In 1758 a Shawnee raiding party captured Mary Jemison, a 16 year old Irish immigrant living in Pennsylvania. The raiders killed her family and took her prisoner. Eventually her captors gave her to a Seneca family as compensation for a son lost in battle. She lived into her eighties, and despite several offers of freedom, she remained with her adopted people. Jemison's real life experience is the basis for St Paul native Deborah Larsen's novel "The White". She heard the story shortly after moving to Pennsylvania to teach at Gettysburg College. She told Minnesota Public Radio's Euan Kerr, she tracked down an oral history of Mary's story taken down by a local doctor, but she thought it was rather stilted.