The Captive

A colonial soldier—not James Travis!—makes his escape in an illustration from "The Pictorial History of King Philip's War," published in 1853.

James Travis may have endured the most harrowing experience of any ancestor who survived King Philip’s War. Or maybe he didn’t. Not knowing didn’t stop the first Travis family genealogist from sharing the story in all its dramatic details, and it’s not going to stop me from repeating it here either. 

“The tradition runs thus,” begins the genealogist, Nathan Hagar Daniels, writing in 1903. Its subject, James Travis, is our second-generation ancestor on my dad’s side. He and his wife, Mercy Pearse, had three children. The story opens in the spring or early summer of 1676, in the midst of war. Here’s how the genealogist told it.

The family at this time lived in or near Barre, Mass., which was then on the frontier. The few families who lived in the neighborhood were kept constantly on the watch to guard against the Indians. The men, as a precautionary measure, carried their guns slung upon their backs, when laboring in the field. One day while James was at work with two other men, they were surrounded, surprised and captured by Indians, and he was hurried off at a tremendous pace. The Indians forced him to travel as rapidly as possible for about forty miles, till they were safe from all pursuit, when, after going a short distance further, they came to their camp. For some unknown reason, instead of burning him at the stake, as it was customary to do with captives, his life was spared.

Soon afterward his life was again in danger; a chieftain’s daughter who was to be married, wished a human sacrifice, and all the prisoners were brought out for inspection, he among the number. There were nineteen in all, and they passed before this chieftain’s daughter, who selected the one who was to be sacrificed. During this ordeal the captive was extremely nervous, and when he came to pass before her he trembled for his life. Fortunately for him, the one chosen was an Englishman only about nineteen years old. Such a scream as he gave, this ancestor said he had never heard before.

The Indians seemed to take quite a liking to this prisoner and his life was spared, although he was carefully watched. He was naturally gifted with great strength and endurance, and was also an excellent shot. He hunted, raced, and fired at a mark with his captors, being very careful never to excel in any of their sports, though being able to do so. After living with them about a year they wished him to take a squaw and settle among them, to all of which he gave a quick consent. A wigwam was built for him, a belt of wampum was given him, and a grand jubilee was prepared, but the night before, seeing what he thought to be a favorable opportunity to escape, he started, but was caught the next forenoon and brought back to camp and sentenced to death. At night he was bound and placed in a wigwam between two guards. The guards slept, one on each side. In the early evening he succeeded in freeing one hand and one foot, but before he was able to do more, one of the guards awoke and got up for a smoke; the captive all this time was, apparently, asleep. The guard attempted to taunt him by asking him how he would like fire for breakfast; he was too sound asleep to hear. By and by the guard laid down and went to sleep, when, after much painful labor he succeeded in freeing himself and getting outside the wigwam. It was snowing lightly and there was a little snow on the ground. He fastened his moccasins on, hind-side before, and started. He had gone but a short distance when he came to a spot where a squaw and her papooses were sleeping under a blanket spread on some bushes; he took the blanket and spread it on one of the horses fastened near-by and rode hard all night.

At daylight he dismounted and set the horse on a canter, retraced some of the ground he had traveled, and then climbed up into the top of an immense pine tree, where he was entirely concealed by the branches, and there he spent the day. While there the Indians passed beneath several times, and he heard them tell what they would do with him if they caught him. At dark he started and traveled as far as he could, and toward daybreak he crept under some logs left by the Indians, and spent the day there. While there some of the Indians crossed the pile of logs without looking for him. At night he started again, and traveled as far as he was able.

The next night while walking in a nearly famished condition across a bog, he fell into the mud nearly up to his neck, and being so weak from fasting, was not able to extricate himself for some time, but at last by the aid of some bushes he succeeded in climbing upon a rock. There he found three crawfishes which he devoured, and after a rest, started on. It was his good fortune, soon after, to find the nest of a wild turkey, filled with eggs. He ate as many as he wanted and rested. When he again started he took the remaining eggs with him. He was now nearly at the settlement. As he approached his home his children were playing near the house, and seeing him coming, ran into the house, saying an Indian was coming. The mother was courageous, and thought if there was but one she was not afraid, so she went to the door to see what he wanted. The children were much surprised to see their mother throw her arms around his neck and kiss him, but not until soap and water had done their work did they recognize their father.

Wow! But what are we to make of this?

