AUTHOR’S NOTE

MY FIRST CLUE and inspiration for this book was a letter written in 1938 in Charleston, West Virginia, on the yellowing typewriter paper of the time. It is addressed in flowing script to “Master Worth Bingham” and “Master Barry Bingham”—my older brothers—from “Cousin Sally” who added, “I prefer the-just-Sally.”

“I am sending you the story,” Sally typed, “of your Great​-Great​-Great​-Great Grandmother. Margaret Handley Paulee Erskine.”

Sally added, “You must let your mother read it over to see if there is anything you should not read until you are bigger boys.”

I was the youngest and a girl; Cousin Sally didn’t consider me an appropriate recipient and yet I am the one who has read, studied, thought, and created, becoming part of the great modern movement of women taking charge of the writing of history.

These few yellowed pages contain Margaret Erskine’s account of her taking by the Shawnee Indians in 1779, based on a brief narrative she dictated to her grandson Allen Caperton six decades after her capture in the wilderness on what was then the western frontier of Virginia.

By now, two hundred and forty-five years later, Margaret’s story has passed through many hands and has been filtered through and colored by many points of view. Along the way, her voice has been lost. Her ignorance as a twenty-six-year-old white woman, her use of terms we no longer accept, her buried thoughts, her sighs, frowns, or sudden spurts of laughter were washed out, carrying away the intimacy of her experience.

Our expectations of that experience have changed as new light has been shed on what have been named “captivity narratives,” nearly all by white women from different periods and different areas. Our expectations of these narratives reflect the agonizingly slow changing of our attitudes toward Native Americans. Now we know that many captives, especially the women, did not want to return to their earlier lives or their earlier families. Something in the tribal life they had experienced caused them to value it. Was it the friendships? The order? The shared work? The greater participation of women in the lives of the tribes?

Finally, a space has opened for my reconsidering and reimagining Margaret’s life. I began this work as an ignorant white woman, a descendent of slave-owning colonists, just as Margaret began her story as an ignorant white woman imbued with the prejudices of her time and place. We have learned together, she as the actor in her story and I as the listening and learning author.

The story begins with Margaret’s birth in Pennsylvania in 1753 and ends with her death in Virginia is 1842 at the ripe old age of eighty-nine.

Why should we care about Margaret’s story? The courage and ingenuity she showed in surviving and adapting bear a similarity to the courage and ingenuity we all need as we face the relentless destruction of the natural world, a destruction prefigured by our destroying of native lands and traditions and peoples.

Courage, once it has taken root in a woman, endures, grows, and forms her future.

That courage shows in a portrait of Margaret painted when she was eighty-seven, two years before her death, by an unnamed itinerant artist. Wearing a decorous black bonnet, tied neatly under her chin, her small blue eyes gaze confidently. Her forehead is unlined and her commanding nose sits above a proudly pursed mouth that seems about to break into a knowing smile. A slice of silver hair shows beneath the edge of her bonnet and her organdy collar is decorated with trim over her white fichu. Although she was a small woman, her black-clothed body looks solid, a sturdy support for her remarkable face, all set in the nineteenth-century version of acclaim: a gold-leaf frame decorated with four clusters of embossed strawberries.

Margaret’s gravestone, at the top of a hill in the Union, West Virginia, cemetery, looks out over the valley as though even in death she wanted a wider view.

This is the story of that wider view.