Mary Jemison

A painting of Mary Jemison

Mary Jemison (1743–1833) was an American frontier woman and an adopted Seneca who was kidnapped by the Shawnee in 1755 or 1758 and sold to the Seneca's in exchange for a lost brother who then adopted her. She married twice, had eight children and numerous grandchildren and told her story to James Seaver in 1824 from which her notoriety came. Her story gave insight into the grave suffering of captives and also to the lives of the Indians and their women, in particular, at that time.

Her early life

Mary Booty Jemison was born to Thomas and Jane Erwin Jemison aboard the ship William and Mary in the fall of 1743 while en route from Northern Ireland to America. Upon their arrival in America, the couple and children, John, Thomas and Betsey, and their new child, Mary, joined other Scots-Irish immigrants and headed west from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to what was then the western frontier (now central Pennsylvania) and squatted on territory that was under the authority of the Iroquois Confederacy. They had two more sons, Matthew and Robert.

During the time the Jemisons were establishing their home, the French and Indian War was raging. One morning in 1758, a capturing party consisting of six Shawnee Indians and four Frenchmen captured Mary, her family (except two older brothers) and Davy Wheelock a boy from another family. On route to Fort Duquesne (where the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers meet to create the Ohio River in modern-day Pittsburgh, Mary’s mother, father, Betsey, Matthew, Robert, and a neighbor woman and her two children were scalped and killed in horrible ways. (Thomas and John had been in the barn, and were able to escape and then went to live with their grandfather, Erwin, in Virginia.) Mary and the other young boy were spared. Once the party reached the Fort, Mary was sold to two Seneca Indians, who took Mary down the Ohio river. The Senecas adopted Mary, giving her the name Corn Tassel then later "little woman of great courage."

Life with the Indians

When Mary was seventeen, she married a Delaware named Sheninjee and had a son who she named Thomas after her father. Concerned that the end of the war would mean the return of captives and thus the loss of his young wife, Sheninjee took Mary on a 700 mile journey to the Sehgahunda Valley along the Genesee River. Although Mary reached this destination, her husband did not. He had left his wife with his brothers in order to hunt, had taken ill and died.

Now a widow, Mary was taken in by Sheninjee's clan relatives and made her home at the Little Beard's Town (present-day Cuylerville, New York). She married a Seneca Chief named Hiakatoo and had six more children. Her husband was a leader in the 1778 Cherry Valley massacre. She was forced to move to the Gardeau Flats near Castile, New York, when General John Sullivan's army retaliated and destroyed her town.

Much of the land at Little Beard's Town was sold by the Senecas to white settlers in 1797. By 1823, most of the remainder of the land was sold, except for a two acre tract of land reserved for Mary's use. She owned the largest herd of cattle in the region due to a 1797 tribal grant which made her one of the largest landowners. Her land title was confirmed by the state in 1817, at which time she was naturalized. Known locally as the "White Woman of the Genesee," Mary lived on the tract until she sold it in 1831 and moved to the Buffalo Creek Reservation. She was noted for her generosity, cheerfulness, had a vigor well into her 80s.

An H.A. Dudley wrote in 1893 about meeting Mary Jemison when visiting with his aunt who was greeted as "the woman who had hair just like my mother's."

"The old woman would stroke the auburn tresses, and sit down on her low and well-worn rocking chair and croon over her reflections of the mother who charged her, when ruthlessly separated in the woods of Pennsylvania, not to forget the name of her childhood, nor the prayers she had taught her in the pioneer home which had that day been burned to the ground.

At that first visit, Dudley reports, that she was small in height (another reported her as four and a half feet tall) and dressed in Indian clothing with moccasins, cloth pantaletts or buckskin, petticoats and an overgarment for the body with shoulders. She wore a blanket when when she went outside.

She lived with her daughter Polly, her sons Tom and John, and perhaps some others. But the boys would disappear as soon as any white visitors came and not return until the guests left. Polly would stay doing work around the house while the visitors talked and she seemed "relieved" when they left.

When white friends came to visit on Sundays, Mary, normally reserved, would often open up and tell about her life. She reported that she had tried once to go back and live among white people, but her half-breed children couldn't be accepted, and she had grown accustomed to the style and habits of the Indians. She said she was just "too old now to learn again the ways of the whites". She had her beautiful acres, which were her home, so she stayed where she was with the Indians.

Around 1830 only white farmers remained in the area. They looked with "envious eyes" on her rich bottom lands which were underused by her family. She decided to move with the Indians to the reservation near Buffalo. She was "white woman enough to own her own land, but too much of an Indian to work it profitably". So she sold her pleasant home and went with her tribe to their reservation.

William Pryor Letchworth asked William B. Munson to describe the woman he had known as a young man. His account appeared in Doty's History of Livingston County.

"The 'White Woman' was quite intelligent, sociable, and communicative, but grave and serious after the manner of the Indians with whom her life from early childhood had been spent... Mentioning to her upon one occasion that I had read the history of her life, and that it had interested me very much, 'Ah, yes!' she replied, 'but I did not tell them who wrote it down half of what it was.' It was thought at that time that she withheld information the Indians feared might stir up against them the prejudices of the white people."

The descendants of a man who knew her, Truman Stone, tell of a time of famine and their great-grandfather went looking for grain. He walked twenty-five miles and found that no one had enough to sell. When he finally met Mary Jemison she gave it freely and refused to take any money from him. He reported that she fed him some Indian cake made of cracked corn with a little salt added and baked in a kettle. "After the cake was done, she broke a goose egg into the kettle and friend it...she invited me to eat, which I did, and it was the best dinner I ever ate."

