On March 31, 1799, Richard J. Cleveland, a twenty-five-year-old entrepreneur from Salem, Massachusetts, cruised through the southern Alaskan waters around Sitka on the Dragon, trying his luck with the local Tlingits in hopes of making a killing in the sea otter trade. Cleveland had left the South China coast on a fifty-ton English cutter with a dubious crew bound for the Northwest Coast. Later, writing of his exploits in his Narrative of Voyages and Commercial Enterprises (1850), he described his impressions of the natives of southeastern Alaska: a "more hideous set of beings, in the form of men and women I have never before seen," with some groups looking "as if they had escaped from the dominions of Satan himself."
———Cleveland's adventures were successful from the commercial perspective, but at several points along the area of Norfolk Sound he ran into trouble. On May 6 near Chilkat (Tlingit) land, about five hundred natives arrived in long canoes with between twelve and twenty-eight people in each, "armed with muskets, spears, and daggers." Cleveland's ship was becalmed in Chatham's straits, and the captain and crew feared capture. They were convinced that "death was greatly to be preferred to falling into the hands of these barbarians." Cleveland's response was to order up the ship's full array of cannons, arms, and pikes. He later discovered that not long before another English ship, fearing attack, fired on and probably killed natives."
———More than 100 years before Cleveland's voyage, the first account of an attack by indigenous people on an English settlement and subsequent capture opened with the following alarm: "On the tenth of February, 1675 came the Indians with great numbers upon Lancaster" In her narrative, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God (1682), Mary Rowlandson, the wife of a Puritan minister, described an attack on a frontier town west of Boston and traced an earthly adventure with a spiritual significance: her thirteen weeks among the Narragansettes and Wampanoags during King Philip's War.
———These two accounts — one a seaman's adventure story, the other the record of a minister's wife's captivity — contain the major themes of capture by the Indians found in a variety of English and American writings in early America. First, there is the description of indigenous people as ugly, satanic, brutal, and nonhuman; "ravenous bears," Rowlandson once called the Narragansetts. Second, there is a stated or implied allegation of Indian irrationality and unpredictability — the presupposition that "wild Indians" might attack, capture, or kill for no reason at all; there is no sense of the possibility that negotiations had broken down, that whites had overrun native lands, that, as in the case of Alaska Natives, lives had been lost and justifiable compensation or retribution was being sought. Third, commercial motives are downplayed, and justified if not glamorized. Thus the Captain John Smith's account of his capture, we lose touch with the fact that Smith and his men arrived in what we now call Virginia not for a pleasure trip but to lay the groundwork for a major English commercial enterprise. In Cleveland's account, the potential capture of his men comes out of some irrational actions by the natives, not out of any objection of theirs to the exploitation of their resources. Fourth, gender colors and shapes descriptions of capture: when white men are in danger of capture, their stories become high adventure; white women's experiences are usually tales of woe and victimization. Finally, capture is seen in a much more ambiguous light in these writings than the accounts themselves explicitly contend. Within Rowlandson's narrative we find a friendship formed between the captive Rowlandson and King Philip of Metacom, the Wampanoag sachem. Other accounts describe men and women escaping from "civilized" circumstances to live as "white Indians."
———Any discussion of captives must acknowledge that the topic has been shaped by a set of racial, entrepreneurial, religious, and gender assumptions that suggest that the world was or should have been a European or American oyster. On the other hand, there is an earlier, precontact history of prisoners of war among indigenous peoples.
———Capture was a widely used tactic of warfare in North, South, and Central America before 1492. Alghough first described by the Spaniards to justify their own conquest of Mexico, the Aztecs' frequently use of captives as slaves and religious sacrifices undermined their regime and contributed to its demise.
———In northeastern North America from approximately 1550 through the American Revolution, death, torture, adoption, or ransom awaited native men captured in wartime. Accounts from colonial times by British, French, and American survivors testify to white comrades and native enemies alike being beaten, tortured, and either burned to death or accepted into indigenous societies. Further Isaac Jogue's account (1643-46) was one of many depicting the capture and torture of priests and Hurons alike among the Iroquois. Similar accounts can be found for the Southwest and the Northeast Coast. Adoption was a common result of capture among Indians east of the Mississippi, from the Hurons and Iroquois in the North to the Cherokees in the South, and among the Great Lakes Ojibwas and the Santee Sioux as well.
———In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Northeast native women were powerful determinants of the fate of war captives. Among the Iroquois, the taking of captives to assuage the loss of kin wan accepted reason for warfare. Female elders decided weather the men would go to war, and a wife or mother who had lost a son, husband, or daughter in the war could chose a captive man or woman to adopt into her family. Either way could be substituted for a lost relative. The same described by Captain John Smith of Pocahontas saving him in early Virginia (1607) was probably the product of a cultural misreading by him of the adopted powers of a leading woman to save prisoners. So common was this practice in the eighteenth century that Lewis Henry Morgan claimed that the Iroquois would have died out because of disease and warfare had they not taken captives into their midst.
