The Gillham Abduction Story: Constructing an Alternative Narrative

In the late eighteenth century, members of Kentucky colonist James Gillham's family were abducted by Indians.1 The men took their captives to what would later become Illinois. Sometime after Gillham recovered his wife (Ann) and children, the family relocated to the Illinois country and eventually settled in what would become Chouteau Township in Madison County. Gillham decided to move to Illinois because of the impressive prairies, soil, and natural resources he noticed during his search for his family.This is the basic outline of the Gillham captivity narrative, a foundational story in the Euro-American history of Madison County, Illinois.2 Doubtless there are similar stories that serve as cultural touchstones in other parts of the American West. But how true are they? Does it matter?Origin stories provide explanations for how groups of people came to be in a particular place. Such tales confer a degree of psychological debt. Regardless of how the inheritors of these stories feel about them, they wouldn't be here if the incidents the stories are based on didn't happen. Often these tales are accepted without much conscious thought; even though they may be recognized as mythological, the principles and values implied are absorbed.The core Gillham abduction narrative presented above is not a myth. But contradictions have accumulated through iterations over time, and various of the resulting details ring false. Euro-Americans who inherit such a story arguably have an obligation to sort fact from fiction. As anthropologist-historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot has said: "At some point, historically specific groups of humans must decide if a particular narrative belongs to history or to fiction. In other words, the epistemological break between history and fiction is always expressed concretely through the historically situated evaluation of specific narratives."3The Gillham story is about conflict between Indigenous peoples and Euro-American settlers at the turn of the nineteenth century, a time when the outcome of the Indian Wars was uncertain. Subsequent embellishments of the story reflect contemporary developments in Euro-American relations with and perceptions of Indigenous peoples. In the two-hundred-plus years since the event, the relevant Indigenous groups have been driven from their midwestern homelands or disappeared entirely. This history informs the evaluation presented in the balance of this article. The first section examines the Gillham story and its variations, discussing their sources and interpreting them as narrative vehicles. It concludes with specific questions and discrepancies to be resolved. The second section addresses these issues by deconstructing the divergent details of the story with regard to contextual historical data. It ends by presenting a revised historicity of the abduction and proposing how this alternate history may inform understanding of the event today.On Friday, February 7, 1806, the United States House of Representatives heard a petition written by James Gillham of the Indiana Territory.4 Gilham was asking Congress "for relief in consideration of expenses incurred by him in the redemption of his wife and children from captivity, by the Piankeshaw nation of Indians, in the year 1791."5 The petition was referred to the Committee of Claims. The following Tuesday, John C. Smith reported that the committee had rejected Gillham's claim, "not being able to perceive on what principles the United States can be held liable to indemnify an individual in a case thus circumstanced."6 Although the fact the petition was made and rejected is documented, the petition itself is no longer extant according to National Archives and Records Administration staff.James Gillham and hundreds of others in the Indiana Territory petitioned Congress multiple times for the right of preemption for Indigenous lands they had squatted on and cultivated without authorization.7 Gillham signed three such petitions from December 1804 to September 1808.8 The first of these began by stating that the petitioners "by various turns of fortune have been placed in this frontier country, some on account of their wives and children being carried away from the states into captivity by tribes of Indians inhabiting this territory, and by pursuing them to this country, and paying an extravagant Ransom to obtain them again."9 The fact that recovery of abducted family members was cited as a pathway to settlement in the Illinois country in a mass petition to Congress for preemption rights suggests two things: that this was a credible statement and that it may have happened to more than one family. Gillham sought congressional aid for his ransom expenses just a couple of weeks after the second petition was rejected (and approximately fifteen years after the actual event). This suggests his main objective was to finance the purchase of his homestead.On