The Little Osage Captive, an Authentic Narrative

Boston: Samuel T. Armstrong, 1822. First edition. Very Good. Publisher's red roan over blue paper-covered boards. Sixteenmo. 108 pp. Complete with frontispiece and one other plate. Gilt-titled spine. Paper over boards chipped and dustsoiled. Contemporary ink ownership signature (Mary Ann D Parker) to front verso of frontispiece. Toning to endpapers and some foxing throughout. Still a Very Good copy of this unusual captive narrative.

This captivity narrative, written for a young audience, differs from others in the genre by the racial dynamics of the captive and captors: Lydia Carter (as she was later renamed after her white benefactor), a (truncated) young Osage girl, was captured by Cherokee warriors after they launched an attack on her community. The white missionary Elias Cornelius, the narrator and purported author of the story, encounters the warriors while traveling and agrees to purchase Lydia. He takes her to the nearby Brainard Mission, where she is educated by the missionaries until her untimely death of an illness. While most contemporary captive narratives follow the violent (and often sexualized) kidnapping and imprisonment of white women and men by Native tribes, this story's captive is herself an Osage; the story, then, is an account of white missionary intervention in inter-tribal conflict rather than a more typical account of violence between white settlers and Native tribes. Lydia is also, in a sense, "captured" twice: once by the Cherokee warriors who attacked her Osage community and once by her ostensible rescuer. Lydia's Osage background adds a complexity to the more standard white woman/Native man dynamic portrayed in many contemporary captivity narratives and sets the stage for a white missionary fantasy of intervening in tribal conflict to save a helpless Native orphan.

Despite its somewhat divergent premise, however, the goal of the work is more or less the same as any other entry in the genre—to bolster the American colonial project and, specifically, solicit donations for the missionary cause. The work ends with an exhortation to the youth of America: "Let children and youth consider, that they are required to do something to send the Gospel to the Heathen. How many of them might give to this object a penny a week...by abstaining from some unnecessary indulgence. Were all the children in our country to do this, they would raise several hundred thousand dollars every year; and their donations alone, would be sufficient to send instruction to every Indian child in America."

Howes C-776; Eberstadt 122: 78, "A popular southern captivity. The Little Osage Captive - Lydia Carter - was rescued by the missionaries from the Cherokee. One of the copper-plates depicts the Brainard Mission." Note that supposed 1821 edition recorded by Ayer is a mistake, according to Howes: "In some copies of the [1824] York edition the final '4' in the date had become so broken as to resemble a '1,' hence the myth of an 1821 printing." Very Good. (Inventory #: 6859)