North Country Captives: Selected Narratives of Indian Captivity from Vermont and New Hampshire

by Colin G. Calloway (Editor)

Revealing firsthand narratives of Indian captivity from eighteenth-century New Hampshire and Vermont.
Narratives of Europeans who experienced Indian captivity represent one of the oldest genres of American literature. They are often credited with establishing the stereotype of Indians as cruel and bloodthirsty. While early southern New England accounts were heavily influenced by a dominant Puritan interpretation which had little room for individual and cultural distinctions, later northern New England narratives show growing independence from this influence.
The eight narratives selected for this book challenge old stereotypes and provide a clearer understanding of the nature of captive taking. Indians used captives to replace losses in their tribes and families, and also to participate in the French and British ransom market. These stories portray Indian captors as individuals with a unique culture and offer glimpses of daily life in frontier communities. Calloway complements them with valuable historical background material. His book will appeal especially to readers interested in Native American peoples and life on the north country frontier of Vermont and New Hampshire.

Genres: American History

176 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

About the author

Colin G. Calloway is John Kimball Jr. 1943 Professor of History and Native American Studies at Dartmouth College. His previous books include A Scratch of the Pen and The Victory with No Name.

Reviews

[Deborah Markus · Rating 3 out of 5]

Remember the old days when sometimes if you really wanted just one awesome song, you had to buy an entire album by the band in question? And you always thought, "Well, if I like this song by them, maybe some of the other ones are good, too?" And the album always, ALWAYS turned out to consist of that one really good song, one song that turned out to be pretty good, and ten tracks of boringness?

(Someone please explain to my younger readers what an "album" is. Thank you.)

Okay, this book wasn't exactly like that. But I did only buy it for the captivity narrative of Susanna Johnson. Years ago I read the YA novel Calico Captive, and the author included a little afterword about how she based her book on a true story of a woman and her family being captured by Indians. So I looked and looked and finally found a collection of such captivity narratives that included the one I wanted.

And it turns out that her story was really interesting, and one other story in the collection was pretty interesting, and the rest of them were okay but frankly kind of hard to read. Especially the one that was a diary, and some of the entries were just one or two sentences, and some of them were really boring things like, "The Sabbath day. It rained at night," and some of them shouldn't have been boring given what they were describing but still were, like, "Had the news of the Indians killing and taking four of our people." And I'm all, "Dude, I know you're a pioneer and all, but couldn't you show a little more emotion than that, considering what just happened?"

So I wouldn't recommend this to the general reading audience. I'll be reviewing Calico Captive soon, and will try to give more details as to just how closely the author stuck to the truth.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

"By the second half of the 18th century... Puritan influence had declined... and captivity narratives... became less dominated by religious symbolism and metaphorical structures.... the north country narratives... in this volume may be less famous... but they more often portray Indian captors as human individuals rather than agents of the Devil, and they also offer glimpses of the daily life of frontier communities that existed on the edges of Indian country." That's a damned interesting thesis. The narratives in this volume- particularly Susannah Johnson's- provide the reader with a clearer- but still imperfect- view of Northeastern Indians. I'm glad I tackled these with some background knowledge of events on the New England Frontier, but Calloway's introductory notes will bring the casual reader up to speed as well.