author
Massy Harbison
b. 1770
Remembered for one of the best-known Pennsylvania captivity narratives, this frontier woman turned a harrowing personal ordeal into a firsthand account that has lasted for generations.
1 Audiobook
Captives among the Indians : first-hand narratives of Indian wars, customs, tortures, and habits of life in colonial times
by Francesco Giuseppe Bressani, Massy Harbison, Mary White Rowlandson, James Smith
About the author
Massy Harbison, also known as Mercy Harbison, was born in 1770 and lived on the western Pennsylvania frontier in the years after the American Revolution. She is chiefly remembered for surviving a 1792 attack and captivity episode that later became the basis of her narrative.
Her story belongs to the early American captivity-narrative tradition. Sources about her describe how she escaped after several days and later gave a deposition about what had happened; her account was eventually published and circulated in Pittsburgh, helping preserve her experience in print.
Because so much of her reputation rests on that single dramatic episode, Harbison is remembered less as a literary stylist than as a rare firsthand witness to frontier violence, survival, and family loss in the early United States.