CHOSEN: A STORY OF ABDUCTION IN EARLY AMERICA

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During the war in America between France and England, on the evening of 4th April 1758, Irishman Thomas Jemison, his wife Jane and four of their children are abducted from their Pennsylvanian farm by Shawnees led by French officers. The two older sons are overlooked by the invaders and raise the alarm.
The captors, fearing the pursuit, kill all but one of their hostages.
Only 15-year-old Mary Jemison is allowed to live.
At Fort Pitt, she is sold to two Seneca sisters who take her to a Mingo settlement three hundred miles from Fort Pitt, on the Scioto River.
Mary marries a Delaware warrior and they have a son, who Mary calls Thomas, after her dead father.
In a gruelling 380-mile journey by canoe, she and Thomas are accompanied by two ‘brothers’ to meet her Seneca ‘mother’ at Geneseo, where she hears of the death from smallpox of her husband.
Mary is courted by a 50-year-old chieftain, Hiokatoo. Whilst he is away, laying waste to English settlements. Mary survives the Seneca Council’s threat of repatriation to the whites.
After the War ends in 1763, Mary and Hiokatoo marry.
In 1766 she bears a son, John.
Ten years of peace ensue, during which Mary’s daughters, Betsey, Nancy and Polly are born.
In 1779, during the War of Independence, as Gen. Sullivan descends on Geneseo, bent on its destruction, Mary flees upriver to Gardeau, obtaining sanctuary in the home of two escaped slaves.
As the War reaches its conclusion, the slaves leave for Canada and Mary takes over their land.
Hiokatoo returns from harassing American settlers.
Two more children are born, Jane and James.
The family find stability in working their land, but tragedy continues to stalk the White Woman of the Seneca.