June 19, 1816, the Western Intelligencer published a lengthy statement by Benjamin Stephenson recapping his service as the congressional delegate representing the Illinois Territory. Among his accomplishments: getting rights of preemption extended via a nine-section act passed February 27, 1815, the final section of which specified that Ann Gillham be granted her choice of a quarter section (160 acres) of land within the Illinois Territory.10 Stephenson's newspaper statement explained the land was granted to Ann Gillham "in consequence of her sufferings by the Indians." He also noted that he could have obtained similar grants for other victims had they given him "the requisite proof." Unfortunately, no documentation of Stephenson's presentation to Congress or the "proof" he alluded to have been discovered to date.At this point, the Gillham abduction saga disappeared from the print record until 1852, when it acquired a narrative arc and details. Before delving into the consequent specifics of the story, it is important to situate it in literature as an example of the Indian captivity narrative genre.Seventeenth-century Anglo-American colonists sought to differentiate themselves from Spanish colonists (whom they criticized as cruel) and Indigenous people (whom they deemed subhuman savages). They perceived the acceptance of Native peoples' ways and rights as existential threats to their white identity and colonization of the continent, but they balked at resorting to violence to solve the problem. Ultimately, the future United States of America would choose violent elimination of Indigenous people and seizure of their land, creating narratives to protect the state from accusations of cruelty.11Some narratives attempting to recast American history assert that the earliest interactions between Anglo-American colonists and Indigenous people were uniformly peaceful. For instance, the Thanksgiving meal as a national origin story neglects to mention that translator Tisquantum (aka Squanto) learned English after being kidnapped and sold into slavery by Anglo-American invaders six years before the Mayflower landed.12 Other stories, like those in the Indian captivity genre, serve in part as rationalizations for colonization.The Indian captivity narrative is a prominent literary form only in English-speaking America, even though analogous historical events occurred in Spanish- and French-speaking colonial America.13 The genre debuted in 1682 with the publication of Mary Rowlandson's story of her abduction by the Nipmuc from her Lancaster, Massachusetts, home six years prior. Like many of her contemporaries, Rowlandson feared the corrupting influences of the perceived uncivilized frontier and savage Indians. The danger increased exponentially in captivity, where survival necessitated adopting "pagan" ways and accepting an eternity in hell.14 Guilt-ridden over her choice of captivity over death, Rowlandson takes pains in her story to repeatedly contrast the Nipmuc unfavorably with "Christians." The religious theme is overt: Rowlandson's story and other contemporary captivity narratives read like Puritan sermons. Captivity was seen as a test from God. Suffering was a means of redemption; survival the result of divine providence. Through the captive's suffering the reader learned to appreciate life.15One hundred years later, revolutionists leveraged Rowlandson's ordeal as propaganda for rebellion against Great Britain. Rowlandson stood in for the colonists "held captive" by British tyranny in a reprinting of her account illustrated with the Nipmuc aggressors rendered to evoke British soldiers.16 In the early and middle eighteenth century, the genre took on decidedly anti-Native and anti-French overtones. These accounts—written in explicitly gruesome prose to ignite reader indignation—also functioned as political propaganda. By the end of the century, the stories evolved into full-blown melodramatic tales packed with lurid and titillating details, more suspense novel than historical record. In their next incarnation, Indian captivity narratives appeared in pseudo-scholarly anthologies, disguised as historical or ethnological research, extending the life of the genre for several decades into the nineteenth century.17 The gory stories and their subsequent spurious use as sources for cultural anthropology served to render Indigenous characters as the villainous "other."Scholars revisited captivity accounts in the 1970s, interpreting them as examples of "myth-archetype" literature.18 In this framework, the victim protagonist endures trials in a malevolent underworld and is ultimately either restored or martyred. These studies of the genre demonstrate that the Indian captivity narrative portrayed Native peoples as the evil "them" for a readership of a Euro-American "us."In the 1980s, gender scholars began studying captivity narratives. Looking specifically at narratives attributed to women captives, researchers attempted to determine whether the