Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging

by Sebastian Junger

captives were brought in, more than half of them women and children and many too young to remember having lived otherwise. Some had forgotten their Christian names and were recorded in the ledgers with descriptions such as Redjacket, Bighead, Soremouth, and Sourplums. Dozens of white relatives of the missing had accompanied Bouquet’s forces from Fort Pitt, and in addition to the many joyful reunions, there were also wrenching scenes of grief and confusion: young women married to Indian men now standing reluctantly before their former families; children screaming as they were pulled from their Indian kin and delivered to people they didn’t recognize and probably considered enemies. The Indians seemed universally anguished to give up their family members, and when Bouquet’s army finally decamped for Fort Pitt in early November, many trailed behind the column, hunting game for their loved ones and trying to delay the final goodbye as long as possible. One Mingo brave refused to leave the side of a young Virginia woman despite warnings that her former family would kill him on sight. “It must not be denied that there were even some grown persons who shewed an unwillingness to return,” William Smith, a contemporary of Bouquet’s, admitted about some of the white captives. “The Shawanese were obliged to bind several of their prisoners… and some women, who had been delivered up, afterward found means to escape and run back to the Indian towns.”