File:Mary Jemison statue at Letchworth State Park.jpg

Statue of Mary Jemison at Letchworth State Park

Mary lived the rest of her life with the people of the Seneca Nation until she died on September 19, 1833. She was initially buried on the Buffalo Creek Reservation, but in 1874 it was being sold with little concern for the graves there. Her grandchildren approached Mr. William Pryor Letchworth to see if her bones could be moved. He asked them to bring the bones of their grandmother to his Glen Iris Estate. Forty-one years after she returned to the valley, she was re-interred at the Glen Iris Estate (now Letchworth State Park in present day Castile, New York. She was placed in a new walnut coffin and brought by train by her grandchildren.

Ceremonies that were held in the ancient Council House blended both the Seneca and Christian ways, Dehgewanus was buried on the bluff above the Middle Falls. A bronze statue of Mary, created in 1910, now marks her grave. The remaining historical documents concerning her life story are kept in the library at Letchworth State Park.

Her children

• A girl who lived two days, 1761
• Thomas Jemison, son of her first husband, Sheninjee, Mary named her son "to commemorate the name of my much lamented father"
• John was born in 1766, son of Hiokatoo, and was killed in 1817
• Nancy, the first daughter to Hiokatoo, was born in 1773, died in 1839
• Betsey, date uncertain but presumed after Nancy but before Polly, died in 1839
• Polly was born late in 1778 or early in 1779, died 1839. (No reason is given for the deaths of three daughters within three months of each other- it is likely, however, that they died of an epidemic on the Buffalo Creek Reservation)
• Jane was born in 1782, died in 1897
• A son named Jesse was born in 1784 or 1785; he was killed by his half-brother, John, in 1812

The English names for these children reflect their white family history, but the children also had Seneca names. According to treaty documents, Thomas was known to the Senecas as Teahdowaingqua.

Seaver's biography of Mary Jemison

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), considered by many history scholars at Letchworth to be a reasonably accurate narrative. She spent a good deal of time telling her story to James Seaver who worked on it from 1823 to 24. It was enormously popular and eventually had 30 editions.

Many setters moved into the Genessee valley seeking good farmland where they became acquainted with Mary Jemison, "She was the protectoress of the homeless fugitive, and made welcome the weary wanderer. Many still live to commemorate her benevolence towards them, when prisoners during the war, and to ascribe their deliverance to the mediation of The White Woman.

Seavers writes that the Peace of 1783 brought an end to the hostilities between the Indians and the whites which allowed many captive whites to return to their friends and families. Stories began to spread about the horrific experiences these survivors had endured and the sad demise of many of their friends and families. To this end he was engaged to interview Mary Jemison.

He describes Mary Jemison as, "speaks English plainly and distinctly, with a little of the Irish emphasis, and has the use of words so well as to render herself intelligible on any subject with which she is acquainted. Her recollection and memory exceeded my expectation. It cannot be reasonably supposed, that a person of her age has kept the events of seventy years in so complete a chain as to be able to assign to each its proper time and place; she, however, made her recital with as few obvious mistakes as might be found in that of a person of fifty."

He adds, "Her ideas of religion, correspond in every respect with those of the great mass of the Senecas. She applauds virtue, and despises vice. She believes in a future state, in which the good will be happy, and the bad miserable; and that the acquisition of that happiness, depends primarily upon human volition, and the consequent good deeds of the happy recipient of blessedness. The doctrines taught in the Christian religion, she is a stranger to."

She told him of her horrific kidnapping experience and how she watched her captors dry her parents' scalps on hoops by the fire. She suffered hunger and exhaustion and finally was given to two Seneca sisters to replace their brother who had died in battle against General Washington. She was loved and taken care of well and even loved her first husband for his kindness. She nearly was taken back by settlers at the fort but her family spirited her away. She later relates the terrible story of how her jealous son, John, killed his two brothers and died a violent death himself.

Her story shows a contrasted life of great suffering yet kindness and love. She loved her children above all else and for this reason chose to stay with the Senecas and even move to the reservation at Buffalo.

Legacy

Mary Jemison's tale gave incredible insights into the suffering of white captives taken by Indians. Her story, as told to James Seavers, showed the life of the Indians in the Northeast of the United States and added much information about the culture, beliefs and practices of the Senecas and other tribes.

Her story has also been used in women's studies to highlight the lives of women, especially Indian women, of the time. She was known as "Dehgewanus, The White Woman of the Genesee." She was re-interred at Letchworth State Park in Pennsylvania, by its founder, William Pryor Letchworth. A granite marker was erected in the 1880's, and the statue was dedicated in 1910. Artifacts, documents, and primary sources are kept in the Letchworth State Park Historical library.

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Beauchamp, William. History of the New York Iroquois (1905), Ira J. Friedman, Inc., 1963. ASIN B000WSG4A0.
• Namias, June. White Captives: Gender and Ethnicity on the American Frontier. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 1993. ISBN 978-0807844083
• Seaver, James. A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison. New York: American Scenic & Historical Preservation Society. 1942 edition. At Guttenberg Project www.gutengerg.org Retrieved July 5, 2008.
• Strong, Pauline Turner. Captive Selves, Captivating Others: The Politics and Poetics of Colonial American Captivity Narratives, Westview Press, 2000). ISBN 978-0813316666
• Volo, James M. and Dorothy Denneen Volo. Daily Life on the Old Colonial Frontier, Greenwood Press, 2002. ISBN 978-0313311031

External links

All retrieved July 5, 2008.

Sources

• Swarthmore College, Mary Jemison, Partial text of a Captivity Narrative from the 1750s transcribed in 1824 www.swarthmore.edu
• A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison, by James E. Seaver, via Project Gutenberg www.gutenberg.org
• A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison, via Google Books (scanned books) books.google.com

Other

• Letchworth State Park, Glimpses of the Past www.letchworthparkhistory.com
  • photograph of Mary as an old woman

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