Barbara Leininger and Marie LeRoy were teenage girls living along Penns Creek in central Pennsylvania in 1755 when an Indian war party captured them and carried them off to western Pennsylvania. This occurred early in the French & Indian War. For several years, the teenagers lived as Delaware Indians. Sometimes they had little to eat, and " ... we were forced to live on acorns, roots, grass and bark," they said later.
After three years, they escaped from their captors and fled on foot across the forests of Ohio and Pennsylvania, eventually reaching the safety of the British fort at Pittsburgh.
The first-person narrative they dictated to a Philadelphia newspaper after their 1759 escape was one of many first-person documents that author John L. Moore uses to tell the true stories of real people in this non-fiction collection of articles that is part of the Frontier Pennsylvania Series.
Other accounts in the book tell how and why Native Americans took the scalps of their foes, kept written records of their wartime exploits, and employed fire as a weapon when hunting for deer.
The stories are set mainly in the valleys of the Delaware, Juniata, Lehigh, Ohio and Susquehanna rivers.
WHAT OTHERS SAY:
"The people of 18th century frontier Pennsylvania - settlers, soldiers, and Indians alike - march across these pages in a human drama that we can understand, but more importantly feel almost 300 years later. Moore lets the actors describe themselves in their own words: the misunderstandings, conflicts, family tragedies, deaths, diseases, hunger, wars, and the simply mundane business of their everyday lives. Our storyteller takes just as much care in describing the Indians' daily slog, quarrels, family life, customs and mores as he does their sometimes friends - and sometimes rivals - the European settlers. Both groups formed intertwined threads in a single frontier web.
"When he describes a famous campaign in the French & Indian War, Moore deftly uses his sources to make General Braddock's doomed expedition come to life. Incidents of friendly fire, frightened European soldiers used to fighting in open spaces but never in woods, slow progress as an army builds a road (!) into the mountains - mile by mile - are all described as if patiently carved into oak to make woodcut prints."
Thomas J. Brucia, Houston, Texas.
Bibliophile, outdoorsman and book reviewer
