Americans Recaptured: Progressive Era Memory of Frontier Captivity

It was on the frontier, where “civilized” men and women confronted the “wilderness,” that Europeans first became Americans—or so authorities from Frederick Jackson Turner to Theodore Roosevelt claimed. But as the frontier disappeared, Americans believed they needed a new mechanism for fixing their collective identity; and they found it, historian Molly K. Varley suggests, in tales of white Americans held captive by Indians.

For Americans in the Progressive Era (1890–1916) these stories of In...