The story was passed from generation to generation, and the genealogist presented it as nothing more than that—a story—although he noted that it had at least “an element of truth for its foundation.” By that he meant that James was indeed taken prisoner; his name appears on a list that says he was captured by Indians in 1676 and held in New York for two years. Let me be clear: The simple fact of being captured is harrowing enough. We can imagine his rage and terror, his wife's anguish, his children's tears; would they ever see him again?

What’s not clear is whether he escaped, as the family tale has it, or was ransomed instead, freed in exchange for a payment. The list on which his name appears was issued as part of a fundraising effort—but that doesn't mean he didn't escape just the same.

I never heard this story growing up, so it didn’t pass down my dad’s branch of the family tree. But it persisted for 240 years of being told and retold, an exercise in remembrance that probably reveals more about James’s descendants than it does about James himself. 

But let’s start with this: what do we know for sure about James Travis?

First, that he was the product of what we’d call a broken home, born in 1645 in Newbury, Massachusetts, the only son of our earliest Travis ancestors, Henry and Bridgett, the Puritan couple whose marriage failed after Bridgett was caught in a dalliance with another man. Henry returned to England when James was three, never to be heard from again; he left behind a will in which he gave his home and land to James when he turned twelve—a will that Bridgett successfully contested.

As our second-generation ancestor on my dad’s side, James Travis was the counterpart of Jonas Fairbanks on my mom’s. Jonas, you’ll remember, died defending his home and family from Indian raiders in February of 1676. Unlike Jonas, who stayed put once he married, James moved around, for reasons unknown—following opportunities, I suppose. He married Mercy Pearse in Gloucester in 1667, on the Massachusetts seacoast north of Boston; he became a founding settler of Brookfield, sixty miles inland, where two of their three children were born; and the family tale has them living in or near Barre, another frontier town fifteen miles north of Brookfield, at the time he was captured.

That probably happened during planting season in the spring of 1676, when James would have been working his fields, isolated and vulnerable. It couldn’t have happened earlier. Between February and April James served as a soldier in the same campaign as Jonathan Fairbanks, the early uncle who attempted to enslave an Indian girl he was sent to rescue. That campaign took James back to Brookfield, where it fizzled out. James was among the majority of soldiers who were sent home—a stroke of good fortune for him, because it meant he did not remain with the troops who attacked an unsuspecting Indian village at dawn one day in May, slaughtering dozens of women and children, only then to be chased down and, in dozens of cases, slaughtered themselves.

“Tradition” is how Nathan Hagar Daniels, the family genealogist, titled his retelling of James’s captivity story. Nathan, a family member, was born in 1833. I read his title as the honest acknowledgement of a diligent researcher who heard the story as a child from Travises many generations removed from James’s time. It’s the only story like it he tells in one hundred and thirty pages of births, deaths, and documented details. When it came time for him to publish his book, it seems that he couldn’t resist telling the story again himself.

The telling and retelling of any story over days, never mind generations, is sure to embellish it. To some degree, that’s all our family stories can be: games of telephone, reflecting what each generation of listeners chooses to hear as much as the underlying facts themselves. And there, I think, lies the essential lesson of this story, a tale that contrasts the savagery of Indians with James’s fortitude and guile and ends with a reassuring message: even two years living among Indians is nothing a good scrubbing can’t wash away.

The genealogist first heard this story as a child around 1840, about 170 years after King Philip’s War, at a time when desperate conflicts with Indians still consumed settlers, soldiers, and the land’s native people in the American West. He retold it in 1903, only thirteen years after the massacre of hundreds of Lakota Sioux by the U.S. Army at Wounded Knee effectively ended the violent conquest of America’s native people. Perhaps in the genealogist’s time, it remained easier to think of Indians as savages who would burn us at the stake if they had the chance, and nothing more. 

My telling of the story reflects my time and my values—a period of great and growing diversity, pushed to its own breaking point by resistance to these changes. I don’t see the family stories of conflict with Indians as matters of good and bad, light and darkness, cunning and savagery. I see centuries of tragedy in which everyone suffered, most of all America’s native people, and consequences we still struggle with today.

This is the last story I’ll tell about our family’s role in this conquest, but it’s not the last story in our Century of Violence. I’ll close next with the story of Asa Travis, James’s great-grandson, three generations closer in the long line of descendants that leads to my dad, to me, and to you. Asa was a poor and courageous farmer who—in a moment that has its own resonance in my time—joined in the act of rebellion against his government that we know as the American Revolution. And then—in a moment that resonates within me—Asa brought his family here to New Hampshire.