A Treasury of Foolishly Forgotten Americans (3 page)

Back in the days when Native Americans were still seen as “savages,” the town of Milford, Pennsylvania, dedicated a monument in 1889 to Tom Quick, the lionized “Indian Slayer” who once roamed the wilds of the region picking off members of the Delaware Nation. “Maddened by the death of his Father at the hands of Savages,” an inscription on the memorial read, “Tom Quick never abated his hostility to them until the day of his death, a period of over forty years.” By some accounts, the body count reached ninety-nine Delaware, though local historians limit it to four or five. The true number, like so much of Tom Quick's life, is obscured by legend. The only certainty is that Milford had seen fit to memorialize a serial killer.

One of Quick's few documented victims was his boyhood friend Mushwink, the son of a Delaware chieftain. The two had grown up together after the Quick family became the first white settlers of the northeastern Pennsylvania area around Milford in 1733. The local Delaware—by then a defeated tribe paying tribute to the six-nation Iroquois Confederacy—treated the Quicks kindly, and Tom and Mushwink became constant companions. Together they explored the great forests of the region, where Tom learned to hunt and trap with great skill and daring. The boys were like brothers, each practically adopted into the other's family. It was an idyll not destined to last.

William Penn had established good relations with the Delaware when he led a group of English Quakers to the new colony of Pennsylvania in 1682. His successors, however, were not so benevolent. Fraudulent land grabs, like the infamous Walking Purchase of 1737,
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and an ever-expanding European immigrant population pushed the Delaware farther and farther west, away from their homeland along the river for which they were named. It was only around the Quick homestead, their traditional burial grounds, that the Delaware remained in any significant numbers.

The increasing bitterness of the displaced tribe came to full fruition during the French and Indian War, when the British and the French, along with their Native American allies, clashed over territory, particularly around the Ohio River Valley. The Delaware, allied with the French, launched fierce raids into their former lands in eastern Pennsylvania, burning homes, pillaging livestock, and scalping men, women, and children alike. “Just now arrived in town an express from our frontiers with the bad news that eight families of Pennsylvania were cut off last week,” Benjamin Franklin, then postmaster of the colony, wrote to London in 1755. “Thirteen men and women were found scalped and dead and twelve children missing.” It was during this time that Tom Quick turned homicidal.

The Quick family and their white neighbors had taken refuge from the marauding tribe in a fortified stone house across the Delaware River in New Jersey. They had only carried with them a month's worth of supplies, however, and as hunger and illness threatened to deplete them in the winter of 1756, Tom, his father, and a brother-in-law ventured back across the frozen river to a mill owned by Tom's father. There they worked all night grinding corn. The following morning, heavily laden with sacks of cornmeal, the men started back. Nearly midway across the river, amid Delaware war cries, shots rang out from the Pennsylvania shore. Tom's father fell. Rushing to his aid, Quick found the old man stricken. “I'm a dead man,” he gasped. “I can go no further. Leave me. Run for your lives.”

With the Delaware war party rapidly approaching, Tom had little choice but to flee to the other side of the river with his brother-in-law as the Indians fell upon his father. Safe on the shore, he watched helplessly as they stripped the elder Quick of his silver buttons and shoe buckles, then scalped him. Tom could just make out the features of the Delaware leader leaning over his father and desecrating his corpse. It was his boyhood friend, Mushwink. Overwhelmed with rage, Tom swore revenge. His oath is recorded in the Quick family papers: “The blood of the whole Indian race is not sufficient to atone for the blood of my father.”

Tales of the murderous rampage that followed were legion, often told in the same reverential tone reserved for other American folk heroes such as Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone. An introductory poem to a book of Quick's exploits, published in 1851, read:

In one perhaps apocryphal story, Quick ambushed a Delaware family and killed them all. Asked later why he hadn't spared the life of the innocent baby, he reportedly snorted, “because nits make lice.” Another oft-repeated tale had Tom splitting rails one day when he was suddenly surrounded by seven Delaware warriors. They demanded that he come with them. Quick pretended to agree, but asked the warriors for their help splitting one last log. The Indians apparently saw no reason to deny this simple request. They dropped their guns and plunged their hands into a split in the log that Tom had opened with a wedge. With his enemies thus positioned, Quick suddenly knocked out the wedge, trapping the warriors' fingers in the wood. At his leisure, he then killed them one by one.

