It Happened Here -- The Captivity Narratives, Part II

In life --and it seems-- especially in wartime, chance often plays a tremendous role.  Young Frederick Schermerhorn would never have guessed that a simple errand of going to fetch his brother to help him drive some of his family's sheep to market would result in an Indian captivity and his forced induction into a Tory regiment that would last four years.

Cemetery Rd., Round Top

Frederick's brother, Jacob, lived with his wife and children on his wife's parents' farm. For five summers the storm of war threatened off in the distance, around the cabin of Johannes Strope (aka Johann Heinrich Straub/Straup). It had rumbled around like a Catskill Mountain thunderstorm above his farm, and flashed like heat lighting on the horizon. Some of his neighbors had joined the rebel militia and fought at Saratoga three summers before; some joined the Sullivan expedition that destroyed Indian settlements through out Iroquois territory last summer and many continued in local militia units like the Esopus Rangers who patrolled the area to counter Indian/Tory raiders. Some of his other neighbors had fled with Tories from the Mohawk valley to link up with the British at Fort Niagara. Rumors persisted that some local Tories had even fled into the heights of the Catskills and were acting as guides to raiding parties when they descended upon outlying farms. But because locally, Johannes Strope was known as a "King’s Man", or a Tory, himself, he wasn’t particularly concerned for his own and his family’s safety, and at age 69 he mainly wanted to be left alone to work his little farm. 

When the war finally came to Strope’s homestead it didn’t come with drums beating and fifes shrilling; it didn’t come with proclamations of Independence or pleas to support the colonists’ King and Sovereign Lord; there were no long files of scarlet-coated British regulars. Instead it came in the form of three or four solitary Indians looking for “Bastayon”, Strope’s adult son. Bastian, (short for Sebastian) had moved with his wife around 1773 to Northumberland, Bradford Co. Pennsylvania where many Palatine Germans, (eventually to be known as the Pennsylvania “Dutch”) had settled. On the Susquehanna River he, his wife and three children had been picked up (captured?) by the Indians and he had somehow tricked the Indians.  Perhaps he talked his way to freedom and Frederick Schermerhorn speculated he had made off with a valuable musket, shot and powder of theirs, though Bastian’s wife and children remained with the Indians and were taken to Canada. At any rate, the Indians were furious at him and were quite literally looking to take his scalp! 

Frederick Schermerhorn, age 17, had come to the Strope’s cabin the day before to get his brother Jacob’s help to drive some of his family’s sheep from their farm to Shinglekill (now Cairo).  His brother was married to Anna “Annatje” Strope and they lived with the Stropes. The boy had arrived late in the day only to discover his  brother was off visiting the miller on Kishkatom creek, so he stayed the night. The next morning, the family was up before dawn and Johannes was already out in his field before Frederick arose. Suddenly, Frederick heard his sister-in-law scream. She had spotted the Indians in their war paint approaching the cabin. 

The Mohawk Indians invited themselves in and made a show of being friendly, at first, by shaking hands with the cabin’s occupants, while they explained they were looking for Bastian. At the same time they began to look around for items to pilfer. This alarmed, then infuriated Mrs. Strope. She  began attempting to take things back that the Indians had picked up and demanded they leave. One of the Indians spied a linen chest and broke into it with his tomahawk. Admiring a piece of linen, he declared it would make a fine shirt for himself. The enraged Frau/Vrouw Strope threw herself at him shouting that the linen was Bastian’s. The Indian declared he hated Bastian and the two wrestled over the piece of fabric as a terrified Frederick shouted to her to give it to him before he killed her. During the commotion, Frederick’s sister grabbed up her children and ran outside where she sought refuge in the high stalks of the Strope’s rye field. The scuffle ended abruptly when the Indian struck Mrs. Strope down with his tomahawk. At the same instant Johannes rushed in from his field, and was felled by a second blow of the enraged warrior’s weapon. As the terrified boy watched, the Indians expertly encircled the dying couples heads with their knives and with their teeth ripped off their scalps as blood poured out over the cabin floor. The Indians quickly gathered up anything they thought would be of use or value to them and then turned to the stunned boy who readily agreed to go with them, rather than suffer the apparent alternative. Out in the rye field Annatje looked up when she smelled smoke and heard the crackling of the burning house, in time to see the Indians laden with their loot, leaving with her brother-in-law in tow.

