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.
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