Follow the River: A Novel by James Alexander Thom (English) Mass Market Paperbac

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Mary Ingles was twenty-three, married, and pregnant, when Shawnee Indians invaded her peaceful Virginia settlement, killed the men and women, then took her captive. For months, she lived with them, unbroken, until she escaped, and followed a thousand mile trail to freedom—an extraordinary story of a pioneer woman who risked her life to return to her people.

FORMATMass Market Paperback LANGUAGEEnglish CONDITIONBrand New Publisher Description

NATIONAL BESTSELLER - "It takes a rare individual not only to see that history can live, but also to make it live for others. James Thom has that gift."--The Indianapolis News Mary Ingles was twenty-three, happily married, and pregnant with her third child when Shawnee Indians invaded her peaceful Virginia settlement in 1755 and kidnapped her, leaving behind a bloody massacre. For months they held her captive. But nothing could imprison her spirit. With the rushing Ohio River as her guide, Mary Ingles walked one thousand miles through an untamed wilderness no white woman had ever seen. Her story lives on--extraordinary testimony to the indomitable strength of one pioneer woman who risked her life to return to her own people.

Back Cover

WOMAN OF COURAGE Mary Ingles was twenty-three, happily married, and pregnant with her third child when Shawnee Indians invaded her peaceful Virginia settlement in 1755 and kidnapped her, leaving behind a bloody massacre. For months they held her captive. But nothing could imprison her spirit. With the rushing Ohio River as her guide, Mary Ingles walked one thousand miles through an untamed wilderness no white woman had ever seen. Her story lives on-extraordinary testimony to the indomitable strength of one pioneer woman who risked her life to return to her own people.

Author Biography

James Alexander Thom was formerly a U.S. Marine, a newspaper and magazine editor, and a member of the faculty at the Indiana University Journalism School. He is the acclaimed author of "Follow the River"; "Long Knife"; "From Sea to Shining Sea"; "Panther in the Sky," for which he won the prestigious Western Writers of America Spur Award for best historical novel; "The Children of First Man"; "The Red Heart"; and "Sign-Talker," He lives in the Indiana hill country near Bloomington with his wife, Dark Rain, of the Shawnee Nation, United Remnant Band. Dark Rain is a member of the National Council

Kirkus US Review

Fleshed out from historical accounts and records, this is a strong novelization of a true woman-versus-nature ordeal. In 1755 Mary Draper Ingles, 23, pregnant mother of two, is kidnapped by Shawnees following their massacre of Mary's West Virginia settlement - a vivid bloodletting. She, her two sons, and sister-in-law Bettie are taken downstream on Sinking Creek - as Mary gives birth to a daughter, then next morning must ride horseback or be slaughtered. (Almost bleeding to death, she nonetheless keeps a cheerful face for the Indians, who respect strength.) They spend 17 days at a salt lick, killing and salting game for winter, then push on to the great O-y-o (Ohio) River and follow that until reaching the Shawnee village - where prisoners are stripped and made to run a gauntlet of whippers before being adopted by Indian families. Mary has a sewing basket and goes into shirtmaking for profit. But when the Shawnee chief asks for her hand, she turns him down; so he sells her to a pair of French traders to work in their store, keeping her sons to raise as braves. And when the traders take Mary and old Dutch woman Ghetel to a second lick to collect salt, Mary decides to abandon her baby to a squaw and strike out for home with Ghetel. They sneak off and endure ever greater starvation for 43 days as they trek about 600 miles, following the rivers back to Mary's settlement. . . while her husband rides into the Cherokee nation and tries to effect her ransom. The two women fail at fishing and hunting, are skin and bone in the fruitless fall, vomiting plant fibers, chewing a rotten doe's head or acorns and grubs. Then it's sleet, wolves, and fording deep streams. Ghetel becomes demented and hunts Mary to eat her. And finally: a crawl on skeletal hands and knees straight up a snowy stone 500-foot bank. . . and more banks beyond. More American Heritage than commercial romance, unusually convincing and often quite moving. (Kirkus Reviews)

