author
Massy Harbison
b. 1770
Remembered for one of early America’s most gripping captivity narratives, she survived a brutal frontier raid in 1792 and later told the story in her own words. Her account offers a rare first-person view of danger, loss, and endurance on the Pennsylvania frontier.
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
Born on March 18, 1770, in New Jersey, Massy Harbison — often also called Mercy Harbison — became known through the story of her capture on the western Pennsylvania frontier. In May 1792, during the violence of the early frontier wars, she was taken in a raid that killed members of her family. She escaped after several days and later gave a deposition describing what had happened.
Her story was preserved in A Narrative of the Sufferings of Massy Harbison, from Indian Barbarity, a work that has been treated as part of the American captivity-narrative tradition. Because the account comes from her own experience, it remains valuable not only as dramatic personal testimony but also as a window into life, fear, and survival in the years after the Revolutionary War.
Harbison died in 1837, but her story continued to circulate in print and in regional history. Today she is remembered as a frontier woman whose life became part of the historical record because she endured extraordinary violence and left behind a vivid account of it.