“They Found and Left Her an Indian”: Gender, Race, and the Whitening of Young Bear

. . . Mourning the lost. At length, a rumour came Of a white woman found in Indian tents, Far, far away. A father’s dying words Came o’er the husbandman, and up he rose, And took his sad-eyed sister by the hand, Blessing his household, as he bade farewell, For their uncertain pilgrimage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

At length they reach’d a lodge Deep in the wilderness, beside whose door A wrinkled woman with the Saxon brow Sate [sic] coarsely mantled in her blanket-robe, The Indian pipe between her shrivell’d lips. Yet in her blue eye dwelt a gleam of thought, A hidden memory, whose electric force Thrill’d to the fount of being and reveal’d The kindred drops that had so long wrought out A separate channel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

A trembling nerve Thrill’d all unwonted at her bosom’s core, And her lip blanch’d. But two daughters gazed Reproachfully upon her, to their cheek Rushing the proud Miami chieftain’s blood, In haughty silence. So, she wept no tears; The moveless spirit of the race she loved Had come upon her, and her features show’d Slight touch of sympathy. . . .

—Lydia Sigourney, “The Lost Lily” (1846)

On an autumn evening in 1835, the elderly, diminutive Miami woman Maconaquah (Young Bear) welcomed the weary white Indian trader George Ewing into her home at Deaf Man’s Village in northern Indiana.¹ According to Ewing, the indigenous woman joined him near the cabin’s hearth after her family went to bed. He surmised that sick, tired, and perhaps wanting to confess before she died, Young Bear revealed a secret she had kept for nearly half-a-century; Indians had taken her from her white family as a child.² His “discovery” launched a national search for Young Bear’s eastern relatives that eventually raised the woman from obscurity to national recognition. Ewing, informed by Young Bear that she had once lived among white people in Pennsylvania, wrote to Eastern newspaper editors, who subsequently published Ewing’s letters in their papers. “There is now living near this place,” he wrote the postmaster at Lancaster, Pennsylvania, “an aged woman, who a few days ago told me, whilst I lodged in the camp with her one night, that she was taken away from her father’s house.”³ Two years later, Ewing received a letter from Joseph Slocum, who was living at the time in Pennsylvania, inquiring about the woman. Slocum wondered; could she be his sister, Frances, the “Lost Sister of the Wyoming”? He packed his bags and set off for Indiana.

White authors have recounted tales about Frances Slocum many times over the past century and a half. And, while these stories appear to mirror the many other captivity narratives that dominated eighteenth- and (to a limited extent) early nineteenth-century American literature, the narrative of Maconaquah’s capture, discovery, and later life differs in important ways. These differences reveal dynamics about gendered constructions of race in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that others do not. Moreover, Frances Slocum’s story continues to be written and rewritten as a captivity narrative, and that process illuminates the ongoing colonial project that has long typified the relationship between whites and Indians in America.

Historically, captivity narratives have served as powerful fables that stress the undesirability of race mixing and place the events of colonization, settlement, and conquest into narratives of violent conflict.⁴ But modern scholarly treatments of the genre raise the possibility of seeing beyond typical nineteenth-century bifurcated categories of race that stress opposition. Historian June Namias believes that “the captivity drama presents us with an intersection of cultures” as intermarriages rest at the center of many of these stories.⁵ In the case of Frances Slocum, however, writers have historically underplayed the violence of her captivity and seldom focused on Slocum’s marriages to two separate indigenous husbands. In fact, they rarely discuss her half-century living among the Indians at all. Instead, writers have spilled much ink upon paper trying to explain how the elderly Frances Slocum [End...