Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, November 1, 1995 TAG: 9511010089
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BILL BASKERVILL ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: EGGLESTON LENGTH: Long
The young woman clung desperately to the icy limestone cliff, her nearly wasted body tormented by starvation and piercing cold.
The New River beckoned hundreds of feet below. By just letting go, she could end weeks of horrific suffering.
She banished the thought and clawed closer to the precipice. Pulling herself up a few inches, she rested, then repeated the painful process hour after hour until cresting the massive rock late on a snowy November day.
Crawling, falling, slipping and sliding, she descended the other side. To her surprise, she saw a patch of corn and signs that people were about.
Mary Draper Ingles prayed that her odyssey of severe psychological and physical anguish was over.
She had endured months of Indian captivity and a six-week trek in uncharted wilderness, driven by ``determination, courage, physical stamina, athletic ability'' and the thin hope of being reunited with her husband. This was the story that Mary's great-great-great granddaughter, Roberta Ingles Steele, recounted in her home on Ingles Street in nearby Radford.
Mary's ordeal had begun in a Virginia frontier settlement known as Draper's Meadow near present-day Blacksburg.
It was a Sunday in July 1755, the second year of the French and Indian War. As Mary's husband, William Ingles, harvested grain some distance away, a band of Shawnee Indians fell upon the tiny settlement.
The Indians killed four people, including Mary's mother. Mary, nine months pregnant, was taken prisoner along with her sons, Thomas, 4, and George, 2, and her sister-in-law, Bettie Draper.
After three days on the trail with her captors, Mary, 23, gave birth to a girl, John P. Hale, a physician and historian, wrote of his great-grandmother's ordeal in the 1886 book ``Trans-Allegheny Pioneers.''
But John Ingles' handwritten manuscript - the first known written account of his mother's captivity and return home - doesn't mention any child born to Mary during her captivity.
Other than that departure, the Hale and Ingles accounts agree almost exactly.
It took a month for the Shawnee raiders to reach their town at the confluence of the Scioto and Ohio rivers near present-day Portsmouth, Ohio. Mary had carefully noted landmarks and the fact that the Indians had followed rivers.
A few days later the Indians parceled out the prisoners to different owners.
Mary's sons were taken deeper into the wilderness. Bettie Draper was sent to a camp 50 miles north up the Scioto.
Mary was allowed to keep her infant and remain in the Shawnee town, where she was put to work making the checkered shirts popular among the Shawnee, according to Hale.
``The Indians incouraged her very much & when she made a shirt for one of the Indians they would stick it upon a stick and run all through the town to show it & praise my mother what a fine squaw she was,'' her son penned in a frontier style.
After about two months in the town, Mary, her baby and an elderly captive from Pennsylvania, referred to by Hale and Ingles as the ``Old Dutch Woman,'' were taken about 150 miles up the Ohio to make salt near present-day Cincinnati, Hale reported.
There, Mary resolved to escape.
``My mother being so distressed in being separated from her children & her situation such a disagreeable one that she came to the determined resolution that she wood leave them & try to get Home or dy in the woods,'' Ingles wrote.
Mary confided her secret to the Old Dutch Woman, whose name was believed to be Mrs. Stump. Each day the two would go into the woods ostensibly to gather wild grapes, walnuts and hickory nuts for the Indians, but, according to Hale, their real purpose was to plot their escape.
``But what was to be done with her child? She will know that the child's cries would give them away. She also knew it was impossible to make it all the way with an infant,'' Hale writes.
``Clearly there was but one thing to do, and that was to abandon the unhappy little sufferer to its hard fate.
``She nestled the dear little babe as cosily as she could in a little bark cradle, gave it her last parting kisses and baptism of tears, tore herself away and was gone, never to see it again in this world.''
They set out in early October with only two blankets, one tomahawk and the tattered clothes they were wearing. They had no food, and Mary had no idea how far she was from home, or even if William had survived the Shawnee attack. She could only follow the Ohio to the Kanawha River and then the New River to home.
Neither woman could swim.
Day after day Mary and Mrs. Stump ate only walnuts, hickory nuts and wild grapes, according to Hale and Ingles.
For a time, they rode on a horse they found grazing in a corn field. The horse fell through driftwood the women were using to ford a stream, and could not fight its way out. With their clothes reduced to shreds of cloth, the women endured the chill of late autumn. With nuts and berries no longer available, they had to eat plants without knowing what they were, Hale reported. And Mrs. Stump, driven by starvation and desperation, tried to kill Mary with the intention of eating her. Both women were so exhausted they did each other no harm.
``Day after day they dragged their weary limbs along, suffering and starving; night after night, they shivered, starved and suffered, crawling into hollow logs or hollow trees as a partial protection from the increasing cold,'' Hale wrote.
``Her children had been taken away from her. She would rather die than live with the Indians. She was just not going to be a captive,'' even if it meant giving up shelter and food provided by the Shawnee, Steele said.
The women finally reached the New River with its towering canyon walls. After Mrs. Stump attacked her a second time, Mary struck out on her own. She found an abandoned canoe and crossed the river. She drew closer to Draper's Meadow, but faced the most daunting terrain of her journey.
Naked and without food, she crawled and clawed her way over a huge cliff.
Just before nightfall she was ``confronted by still another gigantic bluff hundreds of feet high,'' Hales wrote.
Her way seemed totally barred.
``In despair she threw herself down on the bare ground and rocks, and there lay in that pitiable condition, more dead than alive,'' Hale wrote.
The next morning she began the ascent.
