John Bailey and the Angel Gabriel

No sailor approaching Pemaquid Point, Maine, can look upon that black coast with anything but dread. Monolithic rock walls jut from the ocean floor like fists, waves crashing andPemaquid wind howling the names of all those lost at this ocean graveyard. Here the sea churns with tide and wind, fast ocean currents snag on rock outcrops and swirl the water into fearful chaos.

For eons nature’s forces have battered the shore, but those rocks are some of the hardest on earth, and if they can withstand thousands of years of such violence, they can withstand the hull of any boat or bone of sailor’s skull.

It was toward this point that the ship Angel Gabriel sailed on the night of August 14, 1635. She was a 240-ton barque and armed with 16 cannon, uncommon for a ship called to passenger duty, but this was no common ship.

She was originally commissioned into service and outfitted for combat by Sir Walter Raleigh for his voyages to South America. The mighty barque had seen battle at Cadiz, and at great odds fought three Spanish galleons simultaneously that repeatedly stormed the English ship and were beaten back each time, the Angel Gabriel losing three men to the Spanish ships’ five hundred.

For that deed a ballad was written, to be oft repeated by English seaman in search of courage on windy, moonless nights.The Honour of Bristol - Angel Gabriel

Now the galleon was in more peaceful service, transporting passengers from her home port at Bristol, England, to the New World, this time to land at Pemaquid, Maine.

Upon the Angel Gabriel was John Bailey, my eighth great grandfather, whose blood courses through seven generations before entering my Eggleston line. John and his eldest son had secured the required approvals from their parish priest, invoked the oath of allegiance, and once on board, obtained their licenses and the proper seal from England’s official emigration agents. Now they had only to endure the 12 weeks of rough seas it would take to sail from Bristol to Pemaquid.

On the last day of May in the year 1635, five ships left Bristol together. After dropping their river pilots at the mouth of the Severn on June 9, three ships sailed off on their own, confident they could outrun any pirate ship that pursued, for pirates prowled those waters in search of whatever treasure they could capture. The James chose to stay near the heavily armed but slow Angel Gabriel for protection.

The passing was not easy. With winds strong and waves high, the ship swayed violently. Not just for hours, but for weeks. Many if not most passengers were seasick, dizzy, light headed, vomiting, barely able to stand or walk without falling. A passenger, the Reverend Richard Mather, grandfather of the minister and scholar Cotton Mather, wrote in his diary that none could go on deck because of “the tossing and tumbling of the ship.”

Yet I’m sure some, maybe John Bailey walked the decks, drinking in the invigorating sea air, entertaining themselves watching the occasional pod of curious dolphins that sailed alongside the ship for long distances, and enjoying the fresh seafood the crew sometimes hauled on board.

More weeks went by.Raleigh's ship Jason for trip to Guinea The going was slow, so slow that the James sometimes furled only three sails just to stay beside the Angel Gabriel.

Twenty days out to sea the Angel Gabriel and the James pursued a Turkish pirate ship that had taken one of the ships that left Bristol with them, the Mary. They could not catch it and so regretfully turned back to their course.

On July 4, the James decided not to wait for the slower galleon any longer. Mather wrote that, “we lost sight of the Angel sayling slowly behind us, and we never saw her again any more.”

After twelve weeks at sea the Angel Gabriel sighted land. Under cloudy skies, she sailed into a small cove on the coast of Maine and dropped anchor. There was a small settlement at the place, called Pemaquid. John Bailey and the other ship’s passengers were ferried to shore on small boats, and there gave thanks for the voyage and now having solid earth under their feet.The ship James unloading on diff voyage

They immediately began the arduous task of unloading their belongings, but were taken by surprise by a violent storm.

They worked as long as they could, filling the dinghies with trunks, barrels, and livestock, rowing them to shore through the tumbling surf, dragging what they could across the rock and sand and away from the rising seas.

They had to watch in horror, helplessly, as the surf grew too dangerous to risk further trips to the Angel Gabriel. As night fell and the storm grew in power, most took refuge in the homes of the townspeople, though some of the crew stayed aboard the Angel Gabriel.

