The Unredeemed Captive Quotes

However, neither process nor project will go as smoothly as the colonists hope… at some deeper (mostly unacknowledged) level, there will be growing worry that the process might reverse itself—so as to make the currents of change run the opposite way. Instead of their civilizing the wilderness (and its savage inhabitants), the wilderness might change, might uncivilize, them. This they will feel an appalling prospect, a nightmare to resist and suppress by every means possible.

This, indeed, goes far toward explaining the extraordinary popularity of captivity narratives, from the last quarter of the seventeenth century to the beginning of the twentieth. Generation after generation of readers turned to such writings with a special—and intense—curiosity. What was it like for you, on the other side of the frontier? How much, and in what ways, were you changed? Were the changes personally compromising? Did you accept them willingly, or even seek them out? Can we trust you now?