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It was on the frontier, where “civilized” men and women confronted the “wilderness,” that Europeans first became Americans—or so authorities from Frederick Jackson Turner to Theodore Roosevelt claimed. But as the frontier disappeared, Americans believed they needed a new mechanism for fixing their collective identity; and they found it, historian Molly K. Varley suggests, in tales of white Americans held captive by Indians. For Americans in the Progressive Era (1890–1916) these stories of Indian captivity seemed to prove that the violence of national expansion had been justified, that citizens’ individual suffering had been heroic, and that settlers’ contact with Indians and ...
Forsaking their lives in Rutland Vermont, Nathan Perry and his young family journeyed to the Genesee River in far western New York, the heart of the Great Western Wilderness, beyond the limits of civilized America. By autumn 1790, they had built a primitive cabin, their new home surrounded by a vast primeval forest populated by thousands of truculent Seneca natives who resented their presence. So began the Nathan Perry family’s many long years as trailblazing frontiersmen in the wilds of western New York and later in Ohio, where they “went native,” befriending their tribal neighbors, adopting their habits out of convenience and necessity. As the 18th century wound down, Nathan Perry fo...
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