In this excerpt from A narrative of the life of Mrs. Mary Jemison published in 1824, Mary Jemison recounts the capture of her family and neighbors in 1758 by a French and Shawnee raiding party when she was twelve years old. Jemison’s parents, sister, and two of her brothers were killed, and Jemison was adopted by a Seneca family. Her story became one of the most popular examples of the nineteenth-century genre of women’s captivity narratives.
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