Thus commenced the most ungodly hurricane ever to hit New England, then or now, as evidenced in recent analysis by The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA.

A storm surge of twenty two feet, the highest in history, sent wave after wave crashing into shore, wiping out all before it. Unknown numbers of Native Americans lost their lives. On its route from Ipswich to Marblehead the coastal barque, Watch and Wait, owned by another of my ancestors, Isaac Allerton, foundered off of Cape Ann with twenty three aboard. All but two were lost.

Homes in the town of Plymouth were blown down like matchsticks, and mile-wide swaths of forest were leveled by winds well over 130 miles per hour. Farther down-coast the James sought safe harbor from the storm at the Isles of Shoals, but the cables could not hold their anchors and all snapped, the wind and surf now pushing the ship ever closer to the rocks. But they were saved when the hurricane winds reversed to the northeast and pushed the ship away from the islands. The James sailed into Boston the next day, its sails in tatters.

In outer Pemaquid Harbor the Angel Gabriel began to slip her anchors, her cables strung taught as more than Shipwreck300 tons fought to rip away from their hold. But the cables could not hold, and gave way in snaps like mighty whips, lashing through sails already shredded by the winds.

The ship then drifted at the mercy of wind and waves, bowing and rising like a colossal monster from the sea, keel pointed skyward, only to slam back into the troughs, waves crashing over her decks, bowsprit dipping as though straight to the bottom of the sea. Thus she was reduced to splinters, her crew lost.

When they left England each of the Angel Gabriel’s passengers had to sacrifice what they could not transport on the ship, leaving behind treasured bureaus, beds, pianos, wardrobes; the poorer ones choosing only a few articles of clothing, maybe a few utensils and cooking vessels. Now once more their earthly belongings were being culled. This time the sea would take everything they had left in the world, and there was nothing they could do about it.

When John Bailey awoke the next morning and left his shelter, he beheld such destruction as he had never seen. What was this new land he had come to that could wreak such hell?

Surprise! An Award.

I was surprised to check my mail this morning and discover I’d won a One Lovely Blog award. one-lovely-blog-award_thumbAs a winner, I have obligations, and here they are:

  1. Add the logo to my blog.
  2. Link to the person from whom you received this award
  3. Share seven things about myself
  4. Nominate blogs I admire for the next “One Lovely Blog” award
  5. Leave a message on their blogs, letting them know they are “One Lovely Blog”!

So, in no particular order, here are blogs I admire:

Here are seven things about myself:

  1. My toes are very short
  2. I often have garden dirt under my fingernails
  3. My primary source of exercise is running up and down stairs
  4. I haven’t read most of the books I own; one day I will, not sure when
  5. I have a dog named Pixie; she is the (current) love of my life, but don’t tell my husband
  6. I’ve been to a lot of places
  7. I’m in kind of a nesting phase right now

Thanks to Cathy Meder-Dempsey of Opening Doors in Brick Walls for the award!

What was Lost in the Blue Ridge

I did not set out to write a multi-part series on the Blue Ridge Mountain evictions, but as the original post became longer and longer, I decided to split it into parts, all of which I will post in upcoming days. Be sure you read parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five, and Six.

My Blue Ridge Mountain Home Eviction: Part 7

Blue Ridge long

Every 14 days, somewhere in the world a tribal elder dies, the last of his or her kind, and with him goes his culture’s language, folklore, crafts, and beliefs. Half the world’s languages are in danger of disappearing in the next 90 years as children leave the old ways, wooed by bright lights and big cities.

In China, traditional villages, some of them from the 13th century, are vanishing at an astounding rate of about 300 per day, Cliser evictionbulldozed to make way for urban cities, the old people moved carelessly to apartment dwelling or some other unfamiliar government convenience.

For the Blue Ridge mountain people of Virginia, it’s too late. Their culture scattered to the wind when they were evicted from their mountain homes.

Without the cohesion of place they were simply swallowed by the larger culture of America, along with their way of life.  Like drops of water in the ocean, they were absorbed, and then forgotten as a unique group.

Years ago I traveled to the island of New Guinea. To get there I had to fly from Los Angeles to Hawaii, then Guam,then Sulawesi, then Bali, then Irian Jaya, all on successively smaller planes. There was no direct route to where I was going.

MountainFrom Jayapura, Iryan Jaya I boarded a small Canadian-made plane, a Sea Otter, and flew out over the ocean, where we turned back 180 degrees, picked up air speed, started climbing, and that plane gave it everything it had to fly over the mountain range that jutted 15,000 feet into the sky nearly straight from the ocean’s edge.

Our destination was the Baliem Valley, a place 11,000 feet high and surrounded by those 15,000 foot peaks, which were nearly constantly hidden in clouds, though the valley was bright, sunny, and tropical.

Within the Baliem Valley live a people called the Dani. No one knew they were there until recent times. They were first spotted by the Western world in 1938 from an airplane, but it wasn’t until 1961 that a team went in to explore.

Baliem villageMichael Rockefeller, of “those” Rockefellers, was part of that team until he disappeared, his body never to be found.

The Dani were headhunters and cannibals until recent decades, and even recently there were rumors.

I needed to obtain special permission from our State Department to visit there because of ongoing wars between tribes. The police in Denpasar measured my bones before I left, in case they had only bones to identify me later.

The Baliem Valley and the jungles that crawled up its surrounding mountains were the whole world of the Dani.

Tribes were like states unto themselves, complete with different rulers and dialects of language, even though two tribes may live only a mile distant from each other. Baliem Valley, Dani village, Cynthia Berryman Mulcahy

Each tribe had its own way of speaking; its own customs and history. Language dialects changed from village to village.

Maybe each of them used herbs and plants as cures a little differently. Raised their children differently. Hunted differently. Sang different songs.

When I was there no hotels or restaurants were in the Baliem Valley. No natives wore clothes, except those living at one local Christian mission, or in the dinky military barracks in the valley.

I stayed in the village, introduced to the tribe by my guide, and slept on a hard floor alongside the porters who carried our supplies. One morning we were confined to our hut because a battle raged outside, with bows and arrows, one tribe against the other because someone stole a woman and a pig.

Why do I bring this up? Because Irian Jaya’s government, far away on Baliem Valley, new road, Patrick Mulcahy 1984a distant island, decided to build a road over the mountains and into the Baliem Valley, where the primitive Dani lived.

The nation’s other islands were getting too crowded, and they wanted to relocate those people to the Baliem Valley.

I saw the giant earth movers while I was there, a stark contrast to the naked, spear-carrying natives who lived there.

Today there are vacation resorts in the Baliem Valley. The natives panhandle for cigarettes, and demand money in return for taking their photo. There are hotels and restaurants employing natives, who must wear clothes, something that until recently was foreign to them. Their native culture is disappearing, a victim of the easy lure of Western pleasures. Soon it will be gone altogether, save for native performances at events and cultural centers.

Will the Dani survive the oBlue Ridge stillnslaught of popular culture? No. I can say that unequivocally. It may not be tomorrow, or next year, or in ten years, but it will happen.

They’ll be lost to history, just as the all of Virginia’s Blue Ridge culture was lost with the Shenandoah National Park’s building.

Sure, my great grandparents and other mountain folk carried their customs down the mountain with them, but once out of the mountains, their distinct ways were quickly diluted by the larger community’s ways. That’s how it works.

There are still mountain cultures here and there in pockets throughout the South. But each is distinct from the others, if only in subtle ways. Barbara Allen lyrics

As with the Dani in Irian Jaya, there are different lyrics to the ballads, different ways of strumming a guitar, different ingredients in foods, different quilt patterns, and ways of tying rag rugs, and different herbal potions or superstitions to drive away freckles or curly hair.

I know there is a distinctive banjo technique that can be traced only to Grayson and Carroll counties in southwestern Virginia. I know that my grandmother believed whatever a newborn baby touches first, that is what profession they will be. She made sure her youngest, Bobby, touched a bible. He did not grow up to be a minister, but he was the kindest, gentlest man you’d ever meet. I have no doubt there were many unique practices in our part of the Blue Ridge that are now gone forever.

