Captured by a Shawnee raiding party in 1758, when she was a teenager, Mary Jemison was adopted into a Seneca family and lived within that culture until her death in 1833. Known in western New York State as the "White Woman of the Genesee," she became one of the best-known American women of the nineteenth century after she spent three days in autumn 1823 recounting her life to James Everett Seaver. The resulting publication, A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison (1824), was one of the best-selling books of the 1820s, as popular as the novels of James Fenimore Cooper. As Charles Delamater Vail has explained, "readers of the period literally wore out the copies of the little 16mo which were frequently carried in the pocket, and more frequently passed from hand to hand, so that only a few have survived." There are only twenty known copies of this edition...