Ohio State Parks Magazine
Fall/Winter 2004

Jonathan Alder - A Man of Two Worlds

In the violent fight for the Ohio frontier, Jonathan Alder was one of the fortunate few who survived a bloody attack unharmed, and went on to live a happy and productive life that integrated the best of Native American and pioneer virtues.

Jonathan Alder came to Ohio as a frightened little boy, hopelessly far away from his home and family. He witnessed the struggle for control of the land and its wealth of resources. He crossed paths with frontier legends, including the pioneer hero Simon Kenton, as well as the Native American heroes Tecumseh and Blue Jacket. The landscape that he first glimpsed as a captive impressed him so deeply that he returned as a free adult to make his home here.

Jonathan Alder and his family faced adversity from the time he was a baby. When Jonathan was two years old, his family moved from the relatively tame countryside outside Philadelphia to a mining and farming community carved out of the Virginia wilderness. Four years later, after building the family a rustic home and making the necessary improvements to the land to raise crops and livestock, Jonathan’s father died, leaving behind his wife and five young sons.

The boys, including Jonathan, immediately shouldered the duties and responsibilities of grown men. In May of 1781, with their grief over the loss of their father still fresh, six-year-old Jonathan and his sixteen-year-old brother, David, ventured into the dense woods surrounding their cabin to retrieve a mare and colt that had wandered off from the stable.

When David returned mortally wounded, with a broken spear protruding from his back, Jonathan whispered a tearful goodbye as the Indian who clasped his hand jerked him along the trail, preventing him from looking back to see what was about to happen. Minutes later, the Indian who had stayed back with David hurried to catch up, dangling David’s scalp in his hand.

Further down the path, the echo of an axe smacking against a tree caught the Indians’ attention and they darted away, leaving Jonathan with his guard. Half an hour later, the Indians returned with Jonathan’s distraught neighbor, Mrs. Martin, along with her young toddler. On their belts, the Indians had tied the fresh scalps of Mr. Martin and the couple’s infant child.

Now the Indians’ priority was a safe escape, and they began to flee as fast as their hostages could be pulled along by the strips of buffalo leather tied around their waists. After a sleepless night and a second grueling day hiking hurriedly along rugged paths, the Indian who was carrying Mrs. Martin’s youngster tired of his burden and he disappeared for a time, returning with nothing but a tiny scalp. The poor captives trudged along in utter misery, as Jonathan despaired that he would never be reunited with his family, and Mrs. Martin grieved the slaughter of hers.

After a week of arduous travel on foot, the party arrived at the headwaters of the Big Sandy River at the Kentucky/West Virginia border. The Indians spent the afternoon crafting canoes from hickory bark. At last, Jonathan and Mrs. Martin could rest in relative ease and comfort aboard the canoes. The scenery was new and exciting, and from time to time, the overwhelming sense of adventure obscured the recent past and soothed Jonathan’s heartache. Days later, Jonathan was awestruck as the party arrived at the beautiful Ohio River.

The next long stop was at the Pickaway Plains (southeast of modern-day Circleville and A.W. Marion State Park). The deer were plentiful, and the Indians paused for several days to stock up on venison and tan deer hides. From here, the party took a meandering path northwest, zigzagging across the territory between Big Darby Creek and Paint Creek (perhaps passing through today’s Deer Creek State Park and nearby Madison Lake State Park). The party spent the remainder of the summer slowly making their way through the Big Darby Plains, which were alive with deer, elk, buffalo and bear. By the time they reached the Mingo village on the Mad River that was their ultimate destination, they had stocked ample supplies of meat and leather for the coming winter.

All along, Jonathan remained anxious and fearful, although he and Mrs. Martin were treated well and seldom imposed upon to assist the Indians with their chores. He made a half-hearted attempt to run away, but he soon realized that the hundreds of miles of wilderness and the mighty Ohio River that lay between him and his family made the prospect of escape utterly hopeless.

Once at the Mingo village, Jonathan began to understand that the Indians had plans for him, all along. He was to be adopted into the tribe to replace the deceased son of an aging chief and his wife, in accordance with the custom of hostage taking and adoption to maintain the tribe’s population. It was also customary for potential adoptees to undergo initiation rituals that would test their spirit and stamina. Jonathan was required to run the gauntlet, but the experience for him would prove to be more of a rite of passage than the cruel and sometimes lethal punishment meted out to prisoners perceived as enemies of the tribe.

Jonathan was chased by young boys with switches as he ran through the parallel lines of villagers who greeted him with shouts of encouragement, rather than the typical blows from sticks and war clubs. After this test of his mettle, Jonathan was taken to his adoptive parents, Succohanes and Whinecheoh. His new mother, Whinecheoh, had lovingly prepared beautifully decorated moccasins and a fine ensemble of leather leggings, a breech clout, and shirt in which to dress him after a thorough ritual washing ceremony.

