Last week, I wrote about Indian stories, a wildly popular genre of literature in Colonial times, and specifically about a famous collection of these stories entitled Loudon’s Indian Narratives, which was published in Carlisle in 1808.
I mentioned that the editor and publisher of the collection, Archibald Loudon, was a native of what is now Perry County, who decamped to Carlisle to seek his fortune some time in the mid-18th century.
These days, it’s hard to imagine Perry County as the front line of a world war, but it was just that in the 1750s, thanks to the Seven Years War, which was fought by the major European powers both at home and in the colonies.
One of the accounts in Loudon’s Indian Narratives was dictated by Hugh Gibson, who was a young teenager when he was captured in a raid near Loysville in July, 1756. The raid itself, which took place at the fortified stockade of the Robison family, is described in harrowing detail in the same book by Robert Robison himself, who tells how most of the men were away reaping when the attackers, probably Delaware or Shawnee raiders, killed three women for their scalps, including the widow Gibson, Hugh’s mother. Two youngsters were taken alive: Hugh and Betsey Henry.
Betsey Henry’s fate isn’t addressed, but Hugh recounts the five years he spent with his captors.
Some settlers who were captured by native raiders suffered horrible tortures and death. Hugh was witness to such a horror, a young woman burned to death with hot irons in the wake of Colonel Armstrong’s raid on Kittanning in September of the same year.
Other captives were adopted into their captors’ tribe, and came to love the way of life, despite its harsh challenges.
Hugh’s experience seems to rest somewhere between these two extremes. Stunned by his mother’s murder, and sorely tested in the early days of his captivity by beatings, taunting, and deprivation, Hugh was eventually adopted into the tribe. This may seem strange, given the intense hatred for settlers among the tribes whose ancestral lands were steadily being occupied by these foreigners. But adoption was actually quite common. A prisoner – even a white one – was considered a suitable replacement for a native family member who’d died.
After some initial friction with his adoptive father – mediated by Hugh’s new native mother – the boy began to learn Indian ways. The fact that he was able to live among the tribe for more than five years tells a story in itself. The years were difficult, but then life was difficult for hunters and gatherers in the harsh climate of western Pennsylvania. To run away and abandon the tribe was to risk severe punishment, but eventually, an opportunity presented itself, and Hugh seized it, floating an improvised raft down the Allegheny River and finally reaching Fort Pitt.
Early readers would have devoured Hugh Gibson’s captivity narrative. His story reinforced the prevailing view of Indians as bloodthirsty murderers and torturers, and pointed up the heroic risks the settlers were taking in their efforts to “civilize” a so-called wilderness.
But there were much larger forces at work behind the raid at the Robison place that sweltering July day. The victims could be said to be casualties of the French and Indian War.
As the English colonists probed westward towards the Ohio Territory, seeking fur and farmland, they came in contact with French traders, whose claim on the land dated back a hundred years, and who’d spent that time reinforcing ties with the native peoples. Tensions increased in the late 1740s, with both sides laying legal claim to the territory and maneuvering for mercantile and military advantage. In 1753, a young major named George Washington was sent up from Virginia as an envoy to the French, in order to press the English claim to the Ohio Territory. The commander of French forces, confident in the legality of the French presence – not to mention the military might of his native allies — brushed him off.
1754 and 1755 saw the steady escalation of hostilities between the English and the French in the Ohio Valley. Open war was finally declared in the spring of 1756, just a few months before Hugh Gibson was taken.
A key element of the French strategy was to beat back the English settlers from the frontier. To that end, they encouraged their native allies to ride all the way to the Susquehanna and drive the whites back over Blue Mountain.
The strategy worked beautifully. By 1756, Perry County was virtually emptied of English settlers. Many of them sought refuge from the terrifying Indian raids in Carlisle, where their stories would have found a rapt audience in a young man with book-making ambitions named Archibald Loudon.
This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 28 April 2011
For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com
