My Captivity Among the Sioux Indians

Travelling to Idaho with an emigrant train from her home in Kansas, the nineteen-year-old Mrs. Kelly was captured west of Fort Laramie by a band of Oglalla Sioux on July 12, 1864, and held prisoner until December 12 of that year, when she was released at Fort Sully in the Dakota Territory... Her book is clearly one of the most distinguished examples of the last period of the captivity narrative... Fanny Kelly’s narrative is valuable not only because it is an intrinsically exciting firsthand account, rich in details of Indian life, told by a brave and intelligent woman; it is especially valuable because it expresses the tension between two conflicting nineteenth-century images: the Indian as savage aggressor and the Indian as hapless victim-- a tension which illustrate the uneasy mingling of hostility and guilt central to the whole American Frontier experience. --From the introduction by Jules Zanger, Southern Illinois University