Mary Jemison
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Mary Jemison (1743–1833) was an American frontierswoman and an adopted Seneca.
Mary Jemison was born to Thomas and Jane Jemison aboard the ship William and Mary in the fall of 1743 while en route from Northern Ireland to America. Upon their arrival in America, the couple and their new child joined other Scottish-Irish immigrants and headed west from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to what was then the western frontier (now central Pennsylvania) and squatted on territory that was under the authority of the Iroquois Confederacy.
During the time the Jemisons were establishing their home, the French and Indian War was raging. One morning in 1758, a capturing party consisting of six Shawnee Indians and four Frenchmen captured Mary, her family (except two older brothers) and a boy from another family. On route to Fort Duquesne (where the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers meet to create the Ohio River in modern-day Pittsburgh), Mary’s mother, father, and siblings were killed and scalped. Mary and the other young boy were spared. Once the party reached the Fort, Mary was sold to two Seneca Indians, who took Mary downriver. The Senecas adopted Mary, giving her the name Dehgewanus, which means "Two Falling Voices".
She married a Delaware named Sheninjee and had a son who she named Thomas after her father. Concerned that the end of the war would mean the return of captives and thus the loss of his young wife, Sheninjee took Mary on a 700-mile journey to the Sehgahunda Valley along the Genesee River. Although Mary reached this destination, her husband did not. He had left his wife in order to hunt, had taken ill and died.
Now a widow, Mary was taken in by Sheninjee's clan relatives and made her home at the Little Beard's Town (present-day Cuylerville, New York)). She married a Seneca named Hiakatoo and had six more children.
Much of the land at Little Beard's Town was sold by the Senecas to white settlers in 1797. In 1823, most of the remainder of the land was sold, except for a 2-acre tract of land reserved for Mary's use. Known locally as the "White Woman of the Genesee", Mary lived on the tract until she sold it in 1831 and moved to the Buffalo Creek Reservation.
Mary lived the rest of her life with the people of the Seneca Nation until she died on September 19, 1833. She was initially buried on the Buffalo Creek Reservation, but in 1874 was reinterred at William Pryor Letchworth's Glen Iris Estate (now Letchworth State Park) in present day Castile, New York. There is a bronze statue of Mary, created in 1910, marks her grave.
Her story is told in a classic "captivity narrative", J. E. Seaver's Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison (1824; latest ed. 1967), considered by many history scholars to be a reasonably accurate narrative.[citation needed]
Indian Captive: The Story of Mary Jemison, written by Lois Lenski, is a fictionalized version of Mary's story for young readers.
[edit] References
Namias, June. White Captives: Gender and Ethnicity on the American Frontier. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 1993.
Seaver, James. A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison. New York: American Scenic & Historical Preservation Society. 1942 edition.
