James E. (James Everett) Seaver

James E. Seaver was an American author born in 1787 and active in western New York in the early 1800s. He is most closely associated with A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison, the 1824 book based on his interviews with Jemison, whose story of capture, adoption into the Seneca community, and long life in New York made the work widely known.

Historical sources also connect him with South Pembroke, now the town of Darien, New York, where he appears to have served the community as a doctor or local medical practitioner. Accounts from the William G. Pomeroy Foundation say he came to the area around 1816, published the Mary Jemison narrative in 1824 after interviewing her in 1823, and died in Darien on January 25, 1827.

Only a small amount is firmly documented about Seaver beyond that book, but his work has had a long afterlife through later editions and classroom reading. For many readers, he remains the writer who preserved one of the best-known personal narratives connected to early New York, Native history, and the American frontier.