Mary Draper Ingles escapes through Kentucky, 1755

0:11 In 1755, a Virginia mother slipped out of a Shawnee salt camp in Kentucky,
0:16 and set out for home.
0:18 The river... was her only map.
0:21 Draper's Meadow, Virginia.
0:23 Mary Draper Ingles was twenty-three, with her husband Will,
0:27 and two small sons.
0:29 The land was not empty.
0:31 The Shawnee had been pushed west for generations.
0:34 And now, Britain and France were at war for the Ohio Valley.
0:39 We had been pushed from river to river for a hundred years.
0:43 When the British army fell on the Monongahela,
0:46 many of us chose to fight.
0:49 On July 30th, 1755...
0:53 harvest day... a Shawnee war party struck.
0:57 Mary's mother was killed.
0:58 Mary, her two boys, and her wounded sister-in-law were taken.
1:03 Will... escaped.
1:08 For a month, the captives were marched down the rivers,
1:11 to the Ohio.
1:17 I could have slipped away more than once.
1:20 I would not leave my boys.
1:23 At the Shawnee town on the Scioto, her boys were taken from her,
1:27 and given to different families.
1:30 A captive child could fill the place of someone we had lost.
1:34 To us, he was family.
1:37 That fall, she was taken to Big Bone Lick, Kentucky...
1:41 to boil salt among mastodon bones.
1:45 My boys were gone. I knew how far home was.
1:49 Better to try for it, or die in the woods, than live out my days a captive.
1:56 In October, she and an older captive, known only as “the old Dutch woman,”
2:02 went out to gather grapes...
2:04 and never came back.
2:06 They followed the Ohio upstream, wading creek after creek,
2:10 living on walnuts and pawpaws.
2:13 Then came the snow. Starving, the older woman turned on Mary...
2:17 and twice tried to kill her.
2:20 She talked me into leaving.
2:22 Then came the snow and the hunger, and I blamed her for every step.
2:28 Mary broke free. And at night, she crossed the river in a canoe,
2:32 paddling with a splintered slab.
2:36 Around December 1st, frostbitten and alone, she called out at a neighbor's
2:41 cornfield. Adam Harman knew it at once: “certainly Mary Ingles voice.”
2:56 Forty-two days. Perhaps five or six hundred miles.
3:00 The old Dutch woman survived too.
3:03 John Draper and I had gone to the Cherokee to ransom our families.
3:08 We were seven miles off the night she came in.
3:13 Mary and Will founded Ingles Ferry.
3:15 Thomas came home at seventeen, speaking only Shawnee.
3:19 George never returned.
3:21 Raids and reprisals went on for years, on both sides.
3:25 Legend grew around her, but the core is true.
3:29 She died in 1815. She had followed the river home.