THE AMAZING JOURNEY OF MARY DRAPER INGLES

I forgot the housework, neglected needed sleep and sort-of supervised the youngsters. That was my experience many years ago when I first read James Alexander Thom’s Follow the River. The fictional account of the true story of Mary Draper Ingles capture and captivity by the Shawnee in 1755, and eventual escape and journey home was one of those books that was impossible to put down. This twenty-three-year-old woman’s story demanded I do further research to learn more about her.

The Ingles and Draper families migrated to and settled in Draper’s Meadows on the western frontier of the Virginia colony, what is now Blacksburg, Virginia. Mary Draper was only eighteen when she married twenty-one-year-old William Ingles.

On July 30, 1755, Mary was at their cabin with their two young boys and William was harvesting in the fields when Shawnee warriors killed or captured most of the inhabitants of Drapers Meadows. Mary, her sons and her injured sister-in-law Bettie were captured and forced to travel further west. Mary’s sons were taken from her and adopted into the Shawnee tribe and taken to another village. Bettie was given to a warrior and traveled to another site.

Mary and another captive referred to as “Old Dutch woman” traveled another one hundred miles to a Shawnee village west to current day Cincinnati, Ohio. The two women were given the latitude to roam about freely and search for food. Mary Ingles was respected among the tribe for her indomitable spirit and her skills as a seamstress. She made shirts for the natives.

Mary’s journey with the Shawnee Indians is noted by the red line,
her return east is noted with the blue line her return east.

attributed to: Blue Ridge Country Magazine

In October of 1755, the two women escaped under the guise of foraging for food. They headed off along the Ohio River on almost a five-hundred-mile journey back to southwest Virginia with only two blankets and a tomahawk. Their forty-three-day odyssey through treacherous wilderness and Mary’s eventual return home is spellbinding.  

Mary’s story doesn’t end there. She and William had several more children and moved to the New River near Radford, Virginia where they built a home, an inn, and operated a ferry crossing. Over a period of years, the Ingles searched and found one of their sons purchasing him from the Shawnee tribe. Will died in 1782 and Mary lived in their log cabin and operated the ferry until she died in 1815 at the age of eighty-three. Will and Mary Ingles descendants of still own and inhabit their land.

A bronze sculpture of Mary Draper Ingles

by sculptor Matt Langford stands in front of

the Boone County, Kentucky Public Library Main Branch. 

attributed to: Blue Ridge Country Magazine

Mary Draper Ingles story is a testament to the strength of the human spirit and the courage and fortitude of the women who helped settle our country.

Review: The Art and Craft of Writing Historical Fiction by James Alexander Thom

"The past is where we get the raw material we use.... We pick bygone time up by the handfuls and, like clay, see if it feels right and then form it into stories about the past." ~ James Thom, The Art and Craft of Writing Historical Fiction

James Alexander Thom is one of my favorite general market fiction writers, so when I learned last year that he'd written The Art and Craft of Writing Historical Fiction, I ordered a copy and read it at once. More than a nuts and bolts How To Write book, Thom's offering on the craft is in many ways more philosophical than I expected, but delightfully so. It's also peppered with humorous and thoughtful anecdotes that delve into his personal experiences of writing and researching historical fiction. The many examples taken from his novels are bound to interest any reader familiar with Thom and his work.

The book begins with a look at what Thom calls the River of Time. "The story of the world, of America.... flows like a river, and we are all in it--some of us dead, some old, some young, some as yet unborn." Making sure the characters we write come across believably as being in that River of Time farther upstream than the Now in which we write their stories, and offering techniques to help create this verisimilitude, is largely what the rest of the book is about. Unlike the historian, the historical novelist doesn't "[point] backward toward a past time, but [takes] the reader back to that time, back when that time was now, and [looks] forward to the uncertainty of the next hours and days." Thom spends chapters showing and telling how to make those long-ago moments "so vivid, so real, so sensuously complete and immediate that the reader is there, then, looking forward, not just here, now, looking back." Deeper into the book Thom writes, "Your characters are who they are because they enter that stream when and where they do. They are products of their time, and they do what they do because of the circumstances of history in which they find themselves."

Other topics covered are historical truth vs. fiction (the importance of accuracy and just how much fudging of the truth should a writer indulge in). Methods for researching, from book research to the internet to getting out and experiencing history physically. Genealogical research. Taming all that data once you've accumulated it. Starting your story. Writing to the senses. How NOT to write historical fiction. And when and how to orient the reader in another time and place, through setting and details: "As much as you can, you must be like someone who has lived there, because you're going to be not just the storyteller but also the tour guide taking your readers through the past."

The Art and Craft of Writing Historical Fiction is written with an engaging voice that feels more like sitting in a classroom listening to a skilled lecturer telling story after story, and dropping nuggets of vital craft information along the way--or maybe more like a master storyteller sitting across the fire from you, while behind you in the rustling dark owls hoot and coyotes yip. So listen and be entertained, but add another stick of wood to the fire and have your pen and journal ready, because you're about to learn a thing or two.

More about the author: James Alexander Thom was formerly a U.S. Marine, a newspaper and magazine editor, and a member of the faculty at the Indiana University Journalism School. He is the author of Follow the River, Long Knife, From Sea to Shining Sea, Panther in the Sky (for which he won the prestigious Western Writers of America Spur Award for best historical novel), Sign-Talker, and The Red Heart. He lives in the Indiana hill country with his wife, Dark Rain of the Shawnee Nation, United Remnant Band. You can find him on line at: www.jamesalexanderthom.com