Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (31 page)

The rape of Indian women by white men and the rape of white women by Indians was a casual by-product of the move westward and The Great Frontier. Although white men talked freely at the time of the rape of white women-and often used these stories as an inflammatory excuse for their own behavior-the women were reti cent. Firsthand narratives of captivity by abducted females that were published and widely circulated in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were carefully edited for modesty. Neverthe less, explicit, personal accounts of rape have found their way into history. But in this white man's country, insults to Indian women

ate
largely lost. The rape of a "squaw" by white men was not deemed

important. The Indian woman gave her testimony to no one; it was never solicited, except perhaps orally within her tribe. Testaments comparable to those that white abolitionists took from black slaves do not exist for the Indian. Any documentation of the rape of white and Indian women at the hands of their enemy must be lopsided for this reason.

The first full-length narrative of captivity to become a popular success in its time was that of Mary Rowlandson, the "goodwife" of the first ordained minister of Lancaster, Massachusetts. She was taken captive in 1676, the sole adult survivor of a massacre of more than forty persons. Mrs. Rowlandson, as befitting her station,

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sprinkled her story with quotes from the Scriptures and plentiful thanks to the power of God for her divine deliverance, and her writing style became a model for many of the narratives that followed. Toward the end of her story, Mrs. Rowlandson made the following declaration:

I have been in the midst of those roaring lions and savage bears that feared neither God nor man nor the devil by night and day, alone and in company, sleeping all sorts together, and yet no one of them ever offered the least abuse of unchastity to me in word or action. Though some are ready to say I speak it for my own credit, I speak it in the presence of God, and to his glory.

Mrs. Rowlandson's case was not atypical. Isabella McCoy, captured by the St. Francis Indians in
1747,
also averred that she had not been raped. The anonymous narrator of the battles of Trenton and Princeton, quoted in the previous chapter, claimed that British abuse of women had been "far Worse in this Respect than an Indian War, for I Never heard nor read of their Ravishing of Women . . ." Another anonymous author, who penned A Narrative of
the
Capture of
Certain
Americans at Westmoreland
(
780),
saw fit to comment, "I don't remember to have heard an instance of these savages offering to violate the chastity of any of the fair sex who have fallen into their hands." He offered as reason, "This is principally owing to a natural inappetency in their con stitution."

Frederick Drimmer, who edited a collection of captivity narra tives, wrote, "Anyone reading early accounts of captivity among the Indians is struck by the fact that female prisoners do not appear to have been abused by the Indians in the eastern section of the country." He presents a blanket summation from General James Clinton, who participated in a punitive expedition against the Iroquois in New York in
i
799: "Bad as the savages are, they never violate the chastity of any women their prisoners."

Clinton and the anonymous Westmoreland author were writing of the Iroquois, a most remarkable nation whose structure was based on a matrilineal foundation in which women played an important political role, unlike most other Indian tribes and unlike existing white civilization. This factor may help explain the "natu ral inappetency." Also, as Drimmer points out,
"It
was a custom

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AGAINST OUR WILL

for the braves to make elaborate preparations before going on the warpath, and these included the practice of continence and rites of purification. To abuse a female captive would have weakened the Indians' 'medicine.' "

To this analysis we must add another factor: the natural reluctance on the part of women to admit that sexual abuse has occurred. The common experience of most female captives was to live as an Indian wife for the duration of their captivity. Such was the experience of Mary Jemison, the White Woman of the Gene see, who was assigned a husband when she came of age. The equation of "to live as Indian wife" with rape is a matter of delicate interpretation, dependent in part on the length of captiv ity. In any event, the woman had no say in the matter, and "the fate worse than death" could remain a secret if the woman denied it. An admission of sexual use after rescue would bring ridicule and sniggerings from the white society to which she was returned, in addition to rejection as a fitting, chaste partner by husband or future spouse. Female captives were closely scrutinized af ter rescue for signs of moral degradation.

Love relationships, such as Mary Jemison's, or at least rela tionships of tolerable accommodation, certainly did occur between captor and captive, and early stories of Indian captivity are dotted with cases of whites, both male and female ( and especially chil dren ), who preferred to remain with their new relations af ter a rescue. In the case of the adult white woman, to replace a relatively secure status as Indian wife with a questionable future in white society as a "defiled" woman could be reason enough to choose to remain with the Indians. "Some women who had been delivered up af terwards found means to escape and run back to the Indian towns," wrote Colonel Henry Bouquet at the close of Pontiac's War in Ohio in
i
764. "Some who could not make their escape clung to their savage acquainta nce at parting, and continued many days in bitter lamentation, even refusing sustenance."

But these touching cases occurred less and less as the white man pushed westward with increasing violence, and the Indian, in retreat, responded in kind. "From all history and tradition, it would appear that neither seduction, prostitution, nor rape was known in the calendar of crimes of this rude savage race, until the females were contaminated by the embrace of civilized men,"

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wrote historian Ebenezer Mix in
i
842. Rape shrouded in the polite language of "insult," "outrage," and "submission," or the euphe mism, "he treated me as his wife," began to make an appearance in the later narratives of white female captives, and male captives who lived to tell the tale offered succinct commentary on the treatment of the female captives that they saw.

The enterprising Abbie Gardner-Sharp twenty-eight years after the fact wrote and published a lengthy narrative of her three months' captivity among the Sioux in Iowa when she was thirteen years old. Young Abbie and three adult white women, Mrs. Thatcher, Mrs. Marble and Mrs. Noble, were the sole survivors of the Spirit Lake Massacre, a bloody ambush on a settlement of pioneer families in March of i857. Abbie and Mrs. Noble were sold by their captors to a band of Yanktons. Abbie writes nothing of her own sexual abuse, or lack of it, during captivity, except by implication in her story of the death of Mrs. Noble.

One evening as she and Mrs. Noble were preparing to go to sleep, a son of Chief Inkpaduta by the name of Roaring Cloud came into their tepee and "ordered Mrs. Noble out." This was highly irregular behavior. By Indian custom, the two women be longed to the master of the tepee, an old Yankton warrior with only one leg, but the son of the chief apparently felt he had privileges.· Abbie records:

I told her she had better, as I feared he would kill her if she did not. But still she refused. Mrs. Noble was the only one of us who ever dared to refuse obedience to our masters. Naturally of an inde pendent nature, and conscious of her superiority to her masters in everything except brute force, it was hard for her to submit to their arbitrary and inhuman mandates. Frequently before, she had refused obedience, but in the end was always compelled to submit . . . No sooner did she positively refuse to comply with Roaring Cloud's demand, than, seizing her by the arm with one hand, and a great stick of wood . . . in the other, he dragged her from the tent.

Roaring Cloud dealt Mrs. Noble three blows that killed her while Abbie trembled in the tent, "expecting he would return to serve me in the same manner." But the son of Inkpaduta came back to the tent, "washed his bloody hands, had a few high words with the Yankton, and lay down to sleep."

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The narrative of spirited Fanny Kelly, captured by the Oglala Sioux in South Dakota in 1864 and later traded to the Blackfoot Sioux who traded her back to the whites, is blithely free of any hint of sexual use by her captors, although she describes with apparent innocence the several braves who went out of their way to do her favors. An altogether different version of Mrs. Kelly's captivity from a male Indian point of view-is told in Stanley Vestal's
Sitting BuII,
a history of the Sioux leader gathered from the big chief's descendants. In the Indian version the white woman was plainly "used as a wife." Fanny Kelly may be forgiven for her sins of omission. Vestal's book was published seventy years af ter Mrs. Kelly's captivity and still he could not resist some between-us-boys jokes surrounding her predicament and her given name of Fanny.