Jonathan’s fellow captive, Mrs. Martin, had been promised to a man in another village, and was taken away as Jonathan underwent his adoption ceremony. After her departure, Jonathan felt utterly alone and grew desperately homesick and depressed. Every vestige of his former life and identity was gone, and despite the kindness of his adoptive family, the sudden and complete immersion in a culture he did not understand, with a language he could not comprehend, left him feeling utterly alone. The children of the village took pity on the sad little boy, and rallied together to teach him their language, customs and games.

Jonathan’s frontier education had begun.

One of the village braves, Great Turtle, took young Jonathan hunting near the Sandusky Plains in the heart of winter. It was a relatively short overnight trip. Jonathan (who had been suffering with malaria, a common frontier ailment) grew chilled as Great Turtle stalked a deer and caught a wild turkey in the woods. As they emerged from the woods to cross the wide expanse of the open plains, the cold became overwhelming, and the boy was barely able to stumble along on his numbed feet and legs. Great Turtle rushed to his side and pulled him along for nearly two miles until they reached woodlands once again. Jonathan, who had spent most of his young life in dense woodlands and had never seen a prairie landscape before his trip to Ohio, was amazed at the bitterness of the wind and cold on the wide open plains, and the relative warmth and shelter the woods provided. Had he not been in the care of his Indian mentor, he likely would not have survived the lesson.

Before he was old enough to hunt on his own, Jonathan agreed to keep camp for another brave, Swank, on a woodland hunting trip in mid-winter. One evening, Swank was quite late returning to the little camp. Young Jonathan was huddled by the campfire alone, anxious for Swank’s return, as he heard the howling of wolves drawing closer to the camp. Before long, Jonathan could see the wolves’ eyes shining in the firelight, and hear their teeth snapping close by. He shot all the arrows he had with his child-sized bow, but the wolves kept coming. In a panic, he covered the fire, tore down the tent, stretched out the tent fabric on the ground, and rolled it around him snugly in hopes that the wolves’ teeth could not penetrate it. Fortunately, Jonathan soon heard Swank’s feet crunching in the snow near the camp. Swank fired his gun into the pack, and instructed Jonathan to stir the fire and toss firebrands at the wolves as the best method of frightening them away. In addition to this good advice, Jonathan was reminded of the Indian superstition that to shoot at a gun at a wolf and miss would cast a spell on the gun, causing it to consistently shoot wide of the target for as long as five or six months.

Another incident years later taught Jonathan never to underestimate the hazards on the frontier. As a young hunter, he was taught how to make a convincing deer call to lure in a young fawn that has been hidden away by its mother while the doe ventures out to feed. Jonathan spied movement in the brush ahead of him and softly called to the young animal as he crouched behind a dense bush. The prey moved ahead with each successive call Jonathan made, but more slowly and cautiously than he had expected. Finally, the animal was just ahead of Jonathan in the dense brush. As Jonathan sprang to his feet for the kill, he realized with horror that the animal he had been luring toward him was an enormous panther that was about to pounce on the “deer” it had been stalking.

At the age of sixteen, Jonathan went on a horse stealing raid in Kentucky. From Mack-a-chack, the raiding party essentially retraced the route Jonathan had originally taken into Ohio ten years earlier. Now a confident young brave, rather than a frightened child, Jonathan was filled with excitement at the prospect of crossing the mighty Ohio River. The horse stealing mission was a feat of daring and endurance. The braves rode hard night and day without sleep, with a band of 30 settlers in hot pursuit. Finally on the third night, they stopped and made camp. No sooner had they settled in than their leader, Black Foot, was awakened by the hooting of a pair of owls-a warning from the Great Spirit. Black Foot heeded the omen, and tossed a handful of tobacco in the campfire to clarify the Great Spirit’s message. After studying the smoke created by the tobacco, Black Foot announced that the group must immediately break camp and hurry away as he had been warned that the settlers who were pursuing them would soon overtake them if they delayed.

Throughout his stay with the Mingo, Jonathan became well versed in Native American spirituality. His adoptive father had a terrifying dream one winter night in which Jonathan was pursued by a white bear and devoured. The next morning, Succohannes insisted that Jonathan cleanse and protect himself from evil by stripping off his clothes and jumping into the frigid river three times. Jonathan complied, and did indeed survive a number of mishaps while hunting (although he did eventually return to the white culture, which may have been the dream’s deeper meaning). One of the most memorable rituals Jonathan attended was the annual green corn festival held on the banks of the Maumee River when he was fifteen. Several thousand Indians gathered after the harvest for three fun-filled days of feasting, dancing, games, and prayerful thanks to the Great Spirit. Each year, Succohanes and Whinechoeh faithfully observed the feast of the dead, where each family prepares a lush dinner for deceased relatives and remembers each family member they have lost. This mystical tradition took on a deeper meaning for Jonathan and Succohanes when Whinecheoh died in 1790 at the age of eighty.