woman captive actually wrote the account. Some women told their stories to men who then modified them for publication. In other cases, men constructed stories without firsthand input from victims, embellishing historically verified bare facts. A male author impersonating a woman often adopted an expressive, uncomplicated writing voice. The ruse was used to personalize historical events and stimulate the reader to react to them with emotional intensity.19 The technique amplified the message that Indian aggression was an outrage justifying colonization.The extra-historical goals of this literary genre inform the exercise of contextualizing the Gillham abduction story. The Gillham narrative was first published as literature in the 1850s, when the popularity of the genre had already waned considerably. The story was folded into larger frontier histories. It was included in the book The Pioneer History of Illinois written by then-former Illinois governor John Reynolds. The story was also featured in the Alton Weekly Courier on November 2, 1854, in a serialized installment of John Mason Peck's book "Father Clark," or, The Pioneer Preacher: Sketches and Incidents of Rev. John Clark, which was published in book form the following year.20James T. Hair included the story (essentially Peck's version) in his 1866 Gazetteer of Madison County. Hair cited the Carlinville Free Democrat (which began publication in 1856) as his source. After quoting the newspaper story verbatim, Hair added: "Mr. Samuel P. Gillham, now residing about ten miles south-east from Alton, stated to the writer that he had never seen a correct account of the capture of his uncle's family, and hence there are doubtless some minor inaccuracies in the above, which is given as we find it in print."21 Samuel P. Gillham, the source of this discouraging comment, was a grandson of James Gillham's brother. He was also related in another way: he married one of James Gillham's granddaughters.22In summary, over sixty years after the abduction happened, the story was published at least five times in a span of fourteen years (1852–66): the Reynolds account and four instances/close derivatives of the Peck account. A synthesis of these two unique accounts follows: In 1790, James and Ann Gillham lived on a farm in Kentucky with their sons Samuel, Isaac, and Clement and an unnamed daughter. According to Peck, they lived in the Green River country and the children ranged in age from four to twelve years old. One day (in June, according to Peck), James and his son Isaac were out working in their cornfield when several Kickapoo men attacked the house. Ann and the other three children were captured.The captors and their captives traveled on foot; one man led and another took up the rear. They avoided colonial settlements and traveled quickly and continuously while in their vicinity. Food was scarce: the men gave the children some meat jerky, but the adults ate nothing. The children's feet got sore and scratched from briars; Ann wrapped them in rags. After the group had gained a safe distance from white settlements, two of the Kickapoo went hunting and returned with a raccoon, which they boiled in a kettle. Ann was relieved because she had been afraid the children would starve to death or the Indians would kill them.The party reached the Ohio River near Hawesville. The men made three rafts out of logs lashed with elm bark. The group crossed the river at night. Reynolds states that Ann, the children, and two Kickapoo men went in the largest raft.After crossing the river into Indian country, the Kickapoo relaxed. The group traveled more slowly and took time to hunt for food in the area between the Ohio and White Rivers. Still traveling on foot, they avoided the small colonial settlements near Vincennes and in the White River Valley. They crossed the Wabash River below Terre Haute. They continued through what would later be known as Clark, Coles, and Macon Counties in Illinois, until they reached the captors' town near Salt Creek (located in the future Logan County). Peck describes the location of the town as about twenty miles northeast of present-day Springfield. Reynolds estimates the length of the group's journey as three to four hundred miles (the drive from Hawesville, Kentucky, to Lincoln, Illinois, today is three hundred miles). According to Peck, Ann and the children remained with the Kickapoo until 1795, all of them living with different families. Reynolds just says that the boys stayed with the Kickapoo for an unspecified number of years.Meanwhile, James shut down the Kentucky homestead, had his son Isaac stay with a friend, and set out to find his family. Peck gives details of James's search. French traders in Vincennes and Kaskaskia who had relationships with various Indigenous groups made inquiries on his behalf. He met with Arthur St. Clair, governor of the Northwest Territory. James planned to personally visit the various tribes in his quest, but St. Clair convinced him it was too