Howling Wilderness: The Indian Captivity of Ollie Spencer

Colonel Oliver Spencer was a Revolutionary War hero forced by post-war poverty to homestead in the far West, in the Ohio Valley. This was a dangerous proposition, since Native Americans were numerous and still in possession of the land. In this true story, the American government tried several times to wrest the land in Ohio from the Indians, but the natives spectacularly defeated the first of the military expeditions sent against them. Then Wapawaqua, an Iroquois living with Shawnee Indians, kidnapped the Colonel’s son, ten-year-old Ollie Spencer, as the boy returned home from a Fourth of July celebration at Fort Washington in Cincinnati in 1792. This begins the boy’s journey to becoming Indian while living with an Iroquois medicine woman and spiritualist, before his eventual rescue through diplomatic means with the aid of President Washington. Even then, the boy’s adventure was not over as he began a circuitous and dangerous journey home. Finally, we learn how Ollie and his captors spent the rest of their lives, with the natives eventually fighting on the American side in the War of 1812 and their journey to a reservation in Kansas.