barbara and another companion, Marie LeRoy, who escaped together in 1759, are related in Die Erzehlungen von Maria le Roy und Barbara Leininger, Welche vierthalb Jahr unter den Indianern gefangen gewesen, und am 6ten May in dieser Stadt glucklich angekommen (Narrative of captvity [sic] of Marie le Roy and Barbara Leininger, 1755—1759)— published simultaneously in German and English in 1759, the year of their escape.
Unlike her sister Barbara, Regina was adopted by her captors, and she remained with her new Indian family for about nine years. She was among the redeemed captives whom Colonel Henry Bouquet (1719-1765), a British army officer during the French and Indian War, forced the Indians to relinquish toward the end of Pontiac’s Rebellion, an unsuccessful Indian uprising against the British, in 1765. Together with approximately 200 other ex-captives, Regina was brought to Carlisle to be claimed by her white relatives. Regina, however, had turned into a “white Indian,” someone who lived with Indians for a long time, gradually assimilated into their culture, and eventually assumed an Indian identity. Regina had come to look and act like an Indian woman so much that her own mother failed to identify her. It was only through the words of a German hymn—Allein, Und Doch Nicht Ganz Allein (Alone, Yet Not Alone Am I)—that mother and daughter finally recognized each other and the family members were reunited. In 1766 Regina’s mother went to New Providence to tell her daughter’s story to Reverend Heinrich Melchior Muhlenberg (1711—1787), a German Lutheran clergyman, who recorded it in his pastoral reports and published it in Hallische Nachrichten (Hallean Annals). Regina’s life story—of which different versions with slightly varying times, places, and names exist—was fictionalized many times. Like many other captivity narratives before and after, Regina’s is an as-told-to story. Various editors in both languages, English and German, have diluted the facts of her life, her captivity, and her return to white society. Reuben Weiser, another Lutheran clergyman, expanded Muhlenberg’s account into the novel Regina, the German Captive: or, True Piety among the Lowly (1860). The book, in which Regina Leininger appears as the semi-fictional Regina Hartman, testifies to the widespread use of captivity narratives as a means for spreading proLutheran and anti-Catholic propaganda. Weiser points out in the preface to his book that it was especially “prepared for our Lutheran Sabbath-schools” (Weiser 1977, 7).Erzehlung Eines unter den Indianern gewesener Gefangenen (Narrative of an Indian CaptiveJ, first published in Neu-ein- gerichteter Americanischer Geschichts- und Haus-Calender (Newly Established American Historical and House Calendar) in 1762, narrates the captivity of Abraham Urssenbacher. The reader learns that Urssenbacher and his family had migrated from Germany to Pennsylvania in 1759 and settled in Heidelberg Township in Northampton County. His wife (who was pregnant at the time), their two-year-old daughter, his father-in-law, and some other relatives were brutally assaulted and killed in an Indian attack. Urssenbacher, who served as a soldier in a Pennsylvanian regiment stationed at a fort near Bedford, was captured and carried away into Indian captivity. Together with a companion, he later managed to escape. The narrative, which he wrote himself in the first person, focuses on the appalling details of his heroic survival alone in the wilderness.
Merkwurdige und interessante Lebens- geschichte der Frau von Wallville, Welche vier Jahre lang an einen Irokesen verheyra- thet war (The Remarkable and Interesting Life Story of Maria Walwille, Who Was Married to an Iroquois Indian for Four Years) appeared in 1809. The reminder on the title page that it is kein Roman (not a novel) is misleading, because the story is in all probability fictitious. It is the first- person narrative of a certain Maria Grafin von Walwille, who tells about her years of captivity among the Iroquois tribe from about 1755 to 1759, her marriage to an Iroquois warrior, her escape to freedom, and her later marriage to Graf von Wal- wille. An earlier version of the story appeared under the title Die wilde Eu- ropaerin oder Geschichte der Frau von Walville in 1799.
Katrin Fischer
See also Muhlenberg, Heinrich Melchior; Staden, Hans; Travel Literature, German- U.S.
References and Further Reading
Derounian-Stodola, Kathryn Zabelle, and James Arthur Levernier. The Indian Captivity Narrative, 1550—1900. New York: Twayne, 1993.
Kolodny, Annette. The Land before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630—1860. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1984.
Namias, June. White Captives: Gender and Ethnicity on the American Frontier. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1993.
Sayre, Gordon M., ed. American Captivity Narratives: Selected Narratives with Introduction. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000.
Vaughan, Alden T., and Daniel K. Richter. “Crossing the Cultural Divide: Indians and New Englanders, 1605—1763.” Proceedings ofthe American Antiquarian Society 90 (1980): 23-99.
Weiser, Reuben. Regina, the German Captive: or, True Piety among the Lowly. New York: Garland, 1977.