Over the long centuries of the American frontier, as each documented battle, uprising, or war was spawned from across the Atlantic in the process of trying to win the American continent, a flood of brief, humble narratives of the capture of actual people held the horrified attention of an international readership for a moment, a decade, or a generation. If a narrative of a recent raid could not be had soon enough in print, so much convention had come down by the later eighteenth century that the story could be easily embroidered. That is why some accounts of captivity grew larger than life, or existed side-by-side with an actual prosaic deposition made by a "redeemed" captive, one lucky enough to make such an relation of his or her adventure. It is interesting to note that the publishers of captivity narratives unwilling to get the true facts cheated themselves and their readers. The real works, the poignant sufferings of true participants, the victims on both sides of European and American native cultural misunderstanding, revenge, retaliation and war, almost always made better reading than ersatz embellishment.

The Indian captivity narrative allowed early Americans a chance to speak for themselves in a very significant way. We learn from these early soldiers and settlers the genealogies of entire families from New Hampshire to Illinois to Arizona. We can discern what it must have been like to have lived on the frontier, at the edge of the forest or wild prairie, at the foot of the forbidding mountains, supported only by one's unchangeable faith in the inevitability of the growth of civilization. Indian customs from a multitude of tribes and separate cultures were for the first time observed and put down on paper by captives who came back to the settlements. The lone Jesuit missionary in the Mississippi Valley or on Lake Huron in the 1600's, or captured farmers in New York or Ohio were the first North American ethnologists or anthropologists.

The vivid stories profoundly influenced American art, particularly that of such nineteenth century painters as Carl Wimar, Charles Deas and George Caleb Bingham. The crude illustrations in the captivity books often became in oil or watercolor icons for the themes of the winning of the frontier by the whites-and conversely, the loss of it by the Indians. Although many great figures in American literature tried their hands at reworking an original captive narrative, as Cotton, Mather, Thoreau or Whittier reworked the story of Hannah Duston, it is most often the plain, simple prose of the common settlers, putting their thoughts and reactions down on what must have been the most nightmarish of experiences, which creates the best writings, the most compelling to modem readers.

To most men and women living on the frontier at any time in American history, to be made a captive by Indians, to lose a loved one to the tomahawk or the stake, indeed to lose one's own life in the ferocity of the Indian Wars, was a rather remote possibility. The tide of settlement pushed the Indians inexorably from their birthright. Nevertheless the narratives represent occurrences which were common enough to have passed down to us not only in separately printed pamphlets and books by the scores, but in hundreds of newspaper and journal accounts, in compilations, local and regional histories, and anthologies which continued to be produced well after the beginning of the twentieth century. To this day such narratives manage to be reprinted. They have become as well the subject matter for dozens of motion pictures and television scripts.