This is the second of a series of posts introducing the five-part historical fiction novel Unbowed, which will be published in November 2026. All five parts are based on true events and real people – my ancestors. The first post described the outcome of the Battle of Dunbar in 1650 and one of its survivors, Malcolm MacCallum.
Ask any student of early American history about “frontier captivity narratives,” and they will likely point you to the famous 1704 raid on Deerfield, Massachusetts. The story of Eunice Williams—the Puritan minister’s daughter who was captured and refused to return to English society—became a literary sensation in the 1800s.
But history is a selective editor.
Further west, along the volatile, fluid borderlands of the Hudson River valley, a far more complex and terrifying theater of war was playing out. Outposts like Schenectady and Saratoga (the site of modern-day Schuylerville, New York) were the literal razor’s edge between the British and French empires. Yet, the brutal raids that shattered these communities, and the incredible cross-cultural stories of those who survived them, have been almost completely forgotten by the modern world.
In the mid-18th century, Saratoga wasn’t yet part of an historic battlefield—it was a vulnerable, isolated cluster of farms and mills carved out of an unforgiving wilderness. And on a freezing night in November 1745, that wilderness swallowed it whole.
The Night the Frontier Burned
During King George’s War, the French governor in Quebec unleashed a devastating strategy: la petite guerre. These were rapid, terrifyingly coordinated partisan strikes combining French colonial troupes de la marine with allied Indigenous warriors—including the Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) from the Catholic mission village of Kahnawake, just south of Montréal.
When the raiding party descended on the sleeping settlement of Saratoga on November 27, 1745, there was no time for defense. In a matter of hours, thirty houses were reduced to ash, the sawmills were destroyed, and more than thirty settlers were killed.
But for the sixty-odd survivors dragged into the black winter woods, the true ordeal was just beginning. Among them was the MacClure family. Their oldest son was killed in the initial onslaught, and the surviving father, John MacClure, along with wife Jane (or Janetje, in Colonial Dutch) and his six children were forced onto a grueling march north into New France as highly valuable imperial hostages.
Stolen Across the Border: Captivity and Adoption
To the modern imagination, frontier captivity is often depicted as a death sentence or a brutal prison camp. The reality was infinitely more complex, challenging everything history textbooks traditionally teach us about Colonial American and Canadian identity, particularly considering the multiethnic, multilingual landscape of the time (Haudenosaunee/Iroquois, Wyandot/Huron, Mohican, Wappinger, Dutch, German, English, Scottish, Irish, French…).
While John MacClure was marched to a bleak military barracks in the fortress town of Québec, his young daughters were sold to French-speaking families across Canada, while sons Andrew and Thomas were taken to the fortified longhouses of Kahnawake, across the St. Lawrence River from Montréal. They were not kept as slaves—they were washed in the river in a ritual cleansing, clothed in native attire, and adopted to replace warriors lost in battle.
The Price of Redemption
Meanwhile, in Québec, their father John was waging a quiet war of his own to reclaim his fractured family. A master blacksmith, John possessed a level of precision craftsmanship that the French authorities desperately needed.
To secure the leverage required to ransom his children from French estates and Mohawk longhouses, John did something unthinkable for a British subject: he abjured his public Protestant mask, and his wife Jane Finn revealed a hidden Irish-Catholic heritage that allowed them both to navigate French colonial society.
Piece by piece, child by child, John used his forge to buy back his family’s freedom. But the frontier had permanently altered them. When his sons finally walked out of the Kahnawake longhouses, they didn’t return to the British colonies. They embedded themselves into the French-Canadian soil as forgerons (blacksmiths), setting the stage for their descendants to weather the next century of imperial clashes and the fiery Patriote Rebellions of 1837 and 1838.
Rewriting the Frontier
The records of the raid on Old Saratoga were quickly buried beneath the shifting sands of subsequent wars. To the British clerks who eventually claimed Canada in 1763, names like MacClure were phoneticized, misspelled, or overwritten as Makluur or Mack Luer, flattening a complex saga of cultural adaptation into a static entry on a casualty list.
Part II of UNBOWED resurrects this forgotten borderland war. It explores the deep, uncomfortable truth of American and Canadian history: that survival often required shedding your skin, learning the language of your captors, and discovering that “identity” was the most fluid weapon of all.
UNBOWED: Five Generations of Captivity, Rebellion, and Survival launches on (US) Thanksgiving Day, 2026
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