dangerous and most likely futile. James eventually heard from some French traders that Ann and the children were alive and living with the Kickapoo in Illinois country.The two accounts differ slightly with regard to how James redeemed his family, but both feature an Irish trader from Cahokia named William "Chape Wollie" Atchison. Atchison financed the purchase of at least Samuel and Clement from the Kickapoo. Reynolds says that it took the Gillhams several years to pay off the ransom debt. Peck says that James, with the help of a French interpreter and a French guide, met with the Kickapoo in their village near Salt Creek. Both accounts maintain that the boy Clement couldn't speak English when he was restored to his family.The story was subsequently included in Brink's 1882 History of Madison County, Illinois (Hair's Gazetteer is the source cited) and in Stringer's 1911 History of Logan County, Illinois (citing Reynolds's Pioneer History). A brief version in Norton's 1912 Centennial History of Madison County, Illinois and Its People: 1812 to 1912 is faithful to the Peck account.23How do these accounts—the earliest detailed narratives, but not contemporary to the actual event—reflect the evolution of the Indian captivity narrative as a literary genre? In Peck's book ("Father Clark"), the Gillhams themselves tell the saga to Peck's hero while they share a keelboat journey from Kentucky to Illinois. Peck thus uses the Gillham saga to segue between his story in Kentucky and his story in Illinois, to move the action of colonization westward.Reynolds's Pioneer History covers the Gillham abduction in a chapter titled "Illinois under the Northwestern Territorial Government." Reynolds begins with discussions of New Design and John Murdick and then moves on to various other subjects, often focusing on the life of a particular pioneer. The chapter rambles, but he eventually returns to his initial topics. After wrapping up Murdick's story with his death circa 1812, we get this non sequitur, a one-sentence paragraph: "For years after the peace was established with the Indians, in 1795, many cases of hardship and suffering were the consequences of that war."24 And then Reynolds launches into the Gillham story, ending with Ann receiving her land grant in 1815.In Reynolds's book, the Gillham abduction saga functions as one of many vignettes that create an impressionistic portrait of post-revolutionary Illinois, a place and time that saw the nascent establishment of Euro-American settlements periodically challenged by Indigenous resistance. The Gillham story begins in 1790 at the height of Native-colonist conflict in Illinois and ends just after the 1795 Treaty of Greenville, which some saw as the local end of the Indian War. In one sense, the anecdote can be interpreted as a succinct illustration of the white experience in Illinois: a progression of invasion, struggle, and victory.Thus for both authors, the Gillham narrative serves to buttress histories of colonization. The details include tropes familiar to the genre: the specter of Indian violence, a long and difficult journey, ultimate restoration. Reynolds exploits the tale more conventionally to represent the Euro-American "hero" overcoming the Indian "villain." These purposes in the authors' larger works may explain the lack of information they provide about the family's experiences during captivity. There are other verified accounts by captivity victims that are also brief and vague regarding their time spent in Indigenous societies. The details that are included are those that support the purpose of the narrative. For both Peck and Reynolds, the salient point of the tale is the Gillham family's settlement in Illinois—a path to Euro-American colonization of the area that readers can adopt as an origin story. However, the resulting simplification of the story to one of journey and rescue in effect silences the voices of the Kickapoo in the narrative.After the flurry of coverage the Gillham story enjoyed in the mid-nineteenth century, it disappeared from print again for nearly forty years. The saga resurfaced in the mid-twentieth century when it was briefly mentioned in Mt. Vernon, Edwardsville, and Alton newspaper articles published between 1949 and 1957.25On March 12, 1962, the Collinsville Herald featured a detailed account of the Gillham abduction.26 The unidentified writer reported on a paper titled "First Pioneer Family" presented by John F. Gillham at a recent Madison County Historical Society meeting. The Madison County Archival Library in Edwardsville holds a copy of Gillham's paper, which reflects the Reynolds/Peck version in most respects. However, Gillham (a great-great-grandson of James Gillham's brother John)27 specifies that the abducted children were twelve-year-old Samuel, seven-year-old Mary, and four-year-old Jacob Clemons (i.e., Clement in the Reynolds/Peck account). The paper also includes an anecdote, offered as evidence of the impact of captivity on the abducted