A virtual secret of history.

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ABOUT TWO DECADES before 13 colonies decided to join forces to throw off the shackles of Great Britain, a young girl was snatched by a band of Shawnee from her home in the south central Pennsylvania wilderness. One Saturday in April, 250 years after the event, about 1,500 people gathered to learn about Mary Jemison, and to meet a few of her ancestors.

"They made a statement by getting off the couch and coming here today," historian and event organizer Debra Sandoe McCauslin said of the crowd. "It shows us we need to continue to feed that hunger." With the aid of several other residents of Adams County, McCauslin put together a program that offered to explain the significance of a part of the county's history until then marked only with a few roadside historical signs and a monument outside a church near where the teenage Mary once lived.

Thomas and Jane (Erwin) Jemison, the latter pregnant with, it would turn out in those days before the sorcery of ultrasound, another daughter, left Ireland in about 1742 with their children, John, Thomas, and Betsey, aboard the Mary William. They were bound for what they thought were the opportunities of the New World, a place where they had heard William Penn had created a peaceful environment where they could worship, farm, and raise children.

The Jemisons' fourth child, Mary, was born during the voyage. The family settled near Marsh Creek, Pa. There is some discussion these days about the exact location of the first Jemison homestead, and of the second, to which Thomas moved his brood about a year before the event that would fix young Mary's place in the county's lore. The French and Indian War (1754-63) was well underway when Thomas Jemison moved his family to a new location, or a short distance from the first. His reasons for the move have escaped memory; Mary later remembered the move, but she was not certain whether it was to another part of the first farm, or a completely different parcel.

On the afternoon of April 4, 1758, Mary was sent to a neighboring farm to obtain a horse. Decades later, she recalled that, on the way, she found herself accosted by a large white sheet, which wrapped itself around her. The family toward which she had been walking discovered her lying on the ground nearly lifeless, and took her home. Mary finally awoke the next morning, feeling well, and headed home with the horse she had been sent to borrow. "The appearance of that sheet, I have ever considered as a forerunner of the melancholy catastrophe that so soon afterwards happened to our family: and my being caught in it I believe, was ominous of my preservation from death at the time we were captured," Mary said in James E. Seaver's 1923 biography, A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison.

The French and Indian War in the American colonies was an extension of a conflict between the French and English on their own continent. Each nation wanted to oust the other from the new land, which worked out well for the natives, who were less than pleased with being pushed back by hordes of settlers arriving regularly from Great Britain. So, it was French and Indians against white people who were not French--mostly because the French were paying for English scalps.

The conflict came to the Jemison family farm on the morning of April 5, 1758, when a band of Shawnee, accompanied by French soldiers, arrived at the Jemison's. Mary had arrived home with the borrowed horse to find a neighbor with his sister-in-law, whose husband was serving with Col. George Washington's army, and her son and two daughters. Her brothers and father, Thomas and John, were working in the barn, mother was preparing breakfast, and Mary and the rest of the youngsters also were in the house.

They heard shots fired, and looked outside to find six Shawnee Indians and four French soldiers--and the visiting neighbor and a horse lying dead. The intruders made captives of Thomas Jemison and the women and children inside the house. Mary's two brothers escaped capture by hiding in the barn; she later learned they made their way to Mary's grandfather's place in Virginia.

The young girl and her parents began a forced march westward. The second day out, a few miles west of Chambersburg, near the Village of Edenville, the band of captives was separated, and eight of the original 10 captives were killed and scalped. That night, as the Shawnee captors prepared the scalps for sale, Mary recognized the hair of her father and the other children, and especially the red tresses that had been her mother's. The westward march continued nearly a week before finally arriving at Ft. Duquesne where the Monongahela and Allegheny rivers join to form the Ohio. The fort, on what now is the south side of the city of Pittsburgh, was begun in 1854 by the British, but captured and completed by the French, who controlled it when Mary arrived. The day after getting to Ft. Duquesne, Mary was inspected by two Seneca women. One of the tribe's customs was for a bereaved family to replace loved ones lost in battle with suitable substitutes from among captives taken in the same or other battles, and Mary was found suitable.

At the squaws' village, about 80 miles by canoe down the Ohio River, Mary was welcomed with a ceremony in which she was accepted as a replacement for a lost warrior and given the name Dehgewanus, a monicker she said described her as a pretty and pleasant girl. The ceremony also made her a sister to the two squaws who had brought her from Ft. Duquesne. She soon was married to Sheninjee, a Delaware Indian who had come to visit the Seneca village. At first, Mary suffered the marriage only to avoid angering her Seneca "family," but she later said she grew to love the man, who gained her affection with, she told Seaver, "good nature, generosity, tenderness, and friendship." Her first child, a girl, died two days after birth. The following year, when she was about 19, she bore a son, whom she named Thomas Jemison, after her father.

During the Revolutionary War, the Senecas sided with the British, prompting George Washington in 1779 to send an army of 5,000 to destroy the tribe's fighting capacity. An ambush laid by the natives did not stop the American army, which arrived in the Genesee Valley and began to burn the crops and homes. Surviving Seneca escaped into the forest and found refuge in other Seneca villages the invaders bad left unscathed. Dehgewanus made for the village of Gadaho, south of little Beardstown, where she and her children found refuge with two runaway slaves. She lived there for the next six decades. Her Seneca husband, Hiokatoo, from whom she had been separated, ultimately found her. They started their lives afresh, and lived until, nearly 20 years later, a new army invaded. Land speculators, the leading edge of a white invasion the natives had tried to stave off, pushed westward, and sought to get the Seneca and other tribes out of the way.