Old cultures are being mowed down to make room for the new. And more and more, the new culture that takes their place is becoming the same all over the world.

Maybe that is inevitable. Maybe it’s even a good thing; differences between people are what causes war, after all, and so maybe the ultimate result will be the end of strife between nations or peoples. ZerkelImage

I can hope, anyway. Because otherwise, loss is simply loss.

The Blue Ridge are the oldest mountains in the world. And the culture of the people who lived there was one of the oldest (non-Native) cultures in America.

The world around them was changing rapidly in the early 1930s. The car, the airplane, the electric light and telephone – the country was giddy with change, and so it looked with suspicion on those backwards people who didn’t welcome it. It was all too easy to marginalize them, and to ultimately decide their fates for them.

Today the mountains remain, but the people are gone. The forest reclaimed its land. Vines twined in and over those old cabins and twisted through crumbling mortar. Saplings Blue Ridge shack remains - Jon Biloussprung from between their fallen walls, and 80 seasons of fallen leaves have covered their remnants.

Our Blue Ridge ancestors are long gone, and so are their homes. Their culture is lost, save for a few old folks who still remember. Soon they’ll be gone too. I want to learn what my ancestors knew, and continue telling their stories.

You can find Part Eight of My Blue Ridge Mountain Home Eviction here. Or access the whole series here. To make sure you don’t miss the next installments, go to the “Subscribe” form at the top of this page.

The Bluest of Ridges

I did not set out to write a multi-part series on the Blue Ridge Mountain evictions, but as the original post became longer and longer, I decided to split it into parts, all of which I will post in upcoming days.

My Blue Ridge Mountain Home Eviction: Part 1

Blue Ridge longMy great grandparents lived above the Shenandoah Valley, in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, a stretch of peaks, gaps, glens, hollows, creeks, coves, falls, meadows, forests, thickets, and woodland that reaches from Georgia to Pennsylvania. The mountains are like frozen swells of the ocean, billions of tons of rock and soil blown into soft curves by an eternity of wind and rain.

They’re the oldest mountains in the world, and there’s just not that much left of them. These days they rise only about 2,000 feet from the Shenandoah Valley floor, hardly an awe-inspiring height, and about what we out West would call a foothill. But while their height from sea level, 6,685 or so in their bare feet, isn’t inspiring, their serene beauty is.

Blue Ridge Dave AllenThey are gentle, welcoming, not at all intimidating, as are our Sierras that separate California from the rest of the country like a knife edge.

That’s what age does; it rounds our edges, softens our need to be the biggest or the toughest, slows us so we can see others, then opens our arms to welcome them.

Hundreds of years ago early settlers named this mountain range the Blue Ridge. It’s a beautiful name, and exactly the right one. The mist that shrouds its hillsides and hangs in its valleys colors the mountains in shades from dark sapphire to pale azure. Like undulating ribbons they lie in sequence, one overlapping the other, until they simply disappear into distance’s pale mist and you can see them no more.

All the mountains’ detail, the trees and rock outcrops, meadows and streams, fade into blue outlines of mountains. You can swear at times they are transparent, how the mist rises to leave nothing but the shape of a ridgeline in deeper blue than what lies either nearer or farther beyond it. Mona_Lisa,_by_Leonardo_da_Vinci

In the 1400s Leonardo da Vinci noticed a blue haze hanging above the hills of Tuscany. He painted it, and the art historians called those backgrounds hesitant or insubstantial, that he painted them in haze so as not to divert focus from the central theme.

But it was not just a technique, it was a feature of Leonardo’s beloved Tuscan landscape. Da Vinci speculated in his notebooks that the blue haze might have been caused by minute and nearly invisible mists of water emitted from the trees.

There are two other mountain ranges in the world named for their blue mists, one in Australia and the other in Jamaica, and both named the Blue Mountains.

They and the Blue Ridge are all treed with woody plant species that emit their essential oils into the air around them. Known as isoprene, the oil creates the blue-tinged haze that give all three ranges their name.Leonardo_da_Vinci_attributed_-_Madonna_Litta

There’s debate as to the reason the trees release their isoprene, but this we know: There is a purpose. Nature is economical. Nothing is given or taken without good reason.

