Taken By The Shawnee

Transcript:

Chapter One – Intro

My name is Sallie Bingham. I’m a writer, a long time writer. I call myself one of the many great unrecognized writers, but it’s not really true of me because I am somewhat known after publishing sixteen books. This, my sixteenth book, is called Taken by the Shawnee, published by Turtle Point Press in New York. And it’s the account of my five times great grandmother’s sojourn with the Shawnee beginning in 1799. Her name was Margaret Erskine.

She lived in Virginia on what was then the western edge of the of the colonies, and she went to Kentucky or she thought she was going to Kentucky with her group and was picked up along the way by the Shawnee and spent four years with them in their villages on the Ohio.

Chapter Two – Reading from Chapter 12

When they came to a clearing, Margaret saw looming in front of them a large wooden house.

A row of columns supported the roof of a commodious porch, and the windows on the ground floor had both wooden shutters and leaded glass.

She knew at once that the home must be the abode of a great chief or of a white man.

This last idea she soon dismissed as Robert led her and little mouse into a front hall with a tall ceiling, whitewashed walls, and a large window giving a view of the surrounding forest.

Boldly placed by the fire, a red jacketed brave rocked and regarded them.

Margaret studied the man in the rocking chair with disbelief.

He wore a red military jacket with gold epaulettes and wide velvet lapels and cuffs.

Large silver bracelets circled his wrists, and around his neck, he wore the silver ornament on a beaded string.

His hair was cut short, and his handsome face was not marred by smallpox.

Why stare at me, white woman? He asked in English, muddied by a strange accent.

Margaret summoned her courage.

I have never seen one of your kind dressed in such a way. Are you a chief?

Your people call me chief Bluejacket, but my jacket is red, he said.

Like the British, Margaret said, greatly hazarding.

The invaders, Most useful allies, the man said, rocking away, at least at certain times.

The British do not burn our towns, Margaret hasarded.

He gestured impatiently.

You burn my towns.

You kill my people. My town where you’re living now was burned twice.

Our women and children were shot down when they tried to run to the woods.

Margaret raised her hand to protest.

She’d never heard of such a deed, but she was interrupted when a young white woman came into the row room with a tray of tea things.

Margaret noticed with astonishment the porcelain cups decorated with pink moss roses.

Most, however, were chipped or had lost their saucers.

A matching teapot stood over the cups, although it had no top.

The white woman set the tray on a table and began rapidly filling the cups.

When she passed one to Margaret, she saw the woman’s blue eyes.

Who are you? Margaret asked.

Sarah Moore, captured in the years of famine twelve moons ago.

I am married to Bluejacket, she added with a degree of pride.

And Margaret noticed that her belly was round under her deerskin jerkin and remembered her friend Robert Dean saying, they need to replace their dead.

Margaret judged that Sarah Moore was perhaps twenty years younger than Blue Jacket, so there would be there would be many more babies if Sarah remained with the tribe as seemed likely.

Also, she recalled that Sarah might become a suitable friend, even an ally, a source of sustenance in time of trouble.

She touched the woman’s arm as she turned away.

What is this tea? She asked. It was nearly as dark as whiskey. Good Indian tea, brought with bought with scalps from the British in Detroit, Sarah said.

Margaret pushed on. What is that silver disc your husband wears around his neck?

The face of our English father, our King George, Sarah replied, moving away to serve the others.

He is not our father, Margaret told her. We settlers want no king.

Sarah did not reply.

Chapter Three – The Setting

It starts in 1799 in the Greenbrier settlement, which was on the western edge of Virginia, what is now West Virginia, with Margaret and her husband John and his brother Allen and Allen’s wife Agatha and two young men Margaret calls “come alongs,” starting out as many were doing from the frontier to head to Kentucky on horseback, carrying everything they could carry in order to settle in what they assume was free land in Kentucky. Of course, Kentucky had long long since been used by the Shawnee, but they had no awareness of that.

