Tim Fillmon HMdb.org PhotoID=579339
Jenny (Jennie) Wiley Marker
The dramatic tale of Jenny Wiley’s capture by and escape from Native Americans has become a cornerstone of Kentucky history and lore. Yet, as is often the case when events lack reliable documentation, a story can assume a life of its own. As such, Wiley’s odyssey bears examination to see where fact ends and fancy begins.
This is one of the more generally accepted versions of her story.
The Raid
Shortly before dark on a dismal, rainy Oct. 1, 1789, a combined raiding party made up of a dozen or so members of the Cherokee, Delaware, Wyandot and Shawnee tribes broke into the Walker’s Creek, Virginia, frontier cabin of Thomas and Jenny Wiley. It apparently was a reprisal raid—payback for an earlier skirmish in which some of their fellow tribesmen had been killed. Their specific target was a locally renowned Native fighter named Matthias “Tice” Harman, whose cabin stood only a mile or so from the Wiley home, and whom the Indians feared and despised. In the growing gloom, they missed the Harman homestead and struck the Wileys’ cabin by mistake.
Tom Wiley reportedly had left early in the day to market his ginseng at the distant New River trading post, leaving his pregnant 29-year-old wife, five children, and Jenny’s younger brother in the cabin. Her brother-in-law, whose cabin was 2 miles away, came by to warn of having heard American Indian calls in the surrounding woods, strongly advising Jenny to gather her brood and leave immediately for her sister’s cabin. She had been weaving and, believing she and her family were safe from attack until nightfall, determined to remain at her loom a little longer. It would prove a disastrous decision.
After finishing her weaving, Jenny took her 15-month-old son in her arms and—with her other children and brother in tow—prepared to leave the cabin. At that moment, the raiding party burst in and, without preamble, tomahawked her brother and her other four children to death before her stunned eyes. After scalping them and setting fire to the cabin, the warriors took to the woods, driving the dazed and devastated Jenny along with them. Her only remaining children were the one in her arms and the one in her body.
Fearing pursuit, the warriors set a rapid pace to the north with Jenny, seven months pregnant and clutching her small son, struggling to keep up. Their ultimate objective was to cross the Ohio River and reach the safety of the Native towns on the far side. Over the course of the next several days, they forded several frigid, rain-swollen rivers and streams, including the Tug and the Big and Little Sandy, forcing their footsore, exhausted captive to wade and swim along with them. At one juncture, as Jenny watched in horror, they cut green sticks and fashioned them into hoops on which they stretched the scalps of her slain children. Shortly thereafter, Jenny’s small son took sick, and—fearing that his cries would give away their location—her captors dashed out his brains against a tree.
A rescue party led by Harman had set out in pursuit immediately upon finding the small bodies inside the charred cabin. For days, Harman and his men followed the Natives’ trail, at one point coming upon and burying Jenny’s recently slain child. Ultimately, they lost all sign of the raiders and were forced to turn back.
When the warriors were not on the move, they kept Jenny bound with rawhide tethers. On more than one occasion, her fate was strongly debated between the two chiefs in the band—a Shawnee and a Cherokee. While the Cherokee leader argued for killing her, the Shawnee chief, who claimed ownership of Jenny, was more inclined to show mercy. Fortunately for Jenny, her champion’s argument prevailed.
The party ultimately reached the Ohio River, where Jenny went into labor, prematurely giving birth to a son. Her captors were surprisingly supportive, providing her and the child with nourishment. Three months into her captivity, however, the Shawnee chief informed her that the time had come for the boy to undergo a tribal test of fortitude. He tied the child to a piece of bark and floated it in a swift-running creek. When the boy felt the cold water, he began to cry, failing the test and dooming him in the warriors’ eyes. Although Jenny attempted to protect her baby, one of her captors tomahawked and scalped him.
