Mary Jemison

Background

Jemison was born to Thomas and Jane (Erwin) Jemison aboard the ship William and Mary in the fall of 1743, while en route from what is now Northern Ireland to America.

Career

On April 5, 1758, at their farm near the junction of Sharps Run and Conewago Creek, Pennsylvania, Mary, her parents, three of the other children, and some neighbors were captured by a party of Shawnee Indians and French soldiers. Most of the captives were killed, but Mary's life was spared. She was taken to Fort Duquesne, and given to two Seneca women who adopted her as a sister in the place of a brother killed in battle, naming her Dehgewanus. For five years she lived in the Ohio country, and late in 1762 she accompanied three Indian brothers to the tribal home at Little Beard's town on the Genesee River near the present Geneseo, New York. When at the close of the French and Indian War a bounty was offered for the return of prisoners, a chief of the tribe wished to take Mary to the English at Fort Niagara, but her Indian family refused to give her up, and she, having developed a deep affection for them, was not unwilling to stay. During the Revolution her home was frequently the stopping place of Walter Butler and Joseph Brant. At its close she was offered her freedom by her Indian brother, but preferred to remain with the tribe. In 1797 she was granted a tract of her own choice on the Gardeau Flats along the Genesee, near Castile, New York, where she had lived since the destruction of Little Beard's town by Sullivan's army in 1779. In 1817 Jemison was naturalized and her land-title confirmed by act of the New York legislature. At this time she was leasing the greater part of her land to white settlers and living with a married daughter, though continuing to plant, hoe, and harvest her own corn. One of the most extensive landholders in her section of the state, noted for her kindness and generosity, she was a figure of great interest to the settlers. In 1823, James Everett Seaver, M. D. , was commissioned at the instance of a group of citizens, to interview her and write the story of her life. The resulting book, A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison (1824), went through twenty-two editions in the next hundred years, and her story became a tradition in Western New York. In 1831, the Senecas having sold their Genesee lands, she moved to the Buffalo Creek Reservation. She adhered to the Indian customs and manner of dress until her death, which occured on September 19, 1833. In the last months of her life she professed the Christian religion, and she was buried near the Seneca Mission Church. Her remains were moved in 1874 to the estate of William Pryor Letchworth, now Letchworth Park, near her old home on the Genesee. There, in 1910, a bronze statue by H. K. Bush-Brown was erected to her memory.

Achievements

• Jemison is best remembered as a captive of Native American Indians, whose published life story became one of the most popular in the 19th-century genre of captivity stories.

Connections

In the third year of her captivity Jemison was married to a Delaware warrior named Sheninjee, by whom she had two children. Some four years later, Sheninjee having died, she became the wife of an old chief, Hiokatoo, by whom she had six children. Her husband died in 1811, at the age of 103; in that year and the year following two of her sons were killed in a drunken rage by the third, who was himself similarly killed a few years later.

Father:

Thomas Jemison

Mother:

Jane Erwin

Spouse:

Sheninjee

Spouse:

Hiokatoo

References

• A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison
• Historical Sketches of Western New York: The Seneca Indians, Phelps and Gorham Purchase, Mary Jemison, Jemima Wilkinson, Joseph Smith, Jr., And ... and Rochester Knockings (Classic Reprint)
• Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary: Notable American Women, 1607-1950: A Biographical Dictionary. THREE VOLUMES (Volumes 1-3)
• A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison