In 1808, when the freshly hewn logs in our living room on St. Peters Church Road were first starting to check and darken, a book was published just over Blue Mountain that would become a huge success.
The book was Loudon’s Indian Narratives, and it boasted a subtitle that could hold its own against any of today’s non-fiction bestsellers:
“A Selection of some of the Most Interesting Narratives, of Outrages Committed by the Indians, in Their Wars with the White People, Also, an Account of their Manners, Customs, Traditions, Religious Sentiments, Mode of Warfare, Military Tactics, Discipline and Encampments, Treatment of Prisoners, &c., which are Better Explained, and More Minutely Related, than has been heretofore done, by any other Author on that subject. Many of the Articles have never before appeared in print. The whole Compiled from the best Authorities.”
The publisher was Archibald Loudon, a frontier entrepreneur who counted soldier, papermaker, cigar-broker, and apothecary among his many occupations. Today, he’s best known for compiling two huge volumes of Indian stories. Loudon’s Indian Narratives was a runaway bestseller in its time, but virtually all of the copies have been lost to the ravages of time. These days, the original leatherbound tomes will set you back several thousand dollars. Even in Perry County historian H.H. Hain’s time, i.e., the 1920s, Loudon’s Indian Narratives was “now so rare that copies never bring less than twenty-five dollars for the two volumes.”
Happily the book has been reprinted. A perfectly serviceable paperback reprint of the two volume set can be had for $45 direct from the modern publisher, Wennawoods, at www.wennawoods.com.
I came to Loudon’s Indian Narratives in my usual indirect way. Lately I’ve been researching the genre of “captive narratives,” which were the Stephen King novels of their time. Settlers read these stories of murder, abduction, and torture with a kind of horrified fascination. Strangest of all, and most desired by the reading public, were stories of kidnapped children raised among the savages, who lived to return to civilization and report on the titillating habits and customs of the aboriginals.
Of course, these sensational stories tended to omit an uncomfortably common fact: whites who’d been captive for any length of time often didn’t want to return. In the early 19th century, it was beyond imagining that the civilization of the so-called “heathens” might be in any way superior to the puritanical Anglo-Saxon culture that most of the settlers had brought with them from the old country.
Imagine my surprise as I paged through my brand new copy of Loudon’s and saw that the book had been published in Carlisle, PA! I’d never thought of Carlisle as a hotbed of publishing, but in the early days of the Colonies, publishing happened where there was a printing press and a man with an idea for a book.
As for why Mr. Loudon chose Indian narratives for his subject, aside from a large potential readership, perhaps it was because Carlisle had had a front-row seat to the terrible raids that had taken place just over Blue Mountain, on the western frontier of the Pennsylvania territory.
In other words, in today’s Perry County.
Loudon himself grew up in Perry County, in the Raccoon Valley. His earliest memories included friendly contact with local natives. It’s not clear when he moved to Carlisle, most likely to chase larger prospects than were available in either Raccoon or “Shearman’s” Valley, as Shermans Valley was then known. But he was still connected with the land north of Blue Mountain, both by family and business, as the hostilities with the natives came to a head in the mid 1750s.
If you’re like me, the last time you heard about the French and Indian War was some time in high school. Or maybe even middle school. So you may need reminding that the 1750s saw one of the first true world wars, a realignment of global power with theaters in Europe, North and Central America, Africa, India, and the Philippines. This great war was known by many names, depending, as usual, on whether you were on the winning or losing side, but most of us learned about it as the Seven Years War.
The Seven Years War had a different name for each theater. In the North American colonies, it was called the French and Indian war, so-named after the key adversaries of the English colonists.
Next week, I’ll write about one of the stories in Loudon’s Indian Narratives: the capture and five-year captivity of Hugh Gibson, a young teenager abducted in July, 1756, from a fortified stockade belonging to the Robison family. This happened not far from Loysville, near the Center Presbyterian Church, although the roots of the attack can be traced to the war halls of Paris and London.
This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 21 April 2011
For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com