``So feeble and faint from hunger, such soreness and pain from her lacerated feet and swollen limbs, that from time to time she looked down from her dizzy heights, almost tempted, from sheer exhaustion and suffering, to let go and tumble down to sudden relief and everlasting rest,'' according to Hale.
``Climbing and resting, resting and climbing, she at last reached the summit, and the day was far spent.''
She took most of the next day to make her way down the other side of the steep slope, Hale reports.
``Halloo, Halloo'' she called upon reaching the bottom.
Adam Harmon and his two sons were harvesting corn. They heard the noise but thought they were about to be attacked by Indians.
``They grabbed their rifles, always kept close at hand, and listened attentively,'' Hale wrote.
The Harmons came out of the corn toward Mary. They ``picked her up tenderly and conveyed her to their little cabin, near at hand, where there was protection from the storm, a rousing fire and substantial comfort,'' Hale wrote.
It had taken 43 days. With walkarounds of Ohio, Kanawha and New River tributaries, she had covered about 850 miles, or about 20 miles a day, said Lewis Ingles Jeffries, Mary's great-great-great-great grandson.
``It is said to be as heroic to endure as to dare; then [Mary] was doubly heroic, for she dared and endured all that human can,'' Hale wrote.
Jeffries said it was a triumph of will. ``Could anyone stand up and do what she did today? I don't know. People think it's a major problem to find a parking spot.''
Mary and William were reunited a few days later.
``You may guess what was the sensation and feeling of my Father & mother,'' John Ingles wrote.
The Old Dutch Woman was found several days later, and she and Mary had a tearful reunion, according to Hale.
Indians took about 2,000 settlers - men, women and children - captive during the French and Indian War. Few escaped and returned home, Virginia Tech history professor Daniel B. Thorp said.
He said he knew of no women besides Mary and the Old Dutch Woman who successfully fled captivity.
Dark Rain Thom, author of ``Kohkumthena's Grandchildren The History of the Shawnee People,'' said Mary Ingles' escape was not of great importance to the Shawnee.
``They were accustomed to taking prisoners to replace those killed by the whites,'' she said.
The Shawnee would have been disappointed the two women chose to return to what the Indians considered a lesser society, Thom said.
``It was unusual that she did choose to escape and go back because more than 80 percent of whites taken prisoner stayed with the Indians because most did not want to come back to a harsher frontier'' life, she said.
``She was a Christian and just had to get back to her husband and remain true to her wedding vows,'' Thom said. ``You do have to admire her courage, persistence and not giving in.''
What about the baby?
The accounts of Mary Draper Ingles' ordeal by son John Ingles and great-grandson John P. Hale have one major difference - the baby.
Ingles' handwritten manuscript, based upon conversations with his mother, never mentions a child born on the trail.
Hale says in ``Trans-Allegheny Pioneers'' that he learned of the baby from a brief account of Mary's captivity by Mrs. John Floyd, a neighbor of Mary's at Draper's Meadow.
``It is probable that she received the facts related, from Mrs. Ingles direct,'' writes Hale.
Mrs. Floyd's account was written about 1835 - 20 years after Mary died.
John Ingles' account of his mother's captivity and escape is preserved in the University of Virginia library. In 1969, Roberta Ingles Steele and her brother, Andrew Lewis Ingles, edited and published an annotated version of the manuscript, under the title ``Escape from Indian Captivity.''
Who was who
MARY DRAPER INGLES - Born in Philadelphia in 1732. She and William Ingles were married at Draper's Meadow in 1750. Little is known about her appearance other than great-grandson John P. Hale's description of her as athletic and strong. Lord Henry Hamilton, British governor of the Northwest Territories, was being taken to Williamsburg in 1779 as a Revolutionary War POW when the party stopped for the night at the Ingles home near present-day Radford. In his journal, Hamilton writes of Mary: ``Terror and distress [from her ordeal] had left so deep an impression on her mind that she appeared absorbed in a deep melancholy.'' At the time, Mary was 47 and ``graying,'' according to Hamilton. Mary and William had four other children after her return from captivity. Mary died in 1815 at the age of 83 after enjoying what son John Ingles described as ``an extraordinary portion of good health after all her tryals & defiqualteys.'' According to Hale, she always referred to the hours before she was found as the most terrible day of her life. Mary's son John built a house for her after William died. But Mary would walk down the hill to her 14-by-16-foot cabin to spend the night. She believed the windowless cabin - built by William in 1758 - was more secure, family members said.
OLD DUTCH WOMAN - Mary appealed to the men who found her to go look for Mrs. Stump. They initially refused because of the Old Dutch Woman's behavior toward Mary. With more pleas from Mary, Adam Harmon and sons relented and found the woman a few days later. She had had more luck than Mary, finding a hastily abandoned hunters' camp that had a kettle of meat cooking over a fire. Upon seeing each other again, the two women ``fell upon each other's necks and wept, and all was reconciliation and peace,'' Hale writes. Historians believe the Old Dutch Woman eventually found transportation back to her home in Pennsylvania. She was never heard of again in the New River settlements.
THOMAS INGLES - Rescued by his father after 18 years in Indian captivity, he had all but forgotten his native tongue. Thomas' own wife (Elenor) and three children were kidnapped by the Shawnee in 1781. The local militia caught up with them the next day. The Indians killed two of the children and an infant girl, Rhoda, escaped only when Elenor Ingles fell on her after she was clubbed in the head. Elenor recovered.
GEORGE INGLES - Died in Indian captivity.
BETTIE DRAPER - Ransomed from the Shawnee in 1761. Reunited with her husband.
WILLIAM INGLES - Died in 1782 at age 53. He operated a tavern and ferry near present-day Radford.
by CNB