Jemison, Mary
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Wikipedia-Article "Mary Jemison"
Mary Jemison (1743–1833) was an American frontierswoman. She was born at sea while her parents were en route from Northern Ireland to America and settled outside of Philadelphia; Mary was born on the passage to America.
One morning in 1758, a capturing party consisting of six Shawnee Indians and four Frenchmen captured Mary and her family along with a boy from another family. Mary’s life was spared; however, her mother, father, and three of her siblings were killed and scalped. Mary was taken to Fort Duquesne (where the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers meet to create the Ohio River in modern-day Pittsburgh) and then downriver by two Seneca Indians, and adopted by two sisters. She was given the name Dichewamis, which means "The Pretty One".
She married a Delaware and had two sons. Later she married a Seneca named Hiakatoo and had six more children. Known as the White Woman of the Genesee, Mary Jemison refused to leave the Senecas, and in 1817 New York confirmed her possession of a tract of land (given her in 1797) on the Genesee River.
Her story is told in a classic "captivity narrative", J. E. Seaver's Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison (1824; latest ed. 1967). Some subsequent retellings of her life by other authors, written after her death, bent the events of her life to serve a racist, nationalist worldview. Seaver's, however, is considered by most history scholars to be a reasonably accurate narrative.
Indian Captive: The Story of Mary Jemison, written by Lois Lenski, is a fictionalized version of Mary's story for youg readers.
There is a bronze statue of Mary Jemison, created in 1910, in Letchworth State Park in New York.
References
Namias, June. White Captives: Gender and Ethnicity on the American Frontier. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1993.