Excerpt from Book

CHAPTER 1 Sunday, July 8, 1755 She shivered, despite the heat of the hearth, and glanced again toward the sunny rectangle of the cabin door. No one was there, not a shadow. But she felt that same uneasiness that had returned to her several times this morning: a sense that if she had looked a second sooner there would have been a figure in the doorway. It was not the nature of Mary Draper Ingles to be afraid in the daytime. Sometimes in the deep wilderness nights, when the wolves wailed and the owls conspired high on the Blue Ridge east of the valley, when the dying fire made shapes move on the ceiling and the restless sleeping children rustled their corn-shuck mattresses, Mary Ingles would feel frightened. But seldom was she fearful in bright daylight like this, when the valley was familiar and peaceful and the locusts unreeled their eternal dry shrills under the summer sun. Mary turned back to the cookfire. Its heat baked her sweaty face. The little black iron stewpot with the rabbit in it was almost bubbling over now. She pulled it across the iron arm a little, moving it away from the hottest coals, so that the stew might simmer the afternoon away and be at its tenderest when William came back up from the fields. The old clock at the far end of the room ticked slowly. She brushed a strand of sweat-damp auburn hair back away from her cheek. She braced her palms on her knees to help lift her weight from the low puncheon stool and stood up, wheezing with the effort. Her swollen belly, firm and turgid with life, tugged down at all the strong young muscles of her torso. She smoothed the faded homespun cloth of her dress down over the mound and cupped her palms underneath, a caress and an appraisal. It would be happening any day now; she could feel that. She paused there, looking through the sunny doorway, out at the lush meadows, over the dark green treetops, toward the ranks of somber Allegheny mountains marching away to the west where no one except Indians lived. This little group of cabins at Draper''s Meadows was deeper into the mountains than any other white community in Virginia. It was the first settlement west of what her husband Will called the Allegheny "divide." She and Will had been, indeed, the first white people wed on this wild side of the Blue Ridge. Five years ago, it had been: a pastoral wedding between the blue mountains with God seeming to breathe through the whole vast stillness of it. And they had lived prosperously and happily and in peace those five years. Their health was robust and both of their first two children had lived. The valley, fertile with limestone-rich soil where dense bluegrass grew and rippled, was irrigated by never-failing limestone springs, whose waters flowed down crystalline creeks into the lovely, twisting New River and thence out of their valley into the uncharted west. It was a place for health and high spirits, where one''s first look out the cabin door every morning made the heart swell up. So, surely her uneasiness of this morning would pass. Of course, Mary Ingles knew, a woman''s feelings are at their most unsettled, their most skittish, when she is full of the humors of childbearing. She tried to smile away her anxiety. Even William had made light of it this morning, as he often made light of women''s fears. This morning he had passed it off just that way, as the spookishness of a mother-to-be. "Must''ee go?" she had asked him after their Sunday morning prayers, when the valley had still been full of the shadow of the ridge. "I ... I be afraid, a wee bit. And William Ingles had hesitated here in this cabin door with his cradle scythe over one shoulder, a bag of hoecake and a watergourd over the other. He had never before heard Mary profess fear in the daytime. "Why afraid?" he had said then, with that joshing smile of his, looking down at her swollen middle. "When Tommy an'' Georgie come, y'' squzz ''em oot slick as a grape-pip. And your ma''s here to help. Bettie''s here, too, who wasna before. And if ''ee start birthin'', why, only send down for me, and y'' know I''ll come a-runnin'', Mary darlin''." So she had smiled him away down toward the grainfield, that great, dear, strong, hairy man whom she loved till her heart ached with the sweetness of loving, that man who kept her from being as fearful as she might have been here in the wilds with a lesser man. She had not tried to explain to him this morning that it was not the birthing she feared. Nor, really, was it anything else she could name. She had stood in the doorway and watched him join her brother Johnny Draper