Mary Jemison

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Dressing up Mary Jemison as Deh-he-wä-mis

Mary Jemison , with Indian name Deh-he-wä-mis (* 1742/1743, † September 19, 1833 in the Buffalo Creek Reservation in the middle of Erie County , New York ), was an American settler who was about twelve years old was kidnapped by the Seneca , fully immersed in the culture of the Indians and later became a mediator between the Indians and the white settlers.

Life

Early life

Mary Jemison was born on board the ship Mary William during the crossing from Ireland to the United States around 1742/1743 as the sixth child of Scottish-Irish parents Thomas and Jane Jemison. The family settled on a farm near Gettysburg , Pennsylvania .

With the Seneca in Ohio

When she was twelve years old, the farm was attacked by the Shawnee who fought on the side of the British in the Seven Years' War in the Iroquois Union . The two eldest sons escaped, but Mary was captured with her parents and three other siblings. She and a neighborhood boy were separated because they were the right age for adoption. The parents and their siblings were killed and scalped . Mary Jemison was brought to Fort Duquesne, now Fort Pitt , part of what is now Pittsburgh, and there she was bought by Seneca. They brought them down the Ohio River in a canoe to their village. There she was adopted by two Seneca sisters who had recently lost their brother. From the sisters she got her new name Deh-he-wä-mis , also Dickewamis , Dehgewanus or Dehgewanus (English: Two Falling Voices , German: Two Falling Voices ).

Deh-he-wä-mis learned the Seneca language within a year. Some time later another tribe settled nearby, and Deh-he-wä-mis married a Delaware named Sheninjee in 1760 . She had two children from him. The first child, a daughter, died shortly after birth in about 1761. After this loss, she was depressed, but learned from Sheninjee to farm, cook and sew. The Seneca culture was shaped by mutual respect, so Deh-he-wä-mis had more rights than most other women in white America. A few years later she gave birth to her second child, a son. She named him Thomas after her father.

Relocation to New York

As Sheninjee and Deh-he-wä-mis feared towards the end of the Seven Years' War that the prisoners would have to be returned after the end of the war and would therefore have to separate, they set out on a 700 mile journey along the Genesee River to their homeland Sheninjee, into the Sehgahunda Valley in New York. Deh-he-wä-mis reached the Sheninjee family with their son, but without Sheninjee. He had separated from the family to hunt, fell ill and died. The news of his death reached her through a trader in the summer of the following year. But her husband's family took her in like a daughter.

In Little Beards Town, near what is now Cuylerville in the Seneca heartland, her husband's family built a new home for them. Two or three years later she married her second husband, a warrior named Hiokatoo. She later said of him: "He was kind and tender, but as a warrior he was unparalleled for his cruelty". With him she had six children, whom she named after the members of her family according to the Scottish-Irish tradition. She named the girls Jane, Nancy, Betsey, and Polly and the boys John and Jesse.

Since the Seneca fought on the side of the British in the Revolutionary War, they became the target of the American army. In 1779, George Washington's army attacked Little Beards Town. The Seneca hoped to stop the attack with an ambush, but the soldiers reached the Genesse valley and burned houses and fields. The Seneca fled into the forest. Deh-he-wä-mis fled south with their children and found shelter with runaway slaves. There she found Hiokatoo and they rebuilt their lives.

White settlers settled in the valley after the American War of Independence and changed Seneca life. Mary Jemison also made friends with the white settlers in the neighborhood and her Native American family encouraged her to go and live with them. However, she did not want this because she feared that her children would not be accepted because they were half of Indian descent. The Seneca donated a piece of land to her for her loyalty. The family was hit by further blows of fate. Her son John used a tomahawk to drunk to death her eldest son Thomas and years later he shot and killed the youngest son Jesse. Their daughter Jane died at the age of 15 years prior to this event. After fifty years of marriage, Hiokatoo died. Three daughters survived the mother. All three of these daughters died within three months in 1839.

Late life and death

Statue of Mary Jemison at St. Ignatius Loyola Catholic Church in Adams County, Pennsylvania

At the age of 80, she traveled to Castile, New York with a white neighbor she trusted. There she met James Seaver, who wrote her memoirs because she could not write herself. Together with Seyver, he produced one of the most extensive works on the capture of a white woman by the Indians. When the Seneca had to leave their country in 1825 and settled on the Indian reservation at Buffalo Creek, they were able to negotiate that they could stay on their land with their three daughters. However, she very quickly missed the people with whom she had lived for so long, so that in 1831 she sold her land and also moved to the reservation. She died there in 1833. Jemison was also called The White Woman of the Genesee .

A reburial took place in 1874 when she was buried near her former home on Lake Genesee. A bronze statue was erected there in her honor in 1910. This statue shows Mary Jemison, the baby Thomas on her back, on her way along the Genesee. Another statue was erected by a Catholic priest in 1923 near the site where she was captured.

Her biography A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison , written by James Seaver in 1824, was printed in 22 editions. Even today, her story is taken up by many authors and dealt with in literature.

Trivia

A passenger boat on the Erie Canal was named after her.

biography

Web links

Commons : Mary Jemison  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f Glimpses of the Past, Mary Jemison
  2. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j Pennsylvania Center for the Book ( Memento of the original from May 24, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Julia L. Dahl's biography of Mary Jemison @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / pabook.libraries.psu.edu
  3. ↑ D & C Mary Jemison soon to sail out of Rochester by Justin Murphy, January 5, 2014
personal data
SURNAME Jemison, Mary
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Deh-he-wä-mis; Dickewamis; Dehgewanus; Dehgewanus; The White Woman of the Genesee
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American settler who was adopted by the Seneca as a teenager
DATE OF BIRTH 1742 or 1743
PLACE OF BIRTH Ship Mary William
DATE OF DEATH September 19, 1833
Place of death Buffalo Creek Reservation in the center of Erie County , New York