 The Indians made their escape with the young Schermerhorn through some of the roughest terrain in the Catskills, done to frustrate pursuit, into the Susquehanna valley, up through western New York, eventually arriving at Fort Niagara. There the Indians sold the scalps they had taken to the British for 8 Spanish dollars apiece. Schermerhorn given the choice of being adopted by the Indians or enlisting in Sir Guy Johnson’s regiment of Tory Foresters, chose enlistment. His Indian captors were paid $40 for bringing in a “volunteer”. In the course of the war, Schermerhorn participated once in a raid on the Mohawk Valley. He refused to fire on his countrymen or assist in burning their property. Afterwards he was sent to Michigan as part of a detail guarding a captive American officer. In 1785 he was finally released. Making his way back to his home, wearing the Tory Forrester uniform he had been given, he suffered scorn and abuse as a returning Tory until he was reunited with his parents who had moved to Hudson. A few years later he married and eventually bought 100 acres for a farm not far from the site of the Strope’s farm, where he had been captured. He and his wife Sara were buried in the Round Top Cemetery. 

The story of the Stopes' murders and Frederick Schermerhorn's captivity was written down by Josiah Priest, an Albany coach upholster and leather-worker, turned professional author, published in 1839. Priest began writing pamphlets that sold for 12 1/2¢ to 18 1/2¢ each. His first book was   Wonders of Nature and Providence, Displayed ...., a rambling  collection of essays about strange animals, natural phenomena and exotic cultures, published in 1826.  In it he included   "A Prisoner among the Indians", a first-person narrative of John Strover's captivity by the Miami Indians at the start of "Lord Dunsmore's War"--a punitive campaign by the colonial governor of Virgina before the out break of the French and Indian War. The unfortunate Strover survived a 12 year captivity only to be recruited as a scout in 1782 and captured again where he witnessed the torture and burning of other captives, and was nearly burned at the stake himself.

 After his first book, many of Priest's books focused on popular, controversial subjects, that he knew would sell. A View of the Expected Christian Millennium in 1827 and The Anti-Universalist, in 1837 took up current religious issues. His American Antiquities and Discoveries in the West, (1833)  was a book about the mound builders of the Mississippi basin that re-hashed many of the theories about their supposed European or biblical origins and asserted that American Indians were not advanced enough to build them. Priest tried his hand at Gothic fiction with Museum Of Diversion and Tales of Horror (1840) and even jumped on the Washington mythology bandwagon that Parson Weems rode so successfully in A History of the Early Adventures of Washington Among the Indians of the West, conjuring up a romance between Washington and a frontier girl.  Priest entered into the growing public debate on slavery, coming down on the side of slaveholders with Slavery as it relates to the Negro or African Race, examined in the light of current history and the Holy Scripture (1843) and even attempted to exploit the anti-rent controversies with A Copy of the Grants to the Van Rensselaer and Livingston families, together with a history of the settlement of Albany, (1844) for which he got an endorsement from Smith Broughton.

However, time and time again Priest returned  to the genre of the captivity narrative. In 1832 he produced A True Story of Matthew Calkins, also the Captivity of General Patchins by Brant and his Indians and Five Other Rare Pamphlets (1832) (Patchins who became a brigadier general in the New York State militia in 1806 was captured in a 1780 Indian raid near Stamford, NY.)  Stories of the Revolution (1836) included five or six captivity narratives, including "The Captive Boys of

 Rensselaerville," an account of the Dietz family massacre and the capture of John and Robert Brice.
"The Low Dutch Prisoner" came next in 1839, followed by A True Narrative of David Ogden, (and three other captivity stories), in 1840, and The Fort Stanwix Captive in 1841. 

Today, Josiah Priest is largely forgotten, or dismissed as a hack writer and a racist. In his time his captivity narratives fed the need of white Americans to perceive Native Americans as savages and peoples who needed to be removed to beyond the frontiers of white settlement. His principal motive appears to be to produce sensationalist writings that would appeal to his audience and would sell.  But unlike the nickel and dime novelists of the 1860's through the 1880's his captivity narratives were not works of pure fiction, but rather, based on interviews with Revolutionary war veterans and the captives themselves, and though colored by time, Priest's abundant prejudices, and his literary pretensions they have historic merit.