Such stories, which grew richer with each retelling, are difficult to substantiate. But late in 1764 there was an encounter that is well documented. Tom was at a tavern near present-day Reading, Pennsylvania, when an intoxicated Delaware approached and offered to drink with him. Quick refused, but the Indian persisted. “You hate Delawares,” he said. “I hate you.” When Tom continued to ignore him, the Indian taunted, “You kill Delawares. I kill your father.” Perhaps Quick didn't recognize Mushwink. After all, it had been almost ten years since his father's murder. “Prove it,” Tom demanded. With that, Mushwink produced the silver buttons cut from the elder Quick's coat and gleefully mimicked the old man's death agonies. Enraged, Quick jumped up, grabbed a musket mounted on the tavern wall, aimed it at Mushwink, and forced him outside. “Indian dog,” he roared, “you'll kill no more white men.” He then shot his former friend in the back and returned to the tavern.

With the French and Indian War over and trade with the Delaware resumed, Mushwink's murder was seen as a dangerous breach of the peace. Quick was arrested, but the local townspeople arranged his escape. He was free to resume his murderous career, which, some say, lasted another thirty years. Smallpox finally finished him off in 1796.

As the years passed, the famed “Indian Slayer” gradually faded into obscurity. But his memory was revived in 1997, when a vandal defaced his memorial in Milford. The nine-foot-tall zinc obelisk was removed and repaired, but there was sharp resistance to returning it to its former place of prominence. Behavior that was once seen as heroic was now condemned as barbaric. “Lynchings in the South were part of history, too, so are we going to start putting up monuments to the grand wizards of the KKK?” Chuck Gentle Moon Demund, interim chief of the Delaware Nation, said in 2004.

Given the controversy, Tom Quick's monument remains hidden away from public view. When asked for the exact location, Lori Strelecki, curator of the Pike County Historical Society's The Columns Museum, was rather Quick with her response: “If I told you, I'd have to kill you.”

It was a spring day in 1758, with the French and Indian War in full fury, when the terror every frontier family dreaded most was visited upon the Jemisons. A raiding party of six Shawnee warriors and four Frenchmen burst into their home near what is now Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and took them and another family captive. The three adults and seven children were marched through the forest until they reached the spot where most of them would be slain. Only young Mary Jemison, who was about fifteen, and a little boy from the other family were spared. The two children were driven farther into the woods while the rest were killed. Both then had to watch as the bloody scalps of their loved ones were meticulously scraped, dried, and stretched over hoops by the Indians who treated them as trophies.

“Those scalps I knew at the time must have been taken from our family, by the color of the hair,” Mary Jemison recalled many years later. “My mother's hair was red, and I could easily distinguish my father's and the children's from each other. That sight was most appalling; yet I was obliged to endure it without complaining.”

What happened to Mary Jemison was hardly unique at a time when European settlers were routinely abducted by Native Americans. But her story, first published in 1824, was among the most widely read of the Indian captivity narratives that once abounded—perhaps because it offered something different. Not only was Mary snatched away by Indians, a familiar enough horror to many readers, but she also lived among them for the rest of her life. Thus her account provided a tantalizing glimpse into an alien society that both frightened and fascinated so many people.

The narrative is marred somewhat by the unfortunate intrusions of James E. Seaver, the writer to whom Mary told her story at the end of her life. He infused commonly held prejudices against Native Americans into the tale, not to mention an abundance of his own overwrought language (like this bathos-laden passage: “But alas! how transitory are all human affairs! how fleeting are riches! how brittle the invisible thread on which all earthly comforts are suspended!”). Still, Mary Jemison does manage to be heard, and her portrait of the native people is far more balanced and sympathetic than most. She had, after all, become one of them.

After the murder and mutilation of her family, Mary was taken to Fort Duquesne (now Pittsburgh) and given to two Seneca sisters who adopted her as a replacement for their dead brother. This was a common practice among some tribes, who believed the spirit of their loved ones resided in those they adopted, including white prisoners. She was ceremoniously dressed as a Seneca maiden and initiated into the tribe at their village on the Ohio River. “In the course of that ceremony, from mourning [the dead warrior] they became serene,” Mary recalled. “Joy sparkled in their countenances, and they seemed to rejoice over me as over a long-lost child. I was made welcome among them as a sister to the two squaws before mentioned, and was called Deh-he-wä-mis; which, being interpreted, signifies a pretty girl, a handsome girl, or a pleasant, good thing. That is the name by which I have ever since been called by the Indians.”