One hypothesis is that isoprene protects the photosynthesis of tender leaves from heat stress. Yet once released, isoprene mixes with chemicals in the atmosphere to create ozone, which is harmful to the trees.

Science cannot yet explain this costly tradeoff. Perhaps if the genius painter Leonardo Da Vinci were around today he could. Some surmise that the blue haze he wrote of that hung over Tuscany was isoprene.

No matter. The beauty of the mist is not in its science, but in what it does to our souls when we view the mountains through its filtered light. Blue Ridge shortThere is a profound silence telling you that secrets hide here, covered by mists and time and the forests that reclaim their pristine past.

The secrets belong to our ancestors, those hearty people who traversed the ridges and crawled through the underbrush to finally come out on a flat or a meadow where they would build a home, a Blue Ridge home they never planned to leave.

You can read Part Two of My Blue Ridge Mountain Home Eviction here. Or access the whole series here. To make sure you don’t miss any installments, go to the “subscribe” form at the top of this page.

Your Ancestors’ Memories Live On In You. Now There’s Proof.

My precious niece, a pretty little 18-year old social butterfly, is afraid of crowds.

crowd

Put her in a room that’s well-stocked with people, even strangers, and she’ll be the center of attention. But put her in a crowd where everyone’s passing her in different directions and she may just have a panic attack.

My mother-in-law was afraid of pools of water. She wouldn’t go in a lake. She wouldn’t go on a boat. She wouldn’t go near my swimming pool, and even had to take a deep breath before getting in the spa. I could practically hear her heart pounding.

Now it turns out that their parents, or grandparents, or even great-grandparents may be why.

If your great-grandmother was nearly trampled to death in a crowd, there’s a chance you will fear crowds, even if you never heard great grandma’s harrowing story.DNA

Because scientists think that your ancestor’s memories can actually change your DNA.

That if your great-grandmother was bit by a dog and became mortally afraid of them, you stand a chance of inheriting a fear of dogs from her.

The traumatic event changes their DNA, and then passes that changed DNA to the next generation, then the next. The effect continues until your grandmother’s DNA becomes diluted by the increasing number of descendants, and so disappears.

The idea of ancestral memory – of remembering things that happened to your ancestors — isn’t new, but this is the first time it’s getting the boost of scientific proof.

Of course, like all heritable traits, it doesn’t mean that every offspring will have that genetic memory, just as not every child of brown-eyed parents will have brown eyes. Heritability doesn’t work that way.

I suspect we will find that plenty of other traits are transmitted genetically, besides disease propensity, hair texture, nose shape, fear of water, and the like.

I can’t think of any real phobias of my own. I almost wish I did so I could test the theory. I could ask my mother if she, her parents, or her grandparents were ever, say, bit by a dog or nearly drown in the Blue Hole, which was said to be bottomless.

Then I would learn something about both that ancestor, and myself.

Genetic memory, who knew?

The Puzzling “White Indians” Who Loved Their Abductors.

Yesterday I wrote about the five Boyd children who were brutally captured by Iroquois warriors in 1756.The White

If that sounds terrifying, it probably was. At least it started out that way.

The Boyd children were taken by force, their mother and youngest brother killed because they couldn’t keep up.

The children were with their captors for seven years. Then the frontier wars were settled. Treaties were signed stipulating that all captives be returned. Colonial troops went into the wilderness to rescue them, returning with hundreds at a time.

But several of the Boyd children fought against returning home.

When they were forced under guard to reunite with their European-American families, these children managed to escape, and returned to the communities of their captors.

My blog post yesterday was a story of events, not explanations. Captured by Indians

Now I’m wondering about the explanations.

Why did not just these children, but so many others, and adult women and occasionally men as well, choose to stay with their Native captors?

Was it Stockholm Syndrome, wherein a captive irrationally identifies with her captor and blames her own people for not rescuing her?

Or was it something else, something the European Colonials did not want to even think about, that the Natives actually had the more desirable way of living?