———The sex and age of a prisoner of war was important in determining his or her treatment. Among many indigenous nations of the Northeast (and well into Canada), men went to war knowing that if they were captured, a trial involving torture and possibly death was likely. Adoption was possible if the man could endure his trials, but this meant becoming one with the enemy. In Morgan's words, if the victim made it through a gauntlet of a "long avenue of whips," running naked to the waist, he would be "treated with the utmost affection and kindness." Those who did not pass the test were "led away to torture, and to death." On the other hand, native women and small children, although at times psychologically terrorized and frequently traumatized by the death of parents, relatives, and friends, or by scenes of torture inflicted on loved ones, might be treated gently in preparation for their ultimate inetration into enemy tribal village, and family life. Mary Johnson, captured by French and Shawnees in 1758 during the Seven Years' War in southwestern Pennsylvania, was adopted into Seneca society after marrying one of its members. She refused repatriation to white society.
———Although the lore of Indian-white relations is filled with tales of Indians capturing hapless white victims, the record shows that when war or profit was involved, this kind of "savagery" was not limited by color or culture. Europeans themselves frequently captured indigenous peoples. European "explorers" and fishermen kidnapped more people in early America, bringing them back to Europe as showpieces. From the 1600s to the nineteenth century, as disease and overwork decimated New World natives, Africans by the millions were captured and brought to the New World to replace the indigenous labor force. Spanish explorers forcibly took more than a thousand southeastern Indians to the West Indies. Early French attempts at abduction also began in the sixteenth century. Participants included Verrazano's French-sponsored expeditions in 1524 and Cartier's in 1534-35. In the early eighteenth century the French encouraged the capture of indigenous women in Canada for forced resettlement downriver in Louisiana; approximately eighty of these female Indians died in transit. On the northern Spanish frontier, slaving expeditions were practiced by Nuño de Guzman, the first govenor of Mexico, who in the 1530s took twenty Acoma captives and sentenced them to servitude, and Governor Juan de Eulate (1618-25) sold Indians into slavery by shipping them to New Spain.
———After the Pequot War (1637) in northern New England, the British joined the effort, enslaving forty-eight native women and children in the Massachusetts Bay Colony and exchanging Pequot warriors for African slaves in the West Indies. At the time of Rowlandson's capture in 1675-76 during King Philip's War, Richard Waldron of Marblehead captured four hundred Abenakis and had them sold into slavery. During the Tuscarora War (1711 and 1713) more than four hundred Indian slaves were sold by the colonial government of North Carolina. In the Yamasee War that followed, South Carolina became a leader of Indian slaving.
———Although indigenous people were subject to capture and genocidal treatment, it is the fate of Euro-American captives that has held the imagination of the American and European public in thrall from the days of Captain John Smith and Mary Rowlandson. Stories of the Indian enemy opposed to the brave white male captive and the long-suffering or fainting white female captive became favored material in American sermons, history books, fiction, and film.
———While attacks and captives by Indians were not everyday experiences along the Atlantic Plains or Pacific frontiers, they were not uncommon. In New England between 1675 and 1763, an estimated 1,641 white captives were taken. Although capture was a central piece of the indigenous system of making war — earlier inflicted on native people of other indigenous enemies — puritan sermons in early New England like those of Cotton Mather described the experience as an act of Providence sent down upon them by an angry God: punishment for the sins of the New Zion gone astray in the wilderness. Based upon actual events during the colonial Indian wars of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the writings of Puritan ministers and captives involved from descriptions of religious experiences into, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, works of ethnography, propaganda, and popular culture.
———Propagandistic and racist elements appeared in these narratives from the outset, with New England natives being called "savages," "wolves," and "furious Tawnies." Indians were often cast as barbarious devils and contrasted with "civilized" whites. Their use of capture, attack, and torture was seen as a justification for Euro-American warfare, expropriation of land, and extermination.
———Although the Puritan narratives relied on biblical citation and didacticism, by the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the captivity narrative itself evolved into a form of patriotic gore, folklore, and wild fiction. By 1800 Mary Rowlandson, Captain John Smith, and Father Isaac Jogues were joined by other figures such as John Williams, Enuice Williams, Hannah Dustan, Mary Jemison, and Daniel Boone and his daughter Jemima as well-known subjects of captivity literature. These narratives became further exaggerated and modified in fictional works such as The Last of the Mohicans (1824), and dime novels like Ann Sophia Stephen's Malaeska, the Indian Wife of the White Hunter (1860), the story of a supposed Indian woman who was in fact a white captive. Captivity themes also became a staple of American art and popular culture. In the nineteenth century they were used in the creation of works of art by John Vanderlyn, Asher Durand, Erastus Dow Palmer, and Charles (Carl) Wimar. In the mid- to late-twentieth century popular films such as The Searchers, The Emerald Forest, Dances with Wolves, and The Last of the Mohicans have portrayed white men, women, and children captured in war and transformed into Indians.
———But captivity accounts offer more than propaganda or a good read. Some contain accurate ethnographic information. Still others argue directly or indirectly for better Indian-white relations. As politics and history, a select number of these narratives provide early windows into Anglo-American, Indian, and French interaction in North America. The narratives of John Gyles, Mary Jemison, Colonel James Smith, John Dunn Hunter, and John Tanner depict Euro-American captured in war, all of whom lived at length with Indians and were sympathetic and objective enough to offer up to Anglo-American readers information about the native societies in which they lived. Sarah Wakefield, captured in the Dakota War of 1862, argued in her account that government mismanagement and greed brought on that disasterous Indian war.
———From adventure to spiritual testimony to omitted and distorted accounts, the depiction of capture and Indian-white encounters through European and American eyes left a formidable imprint on American history and politics, on notions of gender, race, and ehtnicity, and on the arts and popular culture.

JUNE NAMIAS
University of Alaska at Anchorage