at the edge of the meadow, strong Johnny with his own scythe over his shoulder, and they both had turned to wave back at her as they disappeared--seemed to sink--below the rippling grass at the brow of the meadow. They would have been working four hours in the barley by now, she reckoned--scarcely ever pausing, shirtless, pouring sweat, probably singing to give a cadence to the sweep of their scythes. She knew how they looked working because she had always worked beside them. This was the first year she had not helped with the harvest; her term was too close. But she could envision them as clearly as if she were down there. Those two were durable men and could work all day long, even in this July sun. Her eye somehow went to William''s long rifle, which lay across its two pegs on the far wall, beside the grandfather clock, a powder horn and bullet bag hanging under it, and again she felt the foreboding. Should not he have carried the gun down to the fields with him, as he had done in the first few years? Lately he had simply dismissed it as extra weight. The Indians who had passed up and down through Draper''s Meadows since their arrival here in 1748 had never annoyed them nor given them cause for alarm. Usually they were parties from north of the distant O-y-o River, going down to raid their enemies, the Catawbas, who lived farther south. For centuries they had used the New River as their war road through the mountains. They had caves in its cliffs and canoes secreted in its tributaries. But even in their war paint, they had always been friendly with this little vanguard of white families here in the valley. They would always drink spring water offered them in gourd dippers, smacking their lips and smiling, apparently trying to dispel any uneasiness their war-painted faces and their bristling weaponry might be causing. Sometimes they would take bread that was offered to them, eat it while nodding in appreciation, and then stand and raise their hands in a peaceful salute and continue down the ridges. And then the white people who had remained hidden inside the cabins with their flintlocks cocked, ready for the first unfriendly move, would ease forward the hammers of their guns and exhale in relief, hang up the guns and come out to resume their work or to watch the savages fade into the woods. Only twice had Indians caused any mischief in this valley: in 1749 when a band had raided the cabin of Adam Harmon to steal furs, and in 1753 when another party had stolen skins from George Hoopaugh and Jacob Harmon and killed their barking dogs. Those were old and negligible incidents. So William Ingles had got out of the habit of taking his gun with him to the fields. "More sensible, I''d say, to leave it here for your peace o'' mind," he had joked to her once this summer. True, there was war in the land now, in distant places along the frontier, war against the French and their Indian allies. And once, a few months ago, a young Virginia lieutenant-colonel named Washington, a serious-looking giant of a fellow but a gentleman withal, had passed through this valley with a small escort of horsemen, talking to Colonel James Patton, the valley''s militia leader, about what was happening in the distant conflict. Colonel Washington had advised Patton to have his people on their guard for armed Indian bands with Frenchmen among them. But the people of Draper''s Meadows had seen no Frenchmen, and only friendly Indians; and the weeks had rolled on, and the plantings had been do≠ the crops had grown, and edibles from the woods had been gathered and preserved, and Bettie Draper''s infant son had learned to crawl, and Mary Ingles'' baby had made movements inside her; those were the main concerns of the people in this isolated valley where war surely had no reason to come. Their King was two thousand miles away in London Town and surely gave no more thought to these distant subjects of his than they gave to him. If he was at war with France, how could it affect them here in this valley His Majesty had never even heard of?

Details ISBN0345338545 Author James Alexander Thom Short Title FOLLOW THE RIVER Pages 416 Publisher Ballantine Books Language English ISBN-10 0345338545 ISBN-13 9780345338549 Media Book Format Mass Market Paperback DEWEY FIC Year 1986 Publication Date 1986-11-30 Imprint Ballantine Books Inc. Place of Publication New York Country of Publication United States Residence Bloomington, IN, US Subtitle A Novel DOI 10.1604/9780345338549 Audience General/Trade UK Release Date 1986-11-12 We've got this

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