Mary Whitmoyer ¹

  Research Notes:

From http://www.colcohist-gensoc.org/Essays/whitmoyer_saga.htm
(provided by http://wc.rootsweb.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?op=GET&db=vanalstine&id=I41155):
When the area in the Forks of the Susquehanna was opened to settlement in 1769, one of the pioneer settlers was George Whitmoyer, of Lancaster County. He was probably descended from Peter Witmer, one of three brothers from the Swiss canton of Zurich who came to Philadelphia in 1733. In about 1772 George brought his family to the headwaters of Chillisquaque Creek in what is now Madison Township. They settled in the valley along Mud Creek in modern Jerseytown, built a cabin and made a life in the wilderness. By 1780 Peter and his wife (née Sheets) had nine children: Sarah (Sally) 17, Philip (the oldest son, probably 15), Catharine 14, Ann 12, Mary 11, Peter 8, George 6, John 4, and an infant.

Mary Among the Delawares

After the "Massacre" at the Whitmoyer cabin, the Delaware Indians with Mary (age 11) and John (age 4) rode to far western Pennsylvania to their village along the Allegheny River. There Mary was adopted by an older Delaware woman and remained seven years; John was adopted into a different family in the same village. Mary learned the language and many of the skills of her adoptive mother; in particular, the woman was a noted healer and herb-woman, and Mary learned the secrets of finding medicinal plants and preparing all sorts of salves and potions. She learned, also, to grow and prepare "Indian" foods and to locate many kinds of edibles in the forest, as well as to hunt small game, process skins to make soft leather, and generally to live in the wilderness as a Native American.

Although living with different families, Mary and John were able to see and comfort one another frequently. After four years, however, John was sold away one morning to a British officer; Mary, unaware at the time of John's departure, was heart-broken when she was told. She had a burning desire to find her little brother, but was helpless to leave the village. Three years later, however, after two tough years of scarce food, Mary's Delaware group decided to journey to Detroit; they had heard that British soldiers there would provide food for them. Mary was eager to go, for she had somehow formed the idea that John had been taken to Detroit.

The clan journeyed by canoe down the Allegheny and the Ohio River to the Muskingum, north up that river to its western headwaters, and then by foot to Detroit. There the Delawares exchanged Mary to the British for desperately-needed food supplies. While Mary, now a young woman of eighteen, was sad to leave her adoptive mother, she was delighted at the chance she saw to search among the British at Fort Detroit for her brother, John. In exchange for the food provided to the clan, they "sold" captive Mary to the British; a British officer at the Fort arranged for Mary to become an indentured servant for one year to a French-Canadian settler family at their log home north of Detroit.

Mary entered this year of servitude gladly, for after twelve months she would be free to search for her siblings. She relearned white people's ways of life, along with the French language, and proved useful to the settlers with her knowledge of "Indian" medicine.

Near the end of Mary's year of service, a German Lutheran pastor came to the cabin one day looking for her. He had been asked to help locate the Whitmoyer children by their uncle, Jacob Sheets, their mother's brother. Sheets was a Loyalist from upstate New York who, at the end of the Revolutionary War, like thousands of other Loyalists had been declared a traitor by the United States and had his property confiscated, and so he moved to Canada. The British awarded land grants to these Loyalists, and Sheets claimed a tract along the St. Lawrence River at the Long Sault Rapids, some five hundred miles east of Detroit.

Although her year's service was not quite up, Mary's master let her leave with Pastor Schmidt for the long journey eastward. The two traveled in a huge canoe with "voyageurs" carrying furs to Montreal; down the Detroit River, the whole length of Lake Erie, a portage around Niagara Falls, and then down the length of Lake Ontario they went. Although Mary didn't know it at the time, they passed close by the site on the shore of Lake Ontario where her brother John would later homestead. Mary hoped to hear news of John at Fort Niagara, but the canoe went right past and didn't stop there.

When they finally arrived at the Long Sault, she was welcomed by her uncle Sheets; gradually she learned the German language and became one of his family. At the time she arrived, food was extremely scarce because of a severe summer drought and a subsequent harsh winter, the period known later as the Hungry Year. Mary was able to teach the pioneers how to find edible roots and other food in the forest, and saved many from starvation. She quickly became known also as a "doctor," and though she had no knowledge of Western medicine she is remembered as the "first woman doctor" of that region.

She married settler Henry Hoople, who had lived near the Sheets family in upstate New York and migrated with other Loyalists to Canada. Henry and Mary lived for some time with his brother John Hoople in his cabin beside Hoople's Creek, but finally they built their own home in the woods nearby, a comfortable farmhouse which still stands near Osnabruck, Ontario. Henry and Mary had twelve children, eleven of whom lived to adulthood and had families of their own.

During the War of 1812 a crucial battle happened at the site of John Hoople's cabin along the Creek and involved both families. American troops under General Wilkinson had crossed into Canada and were descending the St. Lawrence to attack Montreal; John and Henry and some of Henry's older sons were in the Loyalist militia which mustered to fight the invaders. On November 10th, an American cavalry troop came downriver in advance of the army to try to seize supplies at the town of Cornwall. John's wife took her younger children and the family's cows back in the woods to Mary and Henry's cabin; the militia meanwhile, some 1,300 strong, set up an ambush just across Hoople's Creek from John's home. A sharp gunbattle ensued, with the Americans setting up two small cannon in John's front yard to fire across the creek ? where John himself, his sons and his brother Henry were among the Canadians under fire! Fortunately, none of the Hooples were wounded, and the Americans soon were forced to retreat after a defeat the next day.

Years later, one of Mary's nine sons, William, became a prosperous merchant in New York City; on a business trip to Toronto in 1851, he happened to hear of a man at Niagara named John Whitmore, who had once been an Indian captive. Sure enough, he learned upon investigation that this was indeed his uncle, still alive and living at the other end of Lake Ontario from the Long Sault. William went to Niagara-on-the-Lake, visited his uncle, and arranged for Uncle John to take a steamer down the lake to visit his sister Mary. News of the visit caused something of a sensation in the Loyalist community along the St. Lawrence. The two elderly people, brother and sister, met again after a separation that had lasted seventy years!