Slocum, Frances (1773–1847)

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Slocum, Frances (1773–1847)

American woman abducted and raised by Native Americans. Name variations: Maconaqua; Ma conaquah. Born on March 4, 1773, in Warwick, Rhode Island; died of pneumonia on March 9, 1847, in Indiana; daughter of Jonathan Slocum (a farmer) and Ruth (Tripp) Slocum; married a Delaware tribesman, in 1791 (divorced); married Shepancanah (a Miami chief), around 1794 (died 1832); children: daughters Kekesequa (b. 1800) and Ozahshinqua (b. 1809); two sons who died in childhood.

Frances Slocum was born in Warwick, Rhode Island, in 1773, the third daughter among ten children of Quaker farmers Jonathan Slocum and Ruth Tripp Slocum . On her father's side, she was descended from one of the country's first English settlers. During the Revolutionary War, when Frances was four years old, her family moved to the Wyoming Valley, settling in what is now Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. They were among a number of settlers, most of them pro-independence, who farmed lands spread out around the so-called Forty Fort. As the war went on, the Patriots in the area forced out those settlers who remained loyal to the king. A number of these Tory settlers banded together with other Tories and local tribes, and in the summer after the Slocums arrived this group attacked the valley, killing settlers and laying waste to farms and settlements. The settlers fled to Forty Fort, where, outnumbered two or three to one (sources vary) by the attackers, they fought desperately and were overwhelmed on July 3, 1778. Some two-thirds of the several hundred settlers were gruesomely killed by Native Americans and Tories in what is now known as the Wyoming Massacre, but the Slocum family, perhaps because of their friendship with local Indians, was spared. While most of the other survivors immediately left the valley, the Slocums, devout Quakers, remained. That November, however, one of the Slocum sons (without telling his parents) joined a punitory expedition against the Indians who had taken part in the massacre. In retaliation, a small group of Delaware tribesmen attacked the Slocums' home and captured a neighbor and five-year-old Frances.

A few weeks later, Jonathan Slocum was murdered. The neighbor who had been abducted with Frances managed to return home some years later, reporting that the little girl was still alive. At the end of the Revolutionary War, her brothers began searching for her, visiting Indian villages from Pennsylvania all the way west to Detroit without luck. Before her death in 1807, Ruth Slocum, who never got over the loss of her daughter, asked her remaining children to keep looking for Frances. Their search would last 59 years.

Slocum had spent the first night after her abduction near Abraham Creek in what is now Frances Slocum State Park in Pennsylvania. She was then taken to a village near Niagara Falls, where she was adopted by a Delaware couple whose daughter had recently died. Now called Weletawash, she lived with her new family on the Detroit River for a time before they moved to the Miami Indian town of Kekionga (now Fort Wayne, Indiana). Gradually she forgot how to speak English, and forgot the first name she had been given at birth. When she was about 19 years old, she was briefly married to a Delaware man, but the marriage ended when he decided to move farther west and she chose to stay in Indiana with her family.

Around 1794, Slocum married a Miami named Shepancanah and took the name of Maconaqua ("Little Bear"). The couple had four children, daughters Kekesequa and Ozahshinqua and two sons who died in childhood, and later moved near Indiana's Mississinewa River. Her husband eventually went deaf, forcing him to give up his position as war chief in their village. The family then relocated to a small settlement a few miles up the river which became known as Deaf Man's Village. Although her home became increasingly surrounded by white settlers, Slocum's heritage was not recognized by them, and she and her family lived peacefully, with her daughters remaining close by after their marriages. After her husband's death in 1832, Slocum, well respected within the Native American community, continued to manage their sizable farm on her own, raising cattle and some 100 horses.

In January 1835, George Ewing, a traveling fur trader who spoke the Miami language, noticed the lightness of Slocum's skin. Now elderly by the standards of the day, wanting to tell her story and assuming that the members of her birth family were dead (she had always feared they would take her away if they found her), Slocum told him of her background. She revealed what she remembered, including her father's name, that she had lived on the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania, and that her family had been Quakers. She requested that he not repeat her story until after she was dead, but a little while later Ewing sent a letter to the postmaster in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, seeking any Slocums in the area. His letter was published in a local paper in March 1837, and the story reached Joseph Slocum, one of her younger brothers, who notified another brother and a sister. That September, the siblings traveled to Slocum's village in Indiana, meeting her again after over half a century. The reunion, facilitated by two interpreters, was an uncomfortable one; Slocum initially did not believe their claim of blood ties, and thought they were trying to steal her land. (By this time, white settlers were already notorious for their greed for land.) Finally convinced of their sincerity, Slocum shared a meal with her siblings, but she refused to return East with them, wanting to remain near her daughters and grandchildren. As her story spread among white settlers, they began calling her "the White Rose of the Miamis."

In 1840, when the Miami agreed to relinquish the last of their land in Indiana, Slocum sought help from her white family members. They successfully petitioned Congress to allow her to remain on the land that had been granted to her daughters under an earlier treaty. (While it was Slocum's land, the government in Washington did not consider her a Native American, although it did consider her daughters Native Americans, and thus had conducted that previous treaty with them.) In 1846, then in her early 70s, she invited her nephew George Slocum and his family to join her and help run the farm. Slocum died of pneumonia the following year, and was buried beside her husband and two sons. A monument erected over her grave by some of her many descendants in 1900 was later relocated along the Mississinewa River, where it stands to this day, near Indiana's Frances Slocum State Park.