author
Fanny Kelly
1845–1904
Known for a firsthand account of life on the overland frontier, she turned a traumatic experience into one of the best-known captivity narratives of the American West. Her writing gives modern readers a vivid glimpse of migration, survival, and memory in the nineteenth century.
1 Audiobook
Narrative of My Captivity Among the Sioux Indians
by Fanny Kelly
About the author
Born in Orillia, Ontario, around 1845, she moved with her family to Kansas as a child during the westward migration of the 1850s. In 1863 she married Josiah Kelly, and the next year the couple joined a wagon train headed west.
In 1864, during the journey near present-day Wyoming, she was captured in an attack and held for several months before regaining her freedom. Years later she published Narrative of My Captivity Among the Sioux Indians (1871/1872), the book for which she is best remembered.
She died in Washington, D.C., in 1904. Today, her memoir is read as both a dramatic personal story and a window into how nineteenth-century Americans understood frontier conflict and westward expansion.