If you’re expecting a definitive answer to that question, I can’t give it. I have only supposition, and some input from far more knowledgeable people than I.

Catheraine Carey LoganCaptive-taking by Native Americans was surprisingly common in Colonial times.

It was also common for captives to choose their Native communities over their Colonial families.

This puzzled the European Americans to no end.

They came to America believing that conversion would be easy once Natives saw the superiority of the Europeans’ religion, clothing, agriculture, dwellings, and every comfort known so far to man.

Yet there were very few Indians who converted to English culture, while large numbers of English chose to become Indian. Even Benjamin Franklin pondered why:

“When an Indian child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and makes one Indian ramble with them, there is no persuading him ever to return. [But] when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and lived a while among them, tho’ ransomed by their friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first good opportunity of escaping again into the woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them.”

One author put a bottom line on it in 1782, writing that,

“thousands of Europeans are Indians, and we have no examples of even one of those Aborigines having from choice become Europeans!”

Those are not the popular writers of their time, the serial novelists aCaptive Womennd journalists who sensationalized stories of captor brutality that today’s academics call “capture narratives.”

These narratives were the thrillers of their time, and the public ate them up.

I have no doubt of much of their truth, aside from the sensationalism. A few were written as eye-witness captive accounts, after all.

Yet James Axtell, historian at Sarah Lawrence College, writes in the William and Mary Quarterly that the Natives treated their captives as equals nearly from the beginning of their captivity.

He notes that though food on the trail was scarce, it was shared equally with the captives. The children were given soft moccasins for running, lessons in survival, snow shoes for easier travel.

White captivesOnce in the villages, the captives were given Indian clothes, taught Indian songs and dances, and welcomed as family members into specifically appointed adoptive families.

It wasn’t necessarily easy. There were often rituals and trials that had to be passed, such as a gauntlet to beat the whiteness out of them, and afterwards, a second ritual to wash it out.

But once these trials were passed, captives were awarded full integration into the tribe.

Compared to the stern and rigorous life of a New England Puritan, or the hardscrabble life of a pioneer farmer, this life might have seemed more compassionate and civilized. The English were new here, still trying to tame the wilderness, bring it to its knees before the saw and the plow, to furrow its land and regiment its growth, much as it did its children.

I can see where life would definitely be more difficult for a European-American child of that time.

Most of the thousands of “white Indians” left no explanation as to why they chose their adopted Native families and culture over the Colonials. They just traded in their hard shoes and disappeared into the wilderness.

The only narratives we have are from those who chose to return to Colonial society. In those writings, it is clear that the “white Indians” valued what Axtell calls the Natives’

“strong sense of community, abundant love, and uncommon integrity – values that the English colonists also honored, if less successfully.”

Mary JemisonAxtell also notes other values, such as:

“social equality, mobility, adventure, and, as two adult converts acknowledged, ‘the most perfect freedom, the ease of living, [and] the absence of those cares and corroding solicitudes which so often prevail with us.”

As I said, I’m no expert. I’ve read only a few academic papers, not even enough to make me dangerous.

But if what these academic researchers say is true – and I have no reason to doubt them – isn’t it a shame that the imposition of culture was so one-way? Isn’t it a tragedy that the annihilation so complete?

We lost a whole culture. But what did we also lose in not heeding the lessons of our own children who chose to have different families?

My Tragic Boyd Blood

Aside

On my father’s side I come from a long line of Boyds. So far so good. But things happen to Boyds that make me want to look over my shoulder now and then just for having Boyd blood.

Of course, things happen to every family, but when they happen to Boyds they tend to be so big or tragic or astonishing that they are recorded in history books.

This story tells only one of them.

Starting with Robert dictus de Boyd in 1262, the Scottish Boyds ascended to nobility…were given a castle…were accused of treason…lost their castle…were literally stabbed in the back…regained Royal favor and a few more castles…were imprisoned in the Tower of London…executed… mortified… regained favor again…and were generally kicked about like royal hacky sacks for some 500-odd years.