1799 was a an important period in American history. The revolutionary war, which they didn’t know very much about, was going on. And they were part of a mass migration going west, largely to Kentucky. And when the Shawnee picked her up and killed the rest of the party, she then realized they were no longer going to Kentucky. They were heading much further north and would end up in the Ohio County country as it was called along the Ohio River. That’s why the Shawnee where the Shawnee had their camps.

We have a very limited view of that historical period, very limited view of the Native American tribes. So for instance, this section that I’m reading is about Margaret’s discovery that when she’d been two years with the Shawnee on the Ohio, that there was a man who was called Blue Jacket, who was a Shawnee.

He was very prosperous. He had a big house. He was married to a white woman and they even had two slaves.

And that was nothing I had never anticipated. The Native Americans actually had slaves at this period. So there were surprises like that that widened my view of who the Shawnee were.

I was also quite taken by what I could find out about their spiritual life, their dances, very different from the other tribes.

Their attitude towards women, which I hadn’t expected. Women were important part of the council.

So I think I found a surprise almost every day during this many, many weeks and months of reading.

You know, as I say in my introduction, I was an ignorant white woman and Margaret was an ignorant white woman from a much earlier period. She learned by her experience during her four years with the Shawnee. I learned from reading everything I could find about the Shawnee. So we were both on a learning curve together, she through direct experience and me through reading.

So I felt as though we were a team. I hope she wouldn’t mind me saying that in writing this book.

Chapter Four – The Research

I started by looking, of course, online to see what had been published. There are really no original documents from 1799. It’s too early, and these were not important people. So whatever was written would not have been preserved and the Shawnee were not literate at that time, so they left no written documents. But researchers, historians in the long period since have written a lot of books based on what they could find out about the Shawnee and about the colonists.

More about the colonists, of course, because there were some written records. And so I’ve spent about three years. I ended up reading or skimming fifty three books in order to come up with enough background material that I could ground Margaret’s story in the context of that time. It was just a lot of fun. It was so interesting.

Chapter Five – Genesis of the Book

Well, it was really a miracle.

I was only able to write the book because my sister and my niece, who had come into a possession of a blue box of documents when my mother died, decided to turn it over to me some years ago.

So in that blue box, there were the letters from three generations of my mother’s family. That was the substance for my last book, “The Blue Box: Three Lives and Letters.” And then there was the much older document, which had been sent by a relative of ours in West Virginia in 1937 for my older brothers to read. And it was the account of Margaret Erskine’s taking by the Shawnee in 1799 as she was heading west from Virginia with her party, they thought to settle in Kentucky.

So I only had about 12 pages of Margaret’s recitation. She’d she’d recited this to her grandson many years after her capture to go on, which meant that I needed to do a great deal of research, about three years of reading, in order to find out enough about the Shawnee and about colonial times in at that period in Virginia to be an authentic book of fiction, but fiction based on very careful research.

It’s called historical fiction as we know. It was fascinating to write. I love this book. I felt as though I really was able to find Margaret’s voice and to relate her experiences of which I had very few of her memories, relate her experiences in a way that was authentic.

For instance, one of the parts that I felt was very important to include was her based on her very limited account of what happened when she had a baby with the Shawnee.

The Shawnee habit is when a woman goes into labor, they take her out into the woods, they construct a very primitive little shelter there, they leave some food and some water, and she’s left alone for about two weeks to have the baby without any help and to begin to nurse the baby and to recover from childbirth absolutely alone in the woods.

And I suppose there might be some excuse for leaving that out, but I thought that was so central to her experience with the Shawnee.

It was hard on her. But since she was a real survivor, she was determined to accept their way. She wasn’t gonna fight and complain and say, I don’t wanna do it this way. This was the way they did it and she was going to conform to that. So it was an example of her ability to get along with these people who originally she called savages, but she came to believe that they were not savages at all. They were different kind of organization, different kind of people then she’d ever known.

Now, we know that’s a terrible thing to say about Native Americans. But it was current at her time in 1799. That was all anyone knew to call them. So to try to cut that out and substitute something that we might find more acceptable would be untrue.

I felt that as she learned about the Shawnee as individuals during her four years, she no longer used that term. She knew them not as savages, but as individuals with individual characteristics.

