Free A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit

for whites to accept or, often, even to imagine is that some captives preferred native culture. Looking back, the cultures of Cabeza de Vaca’s Spaniards and Eunice Williams’s family look more forbidding, if no less remote, than the indigenous cultures among which they came to live. There is something obdurate, obsessive, inflexible about them, as hard and angular as conquistadors’ armor, as dreary as Puritan theology.
    Some of this is evident in Stephen Williams’s refusal to regard her as anything other than a tragedy, a captive, a person waiting to return, to understand that she had become someone else. The word lost in this context has many shades. The captive is at first literally lost, taken into terra incognita. And unless that captive is redeemed, he or more frequently she remains lost to the people who were left behind, and thus the language of lostness is often used to describe the person as lost the way that a possession is lost—a lost umbrella, lost keys—without recognizing that he or more commonly she may well have ceased either to be a captive or to be lost. But the word lost has spiritual implications, as in the line of the penitent slave trader’s hymn “I once was lost but now am found”; the person taken among the heathen was commonly imagined to be spiritually lost, estranged from Christianity and civilization. Thus, whatever the condition of the former captives, they were forever imagined as lost. But they did not always imagine themselves that way, and it seems that the captives had in a sense to lose their past to join the present, and this abandonment of memory, of old ties, is the steep cost of adaptation.
    Mary Jemison, who was captured with her family in Pennsylvania in 1758, told her story to a scribe, and so her voice survives as Williams’s does not. There was a raid on her parents’ frontier farm when she was about fifteen. An Indian followed them with a lash, forcing the children to maintain the pace. They were marched, kept without food and water for days, and then taken to “the border of a dark and dismal swamp.” There she and a little boy were given moccasins, signs that their journey would continue, while the other captives, including her parents and siblings, were killed “and mangled in the most shocking manner.” Like Eunice Williams, she was adopted. She was to replace a brother who had died, and the two Seneca women—“kind good natured women; peaceable and mild in their dispositions”—to whom she was given she referred to as sisters ever after. The trauma of captivity, of the murder of family members, and a sudden new life among another culture and another language must have been considerable, but adapting to it all was a matter of survival, and these child captives survived and then flourished in their new lives. The rupture must have been as sudden and violent as birth.
    More than a year later, the Senecas among whom she lived brought her along on a visit to Fort Pitt (the future Pittsburgh), where the whites took such an interest in her that her sisters “hurried me into their canoe and recrossed the river” and rowed the long journey home without stopping. “The sight of white people who could speak English inspired me with an unspeakable anxiety to go home with them, and share in the blessings of civilization. My sudden departure and escape from them, seemed like a second captivity, and for a long time I brooded the thought of my miserable situation with almost as much sorrow and dejection as I had done those of my first sufferings. Time, the destroyer of every affection, wore away my unpleasant feelings, and I became as contented as before. We tended our cornfields through the summer. . . .” She married, she bore a child, she lost a husband, and by that time she was at home among the Seneca.
    Once again the possibility of returning to the white community appeared when a Dutchman began stalking her in hope of capturing her and turning her in for a