Then, in 1746 Sir William Boyd was executed for attempting to take the British Crown. cabin-in-the-wilderness-lake-georgeMeanwhile, half a world away in the wilds of Pennsylvania, John and Nancy Boyd were about to have their lives ripped apart.

In the mid-1700s my Scots-Irish ancestors came to America in search of a place where the land would sustain them.

Where they could build a home, raise a family, and live in peace, far from the volatile mess in their homeland.

the-comforts-of-homeJohn Boyd and Nancy Urie thought they found it in the unbroken wilderness of Pennsylvania’s Cumberland Valley.

They cut their plot of land from the forest, built a log cabin, and commenced living the hard but independent life of a frontier family.

John was a farmer, and a few miles away lived his neighbor, John Stewart, a weaver.

the-french-lessonOn February 10, 1756, John and his oldest son, William, started out for Stewart’s to buy a web of cloth.

With five active children and a new one on the way, Nancy Urie Boyd needed plenty of cloth to sew, one stitch at a time, into clothes.

David Boyd was a responsible boy of 13, and after his father left for Stewart’s, his mother sent David out to chop wood.

He took his hatchet, and his little brother John, who was six, went along to pick up chips.

cherokee-scouting-fort-duquesneTheir two sisters, Sallie and Rhoda, ten and seven, stayed inside with their mother and little brother.

David got busy with the wood, and his hatchet rang out through the forest.

He put all his concentration on placing the hatchet perfectly straight into the log, splitting it right through the middle.

Taking of captive babyHe was concentrating so hard, in fact, that he didn’t hear the Iroquois Indian who had walked right up to him.

But little John did, and he screamed. David turned, but it was too late.

The Iroquois grabbed David by his belt, threw him over his shoulder, and ran off into the forest.

John was snatched the same way, and in seconds the two boys disappeared into the trees.

Within moments Sally and Rhoda and their little brother, not yet three, were taken, and all five of them were brought together a short ways off.

chase-womanThe Natives instructed the children to run.

As he ran, David looked back to see his agonized mother standing before their home in flames, her hands raised to the heavens, praying, “O God, be merciful to my children going among these savages.”

The party of Natives that took the Boyd children also took their mother after setting the cabin to flames.

They drove the party on until the pregnant mother and smallest child could go no more, and so they were killed along the trail.

Boone_abductionThe children were traumatized. But they did as their captors told them, running on the trail, always running, and staying silent.

And so they survived and were taken hundreds of miles into the Ohio Territory, and there they were separated and given to different tribes.

But they were not made to be prisoners in the way we usually understand the term.

rice-gatherersYou would think that a captor brutal enough to slaughter a babe before his mother and a mother before her children could not show humanity.

But the Boyd children were adopted by the community and given new parents who taught the children this different way of life.

They ate and slept alongside these Iroquois and Delaware people.

They helped to hunt or prepare food, to care for babies and elders, sew shirts, haul firewood, prepare herbal medicine.

Tthe-tannerhey learned lessons of the forest and the stars and the animals. They became what people of the day called white Indians.

After living in the tribe for four years, David Boyd’s adoptive Delaware father decided it was time to return him to his white family.

David hesitated. This had become his new family, and he liked his new life.

He went reluctantly and was reunited with his father, John Boyd.

Twice thereafter he attempted to flee back to his Delaware family, but was brought back each time, and eventually he married a white woman, settled down, and had ten children.

Rhoda Boyd was rescued by the famous captive hunter, Colonel Bouquet.

Sarah Columbia Boyd Berryman.border.rBut on the trip to Fort Pitt, where she was to be reunited with family, she escaped to her Native family, and never returned to white society.

Sallie was returned to her father on February 10, 1764. John was returned on November 15 that same year, along with his brother, Thomas.

That was exactly 250 years ago. I don’t know of any Boyd tragedies of the kind that make history that have happened since then. My family left the Boyd line behind with my great-grandmother, Sarah Columbia Boyd.

Perhaps the Boyd family can rest now.

There are numerous differing accounts of the Boyd capture. I chose to follow what seems the most credible source, the book Setting All the Captives Free, by the scholar, Ian K. Steele.