“We all need inspiration; inspiration is contagious.”
– James Thom, forward to Angels Along the River
This story was originally published in the September 2021 issue of Wonderful West Virginia. To subscribe, visit wonderfulwv.com.
Written by J. Kendall Perkinson
Photography courtesy of Alchetron.com
Two decades before the United States declared independence from Great Britain, the Americas endured a long war between the colonies of the British and the French, with Appalachia serving as a significant region of conflict.
The French and Indian War (1754–1763) was so named for the various native American tribes that allied to both sides, but especially to the vastly outnumbered French colonies. The war began in earnest when a 22-year-old George Washington ambushed a French patrol in what is now Fayette County, Pennsylvania. What followed was nine years of bloodshed on behalf of monarchies that would soon be obsolete in North America.
Mary Draper Ingles was a pioneer living at that time on a small outpost in present-day Blacksburg, Virginia. One year after the war began, a group of Shawnee warriors fighting for the French raided the settlement, killing five people, in what became known as the Draper’s Meadow massacre. Among the dead were Ingles’ mother and her sister-in-law’s baby. Five others were captured, including Mary Ingles and her two sons.
The Shawnee burned the settlement, left the decapitated head of an elderly man with a neighbor, and journeyed with their hostages to a tribal village in Big Bone Lick, Kentucky, south of present-day Cincinnati. Along the way, Ingles was separated from her sons, who were “adopted” by Shawnee families.
As a Shawnee slave, Ingles spent much of her time making salt—a long process of filtering and boiling saline water until only the crusty residue on the bottom remained. After scraping up the salty grit, she would start the process all over again. The method is slow and arduous, requiring 500 to 600 gallons of brine for every bushel of salt produced.
Two and a half months after her abduction, Ingles and another female captive of Dutch or possibly German descent headed out into the woods on the pretense of gathering food—but secretly fled the tribe. All they had in their possession were the moccasins on their feet, a tomahawk which they soon lost, a knife, and two light blankets.
The harrowing, 500-mile winter journey home through mountain wilderness—entirely by foot—is now the stuff of legend.
Ingles correctly reasoned that, if she followed the rivers east, she would eventually make it back home. The two women walked for more than 40 wintry days through the mountains, barely surviving on pawpaws, wild grapes, walnuts, frogs, and whatever else they could scavenge along the way. At one point, they settled for a rotting deer head left by a native hunter.
The journey followed the Ohio, Kanawha, and New rivers, along and beyond the New River Gorge, through the heart of what became West Virginia. At least once during the journey, the starving Dutch woman attempted to kill Ingles to eat her. Ingles escaped the woman’s attack, getting far enough away to cover herself with branches and leaves, remaining silent and hidden as her pursuer passed by.
Forty-three days after she first escaped, Ingles was discovered lying in a cornfield 20 miles from her home, barely alive. According to one account, the unimaginable trauma of the preceding months had turned her hair completely white. She was only 23 years old.
Follow the River
The truly heroic story of Mary Ingles—especially in its full details not covered here—has awed and inspired successive generations of Americans. The first to hear and reproduce it was Ingles’ own son, John Ingles, who was born after her return. He recorded her retelling of the tale in an 1824 manuscript kept on file at the University of Virginia and edited by descendants in the short 1969 book titled Escape from Indian Captivity. Her great-grandson John P. Hale kept the story alive again in his 1886 book, Trans-Allegheny Pioneers: Historical Sketches of the First White Settlements West of the Alleghenies.
But Ingles’ story was first made available to a wider audience with the publication in 1981 of a historical fiction novel by James Alexander Thom titled Follow the River. The book was a national bestseller, and the response was electrifying.
Thom received hundreds of letters from readers. The success prompted his appearance at lectures and book signings, at which readers constantly approached him with heartfelt thanks for his retelling of the story. Cancer patients and their families told him that they had read and re-read the book to bolster their courage. Men told him that they never realized how strong women could be until they read of Mary Ingles’ toughness. Women told him the story had cured them of self-pity, and that they would never whine again. At one event, a scarred and toothless woman who had a particularly difficult life explained that reading Ingles’ story had helped her overcome suicidal thoughts.
