Margaret Handley Pawley Erskine (28 February 1753–3 June 1842), Shawnee captive, was born in Pennsylvania. The names of her parents, who may have emigrated from Ireland, are not known. When she was a child, the Handley family moved to the Greenbrier settlement in western Virginia. They often retreated into frontier forts at times of raids by Virginia tribes. In 1777 Handley married John Pawley, who soon afterward traveled to Kentucky and claimed land there. Late in September 1779, in the company of five other families, including her husband's brother and sister-in-law, they and their young child left their residence, which lay in the area that in 1799 became Monroe County, to move to Kentucky. On the morning of the third day of their journey, about five miles from the mouth of the East River, five members of the Shawnee Tribe and a European man, who acted as an interpreter, attacked them. Pawley and her child were knocked from her horse. She fell to the ground unconscious. The Shawnee killed her child, brother-in-law, and another man and shot her husband in the chest. He believed that she was dead and escaped with the other survivors to Fort Wood, where he persuaded men to form a search party before he died of his wounds. The search party was unable to find Pawley or the Shawnee.
The Shawnee put Pawley and her sister-in-law on horses and carried them away with the supplies that they had seized. About two weeks later, they arrived at a Shawnee town, probably Piqua, on the Mad River about thirty miles from the later site of Springfield, Ohio. The village chief, Wa-ba-kah-kah-to, or White Bark, adopted Pawley into his family and named her Yellow Gold, for one of his deceased daughters. While living with the Shawnee, Pawley earned money and supplies by sewing for them and for the European men who visited the village. In May 1780 she gave birth to a son, whom she named John Pawley.
In August 1780 George Rogers Clark, who commanded the Illinois Regiment, attacked the Shawnee and burned their crops and villages, including Pawley's. She then moved with the tribe to the Sandusky Plains, where they built the village of McKees Town, near the site of Bellefontaine, Logan County, Ohio. Pawley was ill for eight weeks following the battle, and during the following winter the tribe was close to starvation and relied on game until the following year. About 1782 the Shawnee placed another captive, a young white boy named Jack Calloway, under Pawley's care. He remained with her until early in 1784, following White Bark's death. For a $200 ransom paid to White Bark's son, a trader obtained the release of Pawley and her son. They lived with another trader for a short time before traveling back to Virginia with a group of other released captives. Their month-long journey proved arduous because of a lack of food, but Pawley and her son returned to the Greenbrier settlement in the spring of 1784.
About 1785 Pawley married Michael Erskine. They lived initially at Walnut Grove, where she had four sons and one daughter and joined the Presbyterian Church. In 1809 and 1812 Erskine and her husband sold some land and a sawmill to their son Henry Erskine. Erskine's husband died during the summer of 1812, and she inherited most of the furniture and four enslaved workers for her use during her life. His will requested that their son Michael Erskine live with her and care for her until her death. The two sold Walnut Grove in 1825. Erskine was living with her son Henry Erskine and his family in Lewisburg early in the 1830s.
Late in life Erskine told the story of her captivity to her grandson Allen Taylor Caperton (later a member of the Confederate States Senate), who wrote it out in narrative form. The several manuscript versions that survive are so similar that they were undoubtedly derived from the original, first published in 1883. Editions of Erskine's narrative have been reprinted several times, including as a small book, Old Record of the Captivity of Margaret Erskine, 1779 (1912), that popularized her tale. One of Erskine's descendants wrote The Call of the Hawk (2005), a novel based on the story of her captivity.
Margaret Handley Pawley Erskine died on 3 June 1842 and was buried beside her second husband in Green Hill Cemetery, in Union, Monroe County.
Sources Consulted:
Brief account of interview with "Sarah" Erskine in Samuel Kercheval, History of the Valley of Virginia, 2d ed. (1850), 325–326; manuscript copies of narrative with birth date, birthplace, and variant death date of May 1842 (copied before 10 Aug. 1846) in Lyman C. Draper Papers, 8ZZ30, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison, Wis., and Erskine-Gordon-LeConte Papers (dated 8 July 1851), Tennessee Historical Society, Nashville, and another in private possession in 1996; narrative first printed (probably from Caperton's original) in Hardesty's Historical and Geographical Encyclopedia, Illustrated; Containing … Special History of the Virginias, Maps, and Histories of Greenbrier, Pocahontas, and Monroe Counties, West Virginia (1883), 371–373 (with first husband's name rendered as Paulee), and also printed in Virgil A. Lewis, History of West Virginia (1889), 600–612, in Old Record of the Captivity of Margaret Erskine, 1779 (1912), in John H. Moore, "A Captive of the Shawnees, 1779–1784," West Virginia History 23 (1962): 287–296, and with annotation in Anne Crabb, "'What Shall I Do Now?' The Story of the Indian Captivities of Margaret Paulee, Jones Hoy, and Jack Callaway," Filson Club History Quarterly 70 (1996): 363–404; Michael Erskine's will in Monroe Co. Wills and Inventories (1804–1823), 16–21; death date "in the 90th year of her age" on gravestone.
Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Maria Kimberly.
How to cite this page:
Maria Kimberly, "Margaret Handley Pawley Erskine (1753–1842)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2025 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Erskine_Margaret, accessed [today's date]).
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