Taken by the Shawnee

"A masterpiece of women’s frontier experience!" —KATHY SCHULZ, author of The Underground Railroad in Ohio "This is an amazing book, and I couldn’t stop reading it." —JOAN SILBER, PEN/Faulkner and National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of Secrets of Happiness and Improvement "An awesome account of female survival at a horrific time." —BOOKLIST A most unusual portrait of early America based on a rare family document, in which a young mother’s years in captivity with the Shawnee prove to be the best years of her life. It's 1779 and a young white woman named Margaret Erskine is venturing west from Virginia, on horseback, with her baby daughter and the rest of her family. She has no experience of Indians, and has absorbed most of the prejudices of her time, but she is open-minded, hardy, and mentally strong, a trait common to most of her female descendants—Sallie Bingham's ancestors. Bingham had heard Margaret's story since she was a child but didn't see the fifteen pages