“Instead of getting some instrument with which to push the white aside, Father did a curious thing. He carved out a step in the wall of snow and asked me to help him make another and another. He meant it to be my way to the outdoors, for he said, ‘There, now, there, and sure we have made a little step stool, a little snow ladder.’

“I must have been dressed for the cold, for he directly helped me put my foot into the first little step. ‘First this step, Mary,’ he said, and then the next and the next. One, two.’

“I climbed the few snow stairs, and suddenly the wall ended and there was a space between the snow and the top of our door, and I crawled out through that.

“Then I stood and looked out over all the snow on all the cold hills about our house. The fields and the trees stood white under the sun and the whiteness shone in the clear air.

“Then I laughed with relief to see Father’s head appear at the space through which I had come. He pushed something out that I can’t recall ever having seen before, a little sledge which he must have made as we slept, with a heavy rope at the front. Next, he dug his hands into the snow and started pulling himself out, squeezing through the small opening and slithering about on his stomach.

“We two had come up a little snow ladder which we had made ourselves. We had a small sledge. Having climbed the white dead-wall we left the smoky, dark air behind in the cabin: whatever hold it had on us seemed a thing that belonged to some fast-dissolving time and place.

“And I felt that all that lay outside was ours and that the way it lay was ready.”

THE WHITES prevailed upon some of Mary Jemison’s Seneca friends and family to sell their lands and relocate to the Buffalo Creek Reservation. In 1831, Mary sold her own tract and also moved to Buffalo Creek in order to be among her people.

She died on September 19, 1833.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THIS book is a work of fiction based on historical personages and events. Portraits of Mary, the Seneca, the blacks, the Shawnee, the whites, the French, and others in this book are not intended to re-create actual characters, races, or nations as they at one time existed. I invented freely and extensively.

My greatest debt is to the historical Mary Jemison/ Jamison. She gave me the bulk of my book’s plot: it was her life story, her life’s work. I am also grateful to her for telling her story to James Seaver; she knew he would write it down.