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Mary Jemison was a settler girl who was captured by Seneca warriors when she was fifteen, and her family was killed. The Seneca adopted her as one of their own, and she grew up, married, and raised her children in their nation. When she was finally offered the chance to go back, she chose to stay. As an old woman she told her whole life story, and this is the book of it.
The narrative was taken down by James E. Seaver from Mary’s own telling in 1823 and published in 1824, with a preface, an introduction, and an appendix in this first edition text. It moves in the order of her life: the capture in Pennsylvania, the adoption ceremony, marriages, wartime raids, the move to the Genesee country, and her long widowhood as a landholder known to settlers as the White Woman of the Genesee.
Its themes are survival, loyalty, and the cost of the frontier to everyone on it. Mary judges both worlds by conduct rather than blood: she records Seneca kindness and settler cruelty, and her own griefs, children lost, a son murdered, without flinching. The voice Seaver preserved is plain, exact, and quietly devastating.
It lasts because there is nothing else like it: a full life lived across the frontier’s divide, told by the woman who lived it, at a time when such testimony was rarely taken down. Historians still mine it, and general readers still finish it in one sitting, astonished.
Mary Jemison was fifteen when Seneca warriors captured her family in Pennsylvania in 1758; her parents were killed, and she was adopted into the Seneca nation, married, and, offered her freedom, chose to stay. In 1824, in old age, she told her story to James E. Seaver, and the result is a captivity narrative without equal in American literature. Two husbands, children raised Seneca, land on the Genesee River: a life crossing every line the frontier drew.
Of all the captivity narratives, this is the one where the captive stays. Mary Jemison was born on the voyage to America in 1743, captured with her family in Pennsylvania in 1758, and adopted by Seneca sisters to replace a brother lost in war. She married twice, raised her children as Seneca, farmed land on the Genesee River, and negotiated with chiefs and land speculators into her eighties. In 1823 she dictated her life to James E. Seaver, and his Narrative, published in 1824, became an American classic. Expect a plain spoken life, not a romance: the capture and the killings are told without melodrama, and so are the harvests, the hunts, the deaths of children, and the long labour of holding land as an Indigenous woman in a republic hungry for it. The appendix of this first edition adds documents and later testimony. Starvard shelves the book as a primary source of the first rank and a great read besides: one woman’s memory holding two worlds, and the only full account we have of a life lived entirely between them.
Edition: The 1824 first edition text, including its appendix. Text: Project Gutenberg ebook 6960.
The first chapter
A NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE OF MRS. MARY JEMISON,
Title: A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison
Author: James E. Seaver
Release date: November 1, 2004 [eBook #6960]
Most recently updated: June 24, 2013
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/6960
Credits: Text file produced by Robert Connal, David Moynihan, Charles Franks
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
HTML file produced by David Widger
A NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE OF MRS. MARY JEMISON,
Source: Project Gutenberg. Published 1824. US public domain. Share this book: WhatsApp
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