Captured By The Indians

Astounding eyewitness accounts of Indian captivity by people who lived to tell the tale. Fifteen true adventures recount suffering and torture, bloody massacres, relentless pursuits, miraculous escapes, and adoption into Indian tribes.

On New Year's Day in 1870, ten-year-old Adolph Korn was kidnapped by an Apache raiding party. Traded to Comaches, he thrived in the rough, nomadic existence, quickly becoming one of the tribe's fiercest warriors. Forcibly returned to his parents after three years, Korn never adjusted to life in white society. He spent his last years in a cave, all but forgotten by his family. That is, until Scott Zesch stumbled over his own great-great-great uncle's grave. Determined to understand how such a "good boy" could have become Indianized so completely, Zesch travels across the west, digging through archives, speaking with Comanche elders, and tracking eight other child captives from the region with hauntingly similar experiences. With a historians rigor and a novelists eye, Zesch's The Captured paints a vivid portrait of life on the Texas frontier, offering a rare account of captivity. "A carefully written, well-researched contribution to Western history -- and to a promising new genre: the anthropology of the stolen." - Kirkus Reviews

A Newbery Honor book inspired by the true story of a girl captured by a Shawnee war party in Colonial America and traded to a Seneca tribe. When twelve-year-old Mary Jemison and her family are captured by Shawnee raiders, she’s sure they’ll all be killed. Instead, Mary is separated from her siblings and traded to two Seneca sisters, who adopt her and make her one of their own. Mary misses her home, but the tribe is kind to her. She learns to plant crops, make clay pots, and sew moccasins, just as the other members do. Slowly, Mary realizes that the Indians are not the monsters she believed them to be. When Mary is given the chance to return to her world, will she want to leave the tribe that has become her family? This Newbery Honor book is based on the true story of Mary Jemison, the pioneer known as the “White Woman of the Genesee.” This ebook features an illustrated biography of Lois Lenski including rare images and never-before-seen documents from the author’s estate.

Nine Years Among the Indians is an autobiography of Herman Lehmann, who was an eleven-year-old boy when he was captured by a raiding party of eight to ten Apaches alongside his older brother Willie. The Apaches called Lehmann "En Da" (White Boy). He spent about six years with them and became assimilated into their culture, rising to the position of petty chief. As a young warrior, one of his most memorable battles was a running fight with the Texas Rangers on August 24, 1875, which took place near Fort Concho, about 65 miles west of the site of San Angelo, Texas.The phenomenon of a white child raised by Indians made Herman Lehmann a notable figure in the United States.

Even before the arrival of Europeans to the Americas, the practice of taking captives was widespread among Native Americans. Indians took captives for many reasons: to replace--by adoption--tribal members who had been lost in battle, to use as barter for needed material goods, to use as slaves, or to use for reproductive purposes. From the legendary story of John Smith's captivity in the Virginia Colony to the wildly successful narratives of New England colonists taken captive by local Indians, the genre of the captivity narrative is well known among historians and students of early American literature. Not so for Hispanic America. Fernando Operé redresses this oversight, offering the first comprehensive historical and literary account of Indian captivity in Spanish-controlled territory from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. Originally published in Spanish in 2001 as Historias de la frontera: El cautiverio en la América hispánica, this newly translated work reveals key insights into Native American culture in the New World's most remote regions. From the "happy captivity" of the Spanish military captain Francisco Nuñez de Pineda y Bascuñán, who in 1628 spent six congenial months with the Araucanian Indians on the Chilean frontier, to the harrowing nineteenth-century adventures of foreigners taken captive in the Argentine Pampas and Patagonia; from the declaraciones of the many captives rescued in the Rio de la Plata region of Argentina in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to the riveting story of Helena Valero, who spent twenty-four years among the Yanomamö in Venezuela during the mid-twentieth century, Operé's vibrant history spans the entire gamut of Spain's far-flung frontiers. Eventually focusing on the role of captivity in Latin American literature, Operé convincingly shows how the captivity genre evolved over time, first to promote territorial expansion and deny intercultural connections during the colonial era, and later to romanticize the frontier in the service of nationalism after independence. This important book is thus multidisciplinary in its concept, providing ethnographic, historical, and literary insights into the lives and customs of Native Americans and their captives in the New World.

Captivity narratives have been a standard genre of writings about Indians of the East for several centuries.a Until now, the West has been almost entirely neglected.a Now Gregory and Susan Michno have rectified that with this painstakenly researched collection of vivid and often brutal accounts of what happened to those men and women and children that were captured by marauding Indians during the settlement of the West."

This book is an account of Minnie Buce Carrigan's captivity among the Sioux after the 1862 uprising and her subsequent experience as an orphan. Carrigan emigrated with her German parents to Fox Lake, Wisconsin in 1858. Two years later they helped to establish a German settlement at Middle Creek in Renville County, Minnesota, where they lived in relative comfort and peace among the Sioux [Dakota]. By 1862, the numbers of settlers had grown exponentially, and their Sioux neighbors began to display signs of hostility. On August 18, 1862, when Carrigan was only about seven years of age, her parents and two of her siblings were killed during the Sioux uprising. Carrigan was taken captive with a brother and sister and spent ten weeks among the Sioux before the U.S. army compelled the return of all captives. Several other survivors, Emanuel Reyff, J.G. Lane, Mrs. Inefeldt, and Minnie Krieger, relate their own experiences in a final section of the book.