Throughout her captivity, Jenny was made to perform constant labor—cooking meals, carrying water and gathering firewood. Over time, her captors grew less concerned with keeping her bound, and one night, she made her bid for freedom. Slipping out of camp, she followed rivers and streams until she reached the Levisa Fork of the Big Sandy. On the far bank stood a blockhouse, and her shouts brought men from the settlement to the river’s edge. The fort’s canoes had been taken on a hunting trip, so the men built a rudimentary raft, floated it across the swift current, and brought Jenny to safety just minutes before the pursuing Natives arrived. Denied their quarry, they withdrew into the forest.
Jenny soon was reunited with Tom, and their lives began anew, with the subsequent births of five more children. The story of her capture and escape spread rapidly by word of mouth throughout the frontier settlements.
A Search for the Facts
The Jenny Wiley saga has gripped the popular imagination, particularly of Kentuckians, since the late 18th century. As biographer Todd Pack relates, for years after the events, “When a mother cried, ‘Jenny Wiley!’ her children came running. Jenny’s name reminded them to ‘stay safe; stay close.’ ” Since the capture and escape were not consigned to paper in their entirety for more than 100 years, the details survived largely through oral tradition, passed down from one generation to the next. After such a long time, the story has attained a life of its own, until it is nearly impossible to determine the difference between fact and folklore.
There was, indeed, a Jenny Wiley. She was born Jenny (or Jean or Jennie) Sellards in 1760, possibly in Pennsylvania. Shortly after her birth, Jenny’s father, Hezekiah, moved his family to Walker’s Creek in Virginia’s Upper Clinch River Valley. It was in this frontier region, some 19 years later, that Jenny met and married an Irish immigrant named Thomas Wiley. The young couple built a cabin near what is now Bland, Virginia, and began a life based on resilience and self-reliance.
Little is known of Tom Wiley’s early history, although it can be surmised that he left his native Ireland during the mid- to late 18th century surge of Scots-Irish immigration to the New World. Tom settled in Virginia in 1774, and the inscription on a recently erected memorial stone indicates that he served in the 1st Virginia Regiment during the American Revolution.
If Tom Wiley’s intention was to carve a life from the wilderness, he had chosen the best possible mate. As a son would later describe her, Jenny “had coal black hair. She was strong and capable of great exertion and endurance. She was of fine form, and her movements were quick. Her eyes were black with heavy overhanging brows. She was above medium height. Her face was pleasant and indicated superior intelligence. She was persistent and determined in any matter she decided to accomplish. She was familiar with woodcraft and was a splendid shot with a rifle.”
Jenny was, in fact, seized by Natives when Tom was away from the cabin on or around the first of October 1789. We know this from a letter dated Oct. 20 from Montgomery County Lieutenant Walter Crockett to Virginia Gov. Beverley Randolph. It reads, “On the first of this instant A party of Indians took one Willey’s [sic] family, killed and scalped foure [sic] of his children and took his wife and her youngest child prisoners.” She remained a prisoner until her escape, by which time she had lost her two remaining children.
Jenny’s capture was far from unique. For centuries, America’s unsettled lands beckoned to those in search of fortune, adventure or simply the chance of a fresh start. However, life on the vast frontier was nothing if not perilous for the westering immigrants, with atrocities committed by both the Natives and the Europeans. According to biographer Pack, although original source material is understandably scant, it can be estimated that the settlers seized by Natives during America’s four centuries of westward expansion numbered in the tens of thousands.
The annals of the settlement of the nation’s borderlands are rife with tales of women stolen from their homes and families and introduced into lives of captivity in the various tribes. It often was a brutal life for a female captive, and many died as a result. Some had better luck than others and were traded or ransomed back to their families. Others staged daring escapes, preferring to face the elements rather than live among their captors. And there were some who simply accepted their lot, making the tribal lifestyle their own.