A great council was held in the summer of 1797 between the white and native residents. All the Seneca leaders, and the women who, in their matrilineal culture, advised them, finally reached an agreement: they would sell to the settlers most of their lands in return for 12 reservations and cash. Dehgewanus became owner of the Gardeau Reservation, comprising about 18,000 acres. She was not destined to keep it. The predecessors of 21st century developers acquired most of her holding, often, it has been suggested, neglecting to pay a fair price, if any price at all. At any rate, two square miles were reserved for Dehgewanus. She lived there until she sold final title in 1831 and moved to the Buffalo Creek Reservation.

Forty years after the Revolutionary War, Seaver was commissioned by attorney Daniel W. Banister to interview the White Woman of the Genesee and write down her story: A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison. The woman sometimes referred to as "Two Falling Voices"--the Indian Dehgewanus and the white woman Mary Jemison--died, about 200 miles and 75 years from where she was abducted from her family's farm, Sept. 19, 1833, at Buffalo Creek. "She was taken during the French and Indian War," concurs Arendtsville, Pa., resident and Mary Jemison historian Marian Benchoff. "She lived through the Revolution, [and] she lived when the Genesee Valley [in western New York] was settled."

As years passed, she absorbed the Seneca culture. Her first husband, Sheninjee, became ill and died while on a hunting expedition, and she married a Seneca chief. She saw alcohol introduced to the Indians, mourned when one of her sons, 48-year-old John, killed another, 52-year-old Thomas, in a drunken argument, and reckoned the "ardent spirits" would cause the end of all Indians. Yet, she also saw one of her grandsons, Jacob Jemison, attend Dartmouth College; he later may have become a doctor.

Spurning the white world

She had several opportunities to return to the white world, but always declined, and even hid when a group of whites attempted to capture her. "The worst thing you could do was go back and have a child that was a half-breed," explains Benchoff. She bad the respect and admiration of many of the whites who moved in near her, and among whom she was known as "The White Woman of the Genesee." She had a reputation of taking in any passing travelers in need of shelter and food. Many of the settlers invited her into their homes for lunch and fellowship.

Buffalo Creek is about an hour and 15 minutes from Letchworth State Park, which did not exist when Mary Jemison lived. The park has its roots in Glen Iris, an estate and museum created by William Pryor Letchworth. In 1874, with the city of Buffalo expanding its footprint into former Seneca homelands, Letchworth was asked to move Mary Jemison's remains to his museum ground. "That's where she lived, and that's where she is now," Letchworth State Park Manager Roland Beck points out. Also moved were the council house believed to have been the one Jemison spoke of when she related her story to Seaver, from its site about 14 miles south of Glen Iris, and Mary's daughter Nancy's cabin from about eight miles north. Letchworth placed a granite marker on the new gravesite. The marker became the base of a statue the collector dedicated in 1910 of Dehgewanus trekking to the Genesee Valley with her first son, Thomas, on her back. A similar statue of Jemison, her hair braided in Seneca fashion, was placed by Fr. Will Whalen in 1923, in front of St. Ignatius Loyola Catholic Church in Buchanan Valley, Pa., near the land her family fanned and from which she was taken.

The story is of one of the most significant, and least known, pre-Civil War events in what would become Adams County, Pa. It is, says McCauslin, "about all of us whose ancestors were early colonists. Her story helps us understand the struggles of our early founders. We can appreciate how we got here today by learning about those who walked here long ago."

Mary Jemison also graphically represents a transitional period in our nation's history. McCauslin notes her life as a witness to the culture from which she was abducted taking command over the culture into which she was inserted, and which she eventually embraced. Some Adams County residents, arguably mostly history buffs and researchers of local lore, know the story, but it is not one traditionally promoted in elementary and secondary schools in the area where it took place. McCauslin attracted a group of historians, a reenactor-storyteller, the county tourism agency, and even county government in the form of a kick-off proclamation, to mount an event to commemorate the 250th anniversary of Mary Jemison's capture.

Three of Jemison's descendants, among them two representing eighth-generation grandsons from Mary's first sons, attended from New York, with a troupe of native Seneca dancers. Maryland educator Roger Swartz and his wife Deborah, also known as 'Turtle"--a name derived from her Seneca ancestors--have presented at the Smithsonian Institution. At the celebration, Roger talked about "Rites and rituals of Native American warfare during the French and Indian War," and Turtle enlightened visitors about "Native American women's roles and regalia" during the same period.

Attendance exceeded even McCauslin's hopes, filling the parking lots and fire company and church halls in a part of Adams County normally regarded for its remoteness from the better known Gettysburg battlefield and the more visually obvious orchards for which the county justifiably is known. The turnout proved people would be interested in history if it were made available to them.

Often youngsters learn dates and names of nationally significant events, and grow up thinking nothing of import happened where they live. In many cases, nothing could be more untrue. Mary Jemison's story illustrates the desires and hardships of frontier life. Meeting and talking with her descendents offers a picture of at least one of the cultures that existed on the North American continent when Europeans arrived in what to them was a New World. In a time when environmental issues, such as global warming and water pollution, take the forefront in the daily news, McCauslin points out that Jemison's descendants could teach us lessons about worshipping our Earth, taking only what is necessary, and making decisions truly planned for future generations.

John Messeder is a staff writer for the Gettysburg (Pa.) Times.