The Indian captivity narrative, though it has antecedents and parallels in other cultures, developed as a particularly American literary form. It appeared, flourished, and declined during the three hundred odd years of American experience on the Indian frontier: three hundred centuries during which the Indian presented an obstacle to the expanding civilization of the white man. With the disappearance of that frontier—and with it of the threat of the Indian—the captivity narrative lost its last attenuated connection with reality, and it, too, disappeared, merging finally with the stream of Western sensational literature.
During those three centuries of frontier experience, the captivity narrative was to suffer considerable alteration. In its beginnings in Puritan New England, it appeared as a concrete, detailed account of trial and fortitude, illuminated by an intense conviction of God’s mercy. Because almost every such narrative had been written after the captive had been rescued or ransomed or had escaped, it was the experience of redemption which gave intensity and significance to the account of the trials suffered. For the Puritan, the captivity narrative was both concrete evidence and symbolic testimony of Divine Providence.
Later audiences, however, were to find the sensational details of the captivity more exciting than its symbolic significance. The religious intensity of the early narratives was replaced in the eighteenth century by a merely formal piety, and the narrative became increasingly a propaganda vehicle concerned in the main with revealing the cruelty and barbarity of the savages and their European allies. Though it was to be modified at times, it was this view of the Indians which the captivity narratives were to present until the final destruction of the Indian power.
This propaganda function of the narratives of captivity was to merge in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century with the Gothic horror story and the novel of sensibility, producing accounts which grew progressively more sentimental and more shocking. The female captive, because of her greater potential for pathetic effects and because of the excitement she created as an object of sexual interest, all but crowded the male captive off the scene. Those authentic, detailed accounts which make the earliest narratives valuable to the anthropologist and the historian were, in the nineteenth century, replaced by stylized, semi-fictional pastiches of gore and sentimentality confected by hack writers more concerned with reproducing the popular image of the Indian than with authenticity.
It was at this lean latter end of the captivity narrative that Mrs. Fanny Kelly’s My Captivity Among the Sioux appeared. Travelling to Idaho with an emigrant train from her home in Kansas, the nineteen year old Mrs. Kelly was captured west of Fort Laramie by a band of Ogalala Sioux on July 12, 1864, and held prisoner until December 12 of that year, when she was released at Fort Sully in the Dakota Territory. First published in 1872, under conditions made clear in the text, her narrative came buttressed with affidavits from Army officers and Indian chiefs, attesting to its authenticity in a period when most such accounts were more fiction than fact. Her book is clearly one of the most distinguished examples of the last period of the captivity narrative. Although Mrs. Kelly’s work contains most of the standard elements of the nineteenth century captivity, her sentimental passages, her flowery nature descriptions, her pious and patriotic effusions exist as isolated set-pieces, and the detailed and exciting account of her actual experiences is never obscured by them. She is capable of referring to the squaws who guard her in Cooperesque terms: as forest belles, or as artless maidens—but she rejects scornfully and sadly the “noble savages” of popular literature. At moments in her narrative, she intrudes elaborate, full-blown descriptions of sunsets and mountain storms, but she seldom permits her effusive sensibility to spill over into the adventure itself. On the whole, Mrs. Kelly remains an extra-ordinarily level-headed young woman throughout her ordeal. On her liberation she offers the traditional paean of Thanksgiving, not to the Almighty, but to the Flag of the Republic, and equally illuminating of her character is the fact that among the first words she speaks to a white man after she has been taken captive are, “Has Richmond been taken?”
Mrs. Kelly shines through her tale as a woman of genuine courage and ingenuity, and as an observant and sensitive recorder. However, what most significantly distinguishes this account from the dozens of others which it superficially resembles is an ambivalence of motive which produces at times a kind of unconscious irony in her narrative. Although Mrs. Kelly explicitly professes a most unambiguous hatred toward the Indians for their treachery and cruelty, she betrays a more complex attitude by including throughout her account many examples of white treachery, cruelty, and injustice toward the Indians, which considerably weaken her indictment of her captors. Describing a campsite close to which her party was attacked and her companions slain, she remarks that it was near this location that General Harney had, some years before, massacred a group of Indian women and children. In a chapter devoted almost exclusively to the deceitfulness of the Indians, she includes without comment an account of white travellers leaving behind them packages of strychnine-soaked biscuits for the Indians to find.
This ambivalence is further revealed by her tendency to identify herself with her captors in recounting her experiences: she continually shifts the point of view of her narrative in this way, changing from “they” to “we” unpredictably. Even her account of the Indians’ flight from General Sully, who might have rescued her, is for the most part written in the first person plural, and actually ends “. . . giving us an opportunity to escape, which saved us from falling into his hands. . . .”
Fanny Kelly’s narrative is valuable not only because it is an intrinsically exciting first-hand account, rich in details of Indian life, told by a brave and intelligent woman; it is especially valuable because it expresses the tension between two conflicting nineteenth-century images: the Indian as savage aggressor, and the Indian as hapless victim—a tension which illustrates the uneasy mingling of hostility and guilt central to the whole American frontier experience.
Jules Zanger
Southern Illinois University
OF
AMONG THE
BY
WITH A BRIEF ACCOUNT OF GENERAL SULLY’S INDIAN EXPEDITION IN 1864, BEARING UPON EVENTS OCCURRING IN MY CAPTIVITY.
HARTFORD, CONN.
MUTUAL PUBLISHING COMPANY.