Doug Wood, a long time organizer with the West Virginia Scenic Trails Association, also read the book at that time. It’s hard, in his view, to overestimate the effect on readers. “The story just spread like wildfire,” he says. “Suddenly, people who had never heard of Mary Ingles are reading the book and recommending it to their friends. She was nobody fancy. Not well-known. She was a lowly frontier settler, living off the land. All of the sudden the French and Indian War comes along, and she’s sucked into the vortex of war.”
In Fayetteville, a chapter of the WVSTA calling itself the Mary Ingles Trail Club had already formed with a vision of preserving her legacy. The group would soon find itself closer to the spirit of Ingles than they could have anticipated.
Retracing Steps
Several years after Thom’s historical fiction introduced Mary Ingles’ account to mainstream consumers in 1981, an Indiana woman named Eleanor Lahr was so taken with the story that she determined to retrace the pioneer’s footsteps herself. Lahr was 50 when she hiked the trail in 1987—more than twice as old as Ingles had been during her escape. But her decision to recreate Ingles’ journey with a 43-day trek through the mountains reignited the inspiration that had preserved the story thus far.
Newspapers and television outlets widely reported the journey, and Lahr received an outpouring of support from folks all along the route that mirrored the excitement surrounding Thom’s book.
“Everywhere she went, people came out of the woodwork,” Wood says. “They were saying, ‘Hey, can I give you a sandwich? Can I walk with you? Where are you staying tonight?’ It turned into something she didn’t expect it to turn into.”
At the time Lahr made her way through the New River Gorge area of West Virginia, few riverside improvements had been made to the area, and the terrain then was even more difficult than it is today. Members of the Fayetteville Mary Ingles Trail Club sprang into action, finding Lahr along her route and guiding her through the gorge.
“That’s where I had a chance to walk with her,” Wood explains. “She was a wonderful, friendly, effervescent person, and absolutely taken with the story of Mary Ingles. She had truly studied and thought about what it was like for Mary.”
Eleanor Lahr wrote her own book about retracing Ingles’ footsteps—Angels Along the River, published in 2011— containing one chapter for each day of the trek. Perhaps more importantly for West Virginians, the renewed attention surrounding Ingles gave the West Virginia Scenic Trails Association a springboard for creating a trail in her honor.
A Path Through the Woods
Since Lahr’s journey, West Virginia has developed 14 miles of trail in Kanawha State Forest and seven miles of trail on the property of Appalachian Power Company bearing the name of Mary Ingles. Given her historical importance to the region, public entities were relatively easy to get on board. The power company took much longer to agree.
“We were dead in the water for quite some time,” Wood says.
A dozen years after they were first approached, Appalachian Power got back to the WVSTA about the trail in the hopes that its construction would make them eligible for wetland mitigation credits. As it turned out, the trail did not provide those credits, but the company went along with the plan anyway.
Wood began to suspect that the near-magical inspiration of Ingles’ story had turned the tide again when, at the dedication ceremony, a power company administrator spoke about being a descendant of James Patton, a colonial militia captain killed at Draper’s Meadow.
“When he started talking about being descended from Patton and talking about details of the story, I knew he had something to do with it,” Wood says. “Oftentimes, that’s how it works. The story hits a chord with someone who can make a decision.”
Seeking the Inspired
The Mary Draper Ingles Trail is still technically under construction. Doug Wood and other members of the WVSTA are constantly seeking people who find the same inspiration that has brought Ingles’ story into the public consciousness.
“Trail-building with volunteer groups is an ongoing thing,” Wood says. “There is always going to be a need for a strong volunteer core group to work on the trail. You’ll have any number of people who want to walk the trail, but very few who really see the benefit enough to be a part of the work. Those are the ones that make the difference.”
Inspired people of all skills can advance Ingles’ legacy by contributing anything from GPS map work to brush clearing to bridge construction to the Mary Draper Ingles Trail project. West Virginians who want to join this ongoing journey can contact the MITB at its website, www.wvscenictrails.org/mitb, or by following the Mary Draper Ingles Trail Facebook page.