children, in which a grown and intoxicated Jacob Clemons "whoops" like an Indian. The inclusion of the "drunken Indian" trope in this 1962 retelling of the Gillham saga smacks of cinematic stereotypes infiltrating the story rather than newly discovered historical detail.28The richest twentieth-century version of the story is included in the publication Our 150 Years, 1812–1962, In Commemoration of the Madison County Sesquicentennial, produced by the Madison County Sesquicentennial Committee. In the souvenir program's foreword, the committee expresses the hope that it "will serve to enrich the historical knowledge of its readers" and that the celebration as a whole will increase "our appreciation of the adventurous, fascinating deeds of our forebears."29 The section about the Gillham abduction ("The Gillham-Indian Story") begins as follows: "One of the most fascinating, yet tragic sagas of pioneer days concerns the kidnapping of a Gillham family by Kickapoo Indians in June 1790 in Kentucky and their forced migration into Illinois. Numerous versions of the crime have been published in the past but none were quite complete or correct, according to a direct descendant, Mrs. Royal O. Helgevold of Chicago. It is to Mrs. Helgevold and her cousin, Willard Clark Gillham of Benton, Ky., that credit must go for numerous fresh facets in the following account."30 These passages make it clear that the goal of the publication is to convince the reader that the Euro-American history of the county is worthy of admiration and pride: evidence that it is "fascinating," "adventurous," and "tragic" is provided by "fresh" historical information.The beginning of this version of the Gillham abduction story aligns closely with the Reynolds/Peck version: Ann and three of her children (this time identified as Samuel, Nancy, and Jacob) are abducted by Kickapoo men and taken to their village near Salt Creek. The account of the journey reprises the nineteenth-century Reynolds/Peck version but is fleshed out with new details; for instance, Ann bandages the broken leg of one of the Indian captors with her torn petticoat. As in the Peck version, the family members remain in captivity for five years. However, the new account introduces several plot twists: Ann is pregnant when she is abducted. The baby is born in captivity and permanently adopted by a Kickapoo woman.Ann and her son Samuel escape from the Kickapoo town. They avoid detection by hiding in treetops. They fortuitously come upon a horse in the wilderness that they ride to the home of a white settler. The man then ransoms them to James.For several subsequent summers, Jacob visits his sibling in the Kickapoo camp.The new version was repeated in two local newspaper articles published in 1966 and 1969.31 In the latter, Fred Gillham of Edwardsville (another descendant of James Gillham's brother John)32 went on record as a detractor of the escape episode.33 When the saga was revisited in a 1971 newspaper story, all of the extra details were omitted; the result was a lively but largely faithful rendition of the nineteenth-century Reynolds/Peck version.34 Only five subsequent mentions of the story in print have been found to date—the most recent published in 2006—and all are very brief.35An alternative twentieth-century version of the story was offered by Willard Clark Gillham (mentioned as a source in the sesquicentennial version described above) in his 1966 family history.36 This version purports to present an undated account written by Dr. Samuel J. Gillham, a son of Samuel Gillham, the oldest of the abducted Gillham children. Willard Clark Gillham obtained the narrative from Cora Fish, who found it among the papers of her grandfather Daniel Brown Gillham. A summary of this version follows: Ann was pregnant when the family was abducted from their home in the Kentucky Green River country in June 1791. The Kickapoo captors brought them to Peoria. James "came out to Kaskaskia in the fall after, and arrived in Kaskaskia Christmas Eve 1791 and when he got there the Indians had just brought in his family and sold them, the wife, the eldest son and youngest daughter to a Frenchman by the name of Demuly37 and the oldest daughter to a Spaniard in Saint Louis, the youngest was not yet brought in."38 The Frenchman returned Ann to her husband. James paid him two thousand dollars for the oldest boy and youngest girl and hired him to find the boy still in captivity. The Spaniard had adopted the older girl; James paid one thousand dollars to get her back. The remaining boy was eventually recovered. It took the family several years to pay off the three-thousand-dollar debt plus interest.A close reading of this account suggests that the daughter sold along with Ann and her older son to a Frenchman in Kaskaskia may have been the child Ann was carrying at the time of the abduction; the narrative goes on to say she gave birth shortly after her sale to the Frenchman. A significant difference between this version of the story