As documented in a July 4, 1790, letter to Gov. Randolph from Russell County Lieutenant J.D. Smith, Jenny Wiley’s life as a prisoner of the Natives lasted some five or six months, although the length of her captivity has been wildly exaggerated over time. One of her sons, born well after her return, erroneously claimed that she had remained with the band for nearly a year, as does a Johnson County, Kentucky, historical marker. William C. Pendleton’s The History of Tazewell County and Southwest Virginia, 1948-1920, published in 1920, has her living among the Natives for three years.
In addition to presenting a garbled, grossly inaccurate version of the attack on the Wiley cabin, Pendleton makes statements regarding Jenny’s experience that are patently false. In one sentence alone, he not only misquotes the date of her escape by more two years, but he also gives her a young traveling companion: “In September 1792, she made her escape in company with Samuel Lusk, a youth some sixteen years old.” Pendleton has the pair fleeing 50 miles down the Scioto River in a canoe that Lusk had secreted for the escape, then taking refuge in a village of friendly French immigrants. A youth named Samuel Lusk was, in fact, captured by the Shawnee tribe but a full two years after Jenny Wiley’s bid for freedom. One thing is historically certain: When Jenny fled, she fled alone and without a boat.
To further muddy the waters, Jenny’s story often was confused with that of another captured pioneer woman. Mary Draper Ingles, who has been touted as the first white woman to settle in the “Can-tuck-ee” wilderness, was taken by Shawnees in 1755, a generation earlier than Jenny’s abduction. She soon eluded her captors in what is now Boone County, Kentucky. Unfortunately, when recounting the saga of Jenny Wiley’s dramatic escape, various second- and third-generation storytellers inadvertently melded the two women’s accounts.
In his old age, Jenny’s son, Adam Brevard “Vard” Wiley, told his version of his late mother’s story to a young schoolteacher, who recorded it years later as it was related—including the dates—with no thought given to the vagaries of memory, the biases of the narrator, or the passage of time. “In all matters concerning Mrs. Jenny Wiley,” the teacher dutifully wrote, “I have followed the account given me by her son … I believe it was sound judgment to do so.”
Considering it was not until a century after her escape that Jenny’s story was committed to paper from the “recollections” of people who were not yet born when she was captured, it must be assumed that confusion and embellishments played significant roles in what one chronicler has termed the “most romantic history” in the region’s settlement. As the conflation of Jenny’s, Lusk’s and Ingles’ experiences indicate, the significance and impact of oral tradition cannot be overstated. With the passage of time, all details that might interfere with the telling of a good tale get winnowed out as new “facts” are introduced, until the account is burnished and made suitable for optimal dramatic presentation.
This is not to minimize Jenny’s ordeal. It was, without question, unimaginably horrific. To witness the violent deaths and desecration of all six of her children is a horror too terrible to contemplate, nor did it leave her mentally unaffected. According to the son of a family friend, who knew Jenny in later life, “[S]he had little mind since her return from captivity.”
After her escape, Jenny returned to Walker’s Creek, where she and Tom soon started a new family. Ten years later, they moved to the Levisa Fork of the Big Sandy, near the scene of her rescue, where they lived out their remaining years. Tom died in 1810, leaving Jenny a widow until her death in 1831 at 71. She lies on a hill in the small town of River (Johnson County) under a state-financed monument erected in 1965. The site of Tom’s grave is lost to history. In 2005, a basic stone marker was placed facing Jenny’s monument, carved with his name, birth and death dates, and Revolutionary War service.
Various novels, plays and purported biographies have been written about Jenny’s ordeal. Today, a stream she supposedly followed in her bid for freedom bears her name, as do the Jenny Wiley State Resort Park and Keeneland Race Course’s Jenny Wiley Stakes horse race run each April. Prestonsburg hosts the annual Jenny Wiley Festival and is home to the Jenny Wiley Theatre. The Jenny Wiley Association welcomes both relatives and non-descendants in their mission to preserve her history, and—in the words of chronicler Pack—“[H]er name has appeared on everything from a car dealership to a flower shop.”
Part fact and part fable, Jenny Wiley’s place is vouchsafed in the annals and folklore of Kentucky.