Heroine's of the Wilderness, Part 5 - Women Who Were Parted Forever / Frances Slocum, Wyoming's Missing Child

I remember when my teacher read Little House in the Big Woods to my third grade class. Of course, we were gripped by Laura Ingalls Wilder's enthralling story of life in Wisconsin's big woods. It was one of the first stories in which I was caused to consider what it meant for pioneers to leave their homes and families and likely never see them again. Letters might be sent once or twice a year, if possible, but in all actuality, ties might be forever cut when a man decided to move his family to a new property or across the ocean of prairie, whether in search of land, freedom, or an elusive wealth.

I even wonder about the people who first settled the farm where I live. They were immigrants from Czechoslovakia. Their newspapers from home were stuffed in the walls of our porch for insulation. Did they see some of their relatives again before they passed on, or were newspapers and letters their only connection to their old country? And where did their children go, those who were raised here on this ground? We only know of one, the youngest, who eventually moved to Maine.

Then there were those pioneers who had to survive against starvation, fires, raids, illness--entirely alone. They had to do the best they could, whether covering themselves with dirt in a tilled field to escape a prairie fire, hiding in a well to escape raiders, walking for miles to find their way out of the wilderness, or treating their own illnesses with whatever they had on hand. I can't even imagine the trials.

And there were those whose foray into the wilderness brought them to their journey's end in ways they never could have anticipated. Here is one such story.

Wyoming's Missing Child - Frances Slocum 

The Capture of Frances Slocum (Internet Archives Book Image)

The Slocum family were Quakers who emigrated from Rhode Island to the Wyoming Valley in eastern Pennsylvania in 1777. They settled on the edge of the wilderness near Wilkes-Barre with their four children ages 13, 9, 5, and a, trusting that the Quakers' peaceable relations with the natives would keep them safe. However, on November 2nd in 1778, while Mr. Jonathan Slocum was away, three Delaware Indians attacked the family farm and carried off Frances Slocum, age five, her younger brother Ebenezer, and Wareham Kingsley, a young boy whose family was living with the Slocums at the time. Ebenezer was released, but both Frances and Wareham were carried away, while Frances's mother begged for her release. The last Mrs. Slocum saw of her child was likely a tearful glance as she cried out, arms outstretched. After that, Mrs. Slocum never saw Frances again, although she never gave up hoping for her return.

Over the following years, her family continued the search for their missing sister. Her brothers traversed the forests from the Susquehanna to the Great Lakes and even into the wilds of Canada hoping for some shred of evidence that their sister was still alive, but to no avail. Even when, by treaty, the Indians were made to return their captives, Frances was never numbered among them. Eventually, they began to believe that she had not survived her captors or their harsh lifestyle in the wilderness.

It turned out they were wrong. The Delaware had given young Frances to a childless Delaware chief and his wife, who raised her as their own child and named her Weletasash. Frances grew and assimilated into her adoptive family. She was married for a brief period to a Delaware man, but when she suffered domestic violence at his hand, she returned to her Delaware parents. 

At some point she encountered a wounded Miami man while traveling through the forest. With her parents' assistance, she brought him to their village, where he remained with them and regained his health. His name was She-pan-can-ah, known as Deaf Man to the white men because of his deafness. Frances eventually married him, and the couple had two boys, who died young, and two girls. They also moved to the Mississinewa Valley of north-central Indiana.

Nearly six decades passed, when one day Colonel George Ewing, an Indian trader fluent in Miami, stopped for the night at the double cabin of an elderly Miami woman and her extended family in Deaf Man's Village. During Ewing's stay, the woman revealed that she born a white woman who was abducted as a child. She no longer spoke English but remembered a few things. One was that she'd come from a Quaker family somewhere near the Susquehanna River, and she recalled that their last name was Slocum. 

There were theories about why she chose to reveal her identity to Ewing. Ewing believed it was because she was old, and that she wished the truth to be known before she should die.

Ewing went away purposing to find the woman's white relation. After some time, with a letter the postmaster in Lancaster which was misplaced for a spell, a notice was published that finally found its way to a minister in the Wyoming Valley and eventually to Frances's brother Joseph. 

After making a number of arrangements, the siblings of Frances traveled to Indiana near present-day Peru to meet their long-lost sister. They were shocked at the sight of her, so changed. One brother cried out, "Oh! Is that my sister?"

Certain bits of information were exchanged through an interpreter, as Francine answered questions stoically, her two grown daughters beside her:

"What was your name when a child?"

"I do not recollect."

"What do you remember?"

"My father, my mother, the long river, the staircase under which I hid when they came."

"How cam you to lose your thumb-nail?"

"My brother hammered it off a long time ago, when I was a very little girl at my father's house."

"Do you know how many brothers and sisters you had?"

She then mentioned them, and in the order of their ages.

"Would you know your name if you should hear it repeated?"

"It is a long time since, and perhaps I should not."

"Was it Frances?"

At once a smile played upon her features, and for the moment there seemed to pass over the face what might be called the shadow of an emotion, as she answered, "Yes."

William Worthington Fowler. Woman on the American Frontier / A Valuable and Authentic History of the Heroism, Adventures, Privations, Captivities, Trials, and Noble Lives and Deaths of the "Pioneer Mothers of the Republic" (Kindle Locations 3050-3058). Kindle Edition.

Despite her siblings urging her, however, Frances rejected their with to return with them, leaving her Miami family behind. She no longer had any desire to go back to that long-forgotten life, but preferred to remain with her adopted people. 

Joseph Slocum and his two daughters returned a second time to try and convince her to come with them, but even so, Frances would not be moved. "I would feel like a fish out of water," she told the interpreter.

Frances did agree to allow her Slocum family's request to have her portrait painted however. 

Although Frances Slocum never returned to the home or family to whom she was born, she did leave a legacy. A short time after their reunion, the Miami tribes began to be forcibly removed to Kansas. Frances appealed for help from her white brothers, Joseph and Isaac Slocum, who with the aid of a lawyer in Peru, found sympathetic ears in Congress for an exemption for an old woman who had suffered much hardship and hoped to remain near both her families, native and white. So, three years after Frances's identity was revealed, Congress signed a treaty providing some of the Miami with land grants allowing them to remain in Indiana. While Frances herself was not allowed a land grant, the two daughters with whom she was living were, so she and her family were able to remain in Indiana. The members of her Miami village formed the nucleus of today's Miami Nation of Indiana.

Frances Slocum was parted from her family for nearly the whole of her life, but she was not forgotten. She died of pneumonia in 1847 in Deaf Man's village at 74 years of age and was buried beside She-pan-can-ah and their two sons. In 1965, during construction of a dam that would soon be used to flood the area, their graves were moved to Wabash, Indiana, and a monument was raised there in her honor.

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Being a preacher in the countryside is not for the faint of heart nor faith. Four inexperienced preachers face a myriad of challenges including those who figure a man of the cloth needs a wife. Can they meet the expectations of "helpful" congregants and be true to their hearts?

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