Benjamin Franklin wondered how it was that
When an Indian Child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our Customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and makes one Indian Ramble with them, there is no perswading him ever to return. [But] when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and lived a while among them, tho’ ransomed by their Friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a Short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first good Opportunity of escaping again into the Woods, […] whence there is no reclaiming them.
[…]
Children were not the only reluctant freedmen. “Several women eloped in the night, and ran off to join their Indian friends.” Among them undoubtedly were some of the English women who had married [Native American] men and borne them children, and then had been forced by the English victory either to return with their half-breed children to a country of strangers, full of prejudice against [Native Americans], or to risk escaping under English guns to their husbands and adopted culture. For Bouquet had “reduced the Shawanese and Delawares etc. to the most Humiliating Terms of Peace,” boasted Gen. Thomas Gage. “He has Obliged them to deliver up even their Own Children born of white women.”
But even the victorious soldier could understand the dilemma into which these women had been pushed. When Bouquet was informed that the English wife of an [American] chief had eloped in the night with her husband and children, he “requested that no pursuit should be made, as she was happier with her Chief than she would be if restored to her home.”¹⁹
Although most of the returned captives did not try to escape, the emotional torment caused by the separation from their adopted families deeply impressed the colonists. The [Native Americans] “delivered up their beloved captives with the utmost reluctance; shed torrents of tears over them, recommending them to the care and protection of the commanding officer.” One young woman “cryed and roared when asked to come and begged to Stay a little longer.”
“Some, who could not make their escape, clung to their savage acquaintance at parting, and continued many days in bitter lamentations, even refusing sustenance.” Children “cried as if they should die when they were presented to us.” With only small exaggeration an observer on the Muskingum could report that “every captive left the Indians with regret.”²⁰
Further reading: The European and the Indian: Essays in the ethnohistory of Colonial North America
Beyond Geography: the western spirit against the wilderness
Settling with the Indians