Following Succohanes’ death in 1792 at the age of ninety, Jonathan wandered among the neighboring villages and hunting camps, and began courting a squaw from Upper Sandusky named Barshaw. Meanwhile, the tensions between settlers and Indians were escalating. Although Jonathan was never pressured to fight against the white armies, he did take up arms under the leadership of the Shawnee chief Blue Jacket when General Anthony Wayne started his offensive through the Ohio territory in the fall of 1793. Blue Jacket, a white captive formerly known as Marmaduke Van Swerengin, fervently embraced the lifestyle and ideology of his Shawnee captors, and became one of the Shawnee nation’s most passionate warriors.

Jonathan joined the 1794 Indian attack on Wayne’s men at Fort Recovery, but couldn’t bring himself to shoot at the fort. However, he bravely assisted with the daring rescue of a fallen warrior just outside the fort, and marched with the Indians to the presumed safety of the English army’s Fort Miamis (at present-day Maumee, Ohio). Jonathan volunteered to serve as a messenger to the warriors waiting at Sandusky to prepare for the upcoming battle at Fallen Timbers. While Jonathan waited at Sandusky, General Wayne soundly defeated the Indians at Fallen Timbers. The resulting Treaty of Greenville effectively disbanded many of the villages Jonathan considered his boyhood home.

With his adoptive parents both dead and the Indian way of life forever disrupted, Jonathan decided to put down his own unique roots. In 1795, he married Barshaw according to the Indian custom, and took her to the lush hunting grounds on the Darby Plains where they built a cabin near Pleasant Valley (present-day Plain City). Soon they were joined by families of white settlers who taught Jonathan the English he had forgotten. In addition to hunting, Jonathan began raising livestock and producing milk and butter, which he traded with settlers and Indians alike. As they settled into this new way of life, Barshaw became increasingly uncomfortable and dissatisfied. She bore two children, both of which died in infancy. Eventually, the couple concluded that the Great Spirit was opposed to their marriage, and Barshaw agreed that she would be happier if he returned her to home near Upper Sandusky.

Once again alone, Jonathan was seized by an aching desire to be reunited with his first family, but he could recall no more than his own last name, the county in which he had lived, and the nearby lead mine that intrigued him as a young child. A surveyor friend who was planning a trip through Virginia offered to inquire about the Alder family on Jonathan’s behalf, but he was unable to locate them. Remarkably, months later, Jonathan received a letter from his younger brother assuring him that the family he had not seen in 20 years was alive and well. He made the necessary preparations for his homecoming trip, including a new hairstyle and wardrobe, and in November 1805, Jonathan set out for the two-month journey.

At first, Paul Alder and his elderly mother did not recognize the tall, raven haired stranger who stood straight as an Indian. When Jonathan finally revealed his true identity, the reunion was joyful. Jonathan was content to stay and visit for over a year, reminiscing about his childhood and relaying every detail of his capture. He met and fell in love with a neighbor, Mary Blont, and they were married in January 1806. Jonathan convinced his family to join him and Mary in their new life together in Ohio, and in August 1806, the extended family set out in a large horse-drawn wagon.

In the first few years after Jonathan’s return, there were still many Indians living independently on Darby Creek, and they were frequent visitors to the Alder household. Unfortunately, the occasional misunderstandings and tensions between the cultures began to escalate while the Shawnee chief Tecumseh and his brother, the Prophet, began to organize an Indian confederacy. The Alders were assured by their Indian friends in Prophet’s Town that they would be promptly notified if war should be declared in their area so they could escape safely. Just two nights after the Indian confederacy’s decisive loss at the Battle of Tippecanoe in 1811, Indian couriers arrived at Jonathan’s doorstep to inform that the fighting was over and he could rest easy. (The official news of the outcome of the battle was not well known until two weeks later.)

From time to time, Jonathan would leave his farm and visit other former captives who had become his life-long friends. Most had adapted well to their new lives, although they enjoyed reliving their memories and practicing the Indian dialects they had learned as children. John Brickell, who was captured and adopted by the Delaware ten years after Jonathan’s capture, had become a successful hatter in Franklinton (present-day Columbus). Robert Armstrong, who was captured by Wyandots, became a prominent figure in local politics in Franklinton and opened a successful inn and hotel on what is today’s High Street. James McPherson, who was accompanying George Rogers Clark on his 1871 wilderness expedition to the Falls of Ohio (present day Louisville, Kentucky) when he was captured by the Shawnee, served as a storekeeper and sympathetic agent for the Shawnee and Wyandot still living in Ohio. McPherson continued living with the Shawnee after the War of 1812 on the Lewistown Reservation (just south of present-day Indian Lake State Park.

With the disbanding of the Lewiston Reservation in 1832 and the relocation of its residents to a reservation west of the Mississippi River, Jonathan said goodbye forever to the last living reminders of his life as a captive. Jonathan Alder died in 1849 at the age of 74, and was buried near his home.

The quotes provided in this article are attributed to Jonathan Alder, himself, and were taken from the version of the narrative cited below.

References

Nelson, Larry C., A History of Jonathan Alder, His Captivity and Life with the Indians.