and all others lies in the length of time between the family's abduction and rescue: about seven months versus several years.Willard Clark Gillham presents the account in three paragraphs, which he clearly indicates as quoted text. If the passage is in fact a verbatim representation of the document that Cora Fish found, then it has some issues. For instance, it includes the following sentence: "The family, says Dr. Gilham, was with the Indians just seven months." Dr. Gillham would not have written the phrase "says Dr. Gillham." Additionally, none of the Gillham participants are referred to by name (Ann, Samuel, etc.) or their relationship to the alleged author (my grandmother, my father, etc.). There may have been some form of attribution in the original document that caused Cora Fish to believe it was written by Samuel J. Gillham. Alternatively, the account could have been written by an unidentified person relating a story they heard either from Samuel J. Gillham or from someone attributing it to him.Is it possible to reconcile these divergent versions of the Gillham saga? The twentieth-century variations (with the exception of the Samuel J. Gillham narrative) resonate in many ways with the nineteenth-century Reynolds/Peck version. The most significant deviation is the assertion that Ann was pregnant at the time of the incident. This detail first surfaced in the 1962 sesquicentennial informed by Gillham descendants Isabell Helgevold and Willard Clark Gillham. The latter's 1966 family history only includes the Samuel J. Gillham version of the story, which also claims that Ann was pregnant when she was abducted but departs from the 1962 sesquicentennial version in other significant ways. These discrepancies suggest that Willard Clark Gillham obtained the purported Samuel J. Gillham narrative after the sesquicentennial program was published, and/or that the details unique to the 1962 version were provided by Isabell Helgevold, the other source cited in the sesquicentennial publication.Isabell Helgevold's great-grandfather was Samuel P. Gillham (the person who said the version in Hair's 1866 Gazetteer was incorrect in some unspecified way).39 He married his second cousin Louisa Gillham, a daughter of the oldest of the kidnapped children (Samuel). Thus, Isabell Helgevold was indeed a direct descendant of the Gillhams in the abduction saga. She could have been the recipient of stories passed down through the four intervening generations. Unfortunately, both she and Cora Fish (finder of the Samuel J. Gillham narrative) are no longer alive to consult regarding these accounts; they died in 1986 and 1981, respectively. The likelihood of tracking down provenance for these stories is slim.The print record of the Gillham story presented to this point lacks any account by or prepared in consultation with Indigenous sources. Attempts were made to obtain a parallel account of this abduction event, or similar situations involving Euro-American captives, from the Kickapoo tribes in Kansas and Oklahoma as research for this article, but these efforts have been unsuccessful. The Piankeshaw no longer exist as a tribe.The early evidence of James Gillham's petition to Congress seeking help with his ransom expenses and Benjamin Stephenson's success in getting a congressional land grant for Ann Gillham strongly support the conviction that Ann and her children were indeed victims of Indigenous kidnappers. However, the primary documents supporting the petition and the land grant have not been located and are likely not extant. Story particulars that have emerged over the better part of two centuries lack documentation and are highly inconsistent in important ways. The challenge, then, becomes to create a narrative of the abduction event grounded in historical facts that resolves discrepancies between the versions and acknowledges probable motives and perspectives of the Native participants. The following specific inconsistencies and questions will be addressed in the next section: Is the basic geography of the story plausible, i.e., that the Gillhams were taken by Indians from Kentucky to Illinois country?Which Indigenous group abducted the Gillhams: the Piankeshaw, the Kickapoo, or a different group?Was Ann Gillham pregnant at the time of the abduction? If she was, what happened to the child she was carrying?How long were the Gillhams with their Indian captors? (This will be addressed simultaneously with the question of Ann's pregnancy.)James Gillham was a middle child in his father Thomas's second family. Thomas Gillham was a Scots-Irish Presbyterian born in Ireland who immigrated to the United States around 1730, settling in Augusta County, Virginia. James was born circa 1752. The family joined a mass migration of Scots-Irish Presbyterians from Augusta County to the Carolinas in the 1760s. They ended up in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, which later became York County, South Carolina.Documentation of James's marriage to Ann B