1981, Ballantine mass market paperback, 406 pages

James Alexander Thom wrote thick adventure books about the Old Appalachian and Ohio Valley Frontier in a highly skilled manner with much attention to details, in such a way that his books appeal to women as much as men. And for his themes, he sometimes chose a woman as the lead. His authentic characterizations and scrupulous attention to period detail make for a pleasing read. However, as a man, I grow impatient with the womanly detail at times, mostly because I have a daunting reading list and 500 page books bog a reader down.

Son of First Man was a good speculative read.

Long Knife was a brutal war story that got bogged down with retrospective agony.

In Follow the River Thom follows Mary Ingles, an Irish-American lass living with her husband and extended family beyond the crest of the Blue Ridge Mountains, the furthest settled point from the settlements, on her terrible ordeal. In the late summer of 1755 the settlers at Drapers Meadow were slaughtered, driven off or captured. Mary, pregnant, at full term, watched Shawnee warriors butcher her sister-in-law’s infant before taking her.

Mary quickly took the lead among the captives, staking her hopes on a strategy of “quiet dignity,” which kept them alive, but also put her in the position of having to spurn the marriage proposal of a war chief, who did not rape her, but instead took her sons—adopting them—and selling her to a French trader. Thom effectively explores the nature of frontier slavery [although completely skirting the quagmire of white plantation servitude, made possible by the remote location]: Mary is bought and owned by a white man, her baby given to an Indian woman who lost hers in childbirth, her sons adopted into the tribe based on her character. Mary impressed her captures so much that she and her sons did not have to run the gauntlet, a brutal ordeal that either killed the runner, demonstrated they were only fit for slavery, or proved that they were worthy of adoption into the tribe. The fact that many Amerindians were interracial eugenicists is hard for many moderns to swallow, but it was so. For these people culture and character mattered more than race.

The honest exposition of Indian brutality and merit-based life—particularly the willingness to replace losses among the tribe by adopting whites—explains a lot about the hard line so many tribes began drawing at this period in history, for it seems that the adopted whites among them—many servants or the sons of servants—stiffened resistance to white encroachment. The years 1753-63 saw large numbers of adopted war captives, some of whom would fight against their former people in Lord Dunmore’s War and the Revolution a decade and a half later.

Thom closes the book with an insightful afterword describing the fate of Mary Ingles and her children and the tumultuous lives of some of them, particularly Thomas, who lived as a Shawnee for over a decade and then ended up fighting against them on numerous occasions, including the Battle of Point Pleasant, where he and his mother had camped during their captivity, a big fight in which whites fought on both sides. According to Thom just over 2,000 captives were taken by the Indians during the French and Indian War, some of them, like Thomas, being recovered years later via purchase or “ransom.”

One thing was for certain, Mary Ingles was a runaway white slave. And, years later, thinking her eaten by wild animals in the wilderness, when the Shawnee heard that she had walked 1,000 miles to her home, they thought it was a great deed worthy of admiration, quite a different attitude than that typically held by whites whose chattel had escaped against great odds, who instead cursed their names.