Although she missed her family terribly and struggled to retain her native identity, Mary adapted well to the life of a Seneca woman. She tended crops, dressed game, and after several years was married to a Delaware chief by the name of Sheninjee. “The idea of spending my days with him at first seemed perfectly irreconcilable to my feelings,” she told Seaver; “but his good nature, generosity, tenderness, and friendship toward me soon gained my affection; and strange as it may seem, I loved him.”

Mary's contentment was made plain when she actively resisted being returned to the white world. The British offered a bounty on all those who had been taken captive during the French and Indian War, but when a Dutchman named John van Sice tried to redeem her, she ran away and hid for three days. Similarly, when a Seneca chief ordered her returned to the British, she disappeared with her child, a boy named Thomas, until it was safe to return to her tribe—the people she now considered her family. “With them was my home,” she said.

A period of peace followed the French and Indian War, during which time (Sheninjee having died) Mary married her second husband, a Seneca warrior named Hiokatoo. The couple had six children, all named with a nod to their mother's past and the relatives from whom she had been parted. Two boys named John and Jesse joined their half brother, Thomas, along with four daughters called Jane, Nancy, Betsey, and Polly. Mary described the Seneca people during the lull in hostilities (with what appear to be some of James Seaver's linguistic flourishes tossed into the text):

The peaceful interlude lasted until the American Revolution, when the Seneca (among other tribes) were enticed by the British to help subdue the rebellious colonists. Mary Jemison had a unique perspective on the conflict and witnessed horrors committed by both sides. She described the ghastly execution by the Indians of an American officer named Thomas Boyd, who was stripped naked, tied to a tree, and menaced by tomahawks and scalping knives. An incision was then made in his abdomen, and his intestines were slowly drawn out. Finally the prisoner was beheaded, his head stuck on a pole, and the rest of his body was left to rot unburied. It was a brutal killing, but Mary also recalled the destruction of her village in western New York by American forces under Major General John Sullivan. “A part of our corn they burnt,” she said, “and threw the remainder into the river. They burnt our houses, killed what few cattle and horses they could find, destroyed our fruit trees, and left nothing but the bare soil and timber.” A number of Indians starved or froze to death as a result. Mary survived by working for two escaped slaves who hired her to help them husk corn on their farm.

“I have laughed a thousand times to myself,” she told Seaver, “when I have thought of the good old negro who hired me, who, fearing that I should get taken or injured by the Indians, stood by me constantly when I was husking, with a loaded gun in his hand, in order to keep off the enemy; and thereby lost as much labor of his own as he received from me, by paying good wages.”

After the Revolutionary War, Mary was given another opportunity to return to the white world—only this time without her oldest son, Thomas, who the Seneca leaders believed would one day make a great warrior. “The chiefs refusing to let him go was one reason for my resolving to stay,” she recalled; “but another, more powerful if possible, was that I had got a large family of Indian children that I must take with me; and that, if I should be so fortunate as to find my relatives, they would despise them, if not myself, and treat us as enemies, or, at least, with a degree of cold indifference, which I thought I could not endure.”

Mary was rewarded for her decision to stay with an enormous tract of land around New York's Genesee River. It was a munificent bequest, but she would find little peace there in her later years, thanks to murderous infighting among her sons. A lingering quarrel between Thomas and his half brother John came to a bloody conclusion in 1811, when John beat Thomas to death at their mother's home while she was away. “I returned soon after, and found my son lifeless at the door, on the spot where he was killed,” she remembered. “No one can judge my feelings on seeing this mournful spectacle; and what greatly added to my distress was the fact that he had fallen by the murderous hand of his brother.” It was a terrible tragedy for any mother, but Mary had to endure it again when John killed his other brother, Jesse, in another drunken rampage. John himself was later killed by some companions. Mary blamed the booze, and reflected upon its destructive effects on her family and her community:

After a lifetime of adventure and heartbreak, Mary told her story to James Seaver in 1823. By then she was an old woman of about eighty, careworn but still lively and engaging. “When she looks up, and is engaged in conversation, her countenance is very expressive,” wrote Seaver. “But from her long residence with the Indians, she has acquired the habit of peeping from under the eyebrows, as they do, with the head inclined downward.” The book that followed was a best seller with numerous editions, and “the White Woman of the Genesee,” as Mary was called, became familiar to generations of readers. But there was more to Mary Jemison than Seaver was able to capture with his purple prose. As she later told a visitor before her death in 1833, “I did not tell them who wrote it down half of what it was.”