But, you know, I think it’s very important, particularly right now when so much is under attack in literature, that we remain true to the historical documents. We don’t edit them. We don’t change them in order not to offend modern sensibilities.

We have to stay true to what life and expression was like at the period we’re writing.

Chapter Six – Contacting the Shawnee

I was afraid to.

I think they might legitimately have a problem with any white woman writing about their history.

I think they might say, not because they felt it was full of inaccuracies, but just that it is wrong for white people to take over their stories.

And they have a legitimate argument in that. It would be very hard to counter that argument. I think all I would be able to say, and eventually, the Shawnee will read this. The remnant of the tribe was driven into Oklahoma not long after Margaret’s sojourn.

I think the only thing I could say is, first of all, it is fiction.

Second of all, it’s about a member of my family and it’s told from her point of view, not from the point of view of the Shawnee. That would be, I think, unacceptable.

But it’s from her point, a very limited point of view, at the beginning.

Very much the white version. And then as she goes on through her four years, she learns who the Shawnee are. And of course, that’s so crucial today that we learn who people are that we may think of just as other. As soon as you get to know an individual, it’s no longer an other. It’s somebody you know. And I felt that would be perhaps persuasive to the Shawnee that this was a telling of their story that might create better understanding of who these people were and help to erase perhaps some of the prejudices that even today we white people have about Native Americans.

[Interviewer] And when she reentered white society at the end of the book, she actually missed the tribal culture…

Yes. She did. That colonial life was very male-centered.

The women had really no political role at all and no voice. They worked like dogs doing all the necessary household tasks, hauling water from springs that might be two miles away, building fires, cooking food, giving birth, tending to children. And she, of course, could fit into that because she was used to hard work. But what was so hard for her was that her family and her neighbors never really accepted her.

There was a lot of prejudice about the captives coming back home. A lot of questions about why did you stay that long? Couldn’t you escape? Of course, she couldn’t escape.

She was deep in foreign territory. She wouldn’t even have known where to go. And did you perhaps become the concubine of one of these natives? Which she didn’t.

She was an adopted daughter of the chief Whitebark. But all those suspicions continued to circle around her and really made her life, which was long—she lived many years after her captivity—very difficult back at home in Virginia. And I’m sure she longed, and many of the former captives did, for the kind of order and stability she had found with the Shawnee, particularly the role of women who spoke in counsel, whose wisdom was respected.

There was none of that where she was in the Greenbrier settlement.

Chapter Seven – The Book’s Reception

It’s received with more warmth, I think, than any of my other books.

I think it it comes at a very important time when we are really trying to escape some of our earlier prejudice about Native Americans and, of course, also about African Americans. So it’s as though people were prepped to receive it with real generosity and warmth. That’s never happened to me before. I’ve always written as an outsider and I write as an outsider here too. But I think the times just happened to be very good for this book and I’m so grateful for that.

Chapter Eight – Turtle Point Press

Oh, it was just the best experience of my long writing life. Ruth has the ability to understand her writers, to accept her writers’ points of view. The first time I haven’t been so heavily edited that I just didn’t even know what came back. I felt as though it had been gutted.

Ruth would never do that. She, of course, will edit my next book, Cowboy Tales [How Daddy Lost His Ear and Other Stories], but she’s not gonna gut it because she she knows my point of view. She accepts my point of view. Absolutely beautiful experience.

And it makes me realize once again that if there’s any hope for writers in this country, it’s the small publishers.

The big publishers are now entirely commercialized.

And if you’re not gonna write a best seller, which I never hoped to do, they really are not interested in you. And I’ve had the experience of a book being accepted by a big publisher without them having any idea who I am or what my point of view is. And then finding that they’re horribly irritated and disappointed by the point of view from which I write, resulting in a lot of very heavy editing. So I’m just so grateful for the small press. They’re always on edge. They never have the kind of financial resources they should have, but they are our hope as writers.

Chapter Nine – Gratitude

I’m so grateful to my sister and my niece for turning the blue box over to me, full of family letters I knew nothing about, including Margaret’s account, very brief account, of her adventure.