In collaboration with Native American sources, this writing reveals through the use of historical narrative what happened to white captives taken by Native warriors during the battle for control of the Ohio Country in the latter half of the 18th century. More than 1,200 white captives were adopted and assimilated into the Mingo, Shawnee, Lenape (Delaware), and Wyandot tribes who never returned to the colonial frontier when given the opportunity to do so, but rather stayed and inter-married. Historians and psychologists to the present do not understand the unique transformation that caused Felix Renick of Virginia in 1798 to say, “It is easy to make an Indian out of a White man, but hard, if not impossible to reclaim that White man after being converted.”
Presenter Bio: Born and raised in Canada, Alan Fitzpatrick has been a native of West Virginia since 1973 when he graduated from Kent State University in psychology and became employed at the West Virginia Penitentiary in Moundsville as a Classifications Counselor. Since then, he has made the Wheeling area his home. Alan ran a retail carpet business for thirty-three years before retiring. He has always been fascinated by the early frontier history of the Upper Ohio Valley, and in 1997, he was a founding member of “Fort Henry Days,” a yearly living-history commemoration and re-enactment of the 1782 last battle of the American Revolution. The event is held at Wheeling’s Oglebay Park every Labor Day weekend. Alan has written nine non-fiction early-American history books dealing with the conflict between Native-Americans and colonials during the tumultuous period of the late 1700’s.
Author of:
"Wilderness War on the Ohio"
"In Their Own Words"
"The Place of the Skull"
"The White Indians"
"Captives and Kin in the Ohio Country"
"The Untold Story of Isaac Zane"
Patriot Soldier, Loyalist Spy
"Vengeance is Mine-The Untold Story of Bemino"
"Captured by the Mingo – Two Faces"
You may also like the following events from Lunch With Books at the Ohio County Public Library:
Also check out other
Arts events in Wheeling,
Literary Art events in Wheeling.
|
