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Some of our earliest settlers’ stories are so
fantastic, they’re hard to believe. Take Mary Neely Spears, also
known as Granny Spears. At 19 she was kidnapped and enslaved by American
Indians until she escaped and was discovered by her brother several states
away more than two years later. She ended up near New Salem, Ill., where
she befriended Abraham Lincoln and became a natural healer.
Even Mary’s contemporaries considered her story
amazing. The tale appeared in one of the most popular national publications
of the time — Harper’s, as well as several other publications and possibly a
Tennessee textbook. Last fall a book based on Mary’s story, P.M.
Terrell’s Songbirds Are Free (Drake Valley Press), was published. Here then, is Mary’s much-abbreviated story as
told in the February 1868 Harper’s New
Monthly Magazine and the Past and Present of Menard County, Illinois (S.J. Clarke Publishing Co., 1905). The latter was written
by R.D. Miller, who says he was with Mary during her last days. In 1780, at the height of the Revolutionary War,
Mary’s family lived near Nashville, Tenn., in a fort for protection.
She and her father ventured outside one day to go to the river. Without
warning, two or three Indians attacked. They killed her father and scalped
him before dragging Mary off to their canoe. Mary feared that they’d kill her next, but
instead they took her to their camp, three days’ travel north, and
told her that she had to become a slave or a wife. She chose the former. Among other duties, Mary sewed apparel, hauled
timber, made bullets, and marched hundreds of miles with the Indians
through Kentucky, Indiana, and Michigan, all the way to Lake Huron. With a
knife she secretly carved her name in trees in case anyone was looking for
her. For a long time the Indians carefully watched Mary
and bound her hands at night to prevent her escape. Night was also the time
when they would dry scalps, including her father’s. Her captors would
“trim off the corners and cast them at her feet, [which] she would
collect together, make a hole in the ground with her hands, and bury them .
. . with her hands crossed and bound,” Miller wrote.
It’s no surprise that Mary detested Indians. Harper’s says she saw
them kill a captive’s infant, among other atrocities. “She
would never speak their language unless compelled by circumstances to use
it; and she used to say that the only favor she ever asked of them was that
she might be put to death,” the article says.
One winter most of the group, including Mary, caught
smallpox. As a result, Mary was blind for a week and a half. An older
Indian woman healed Mary using a poultice of prickly pear and bear oil.
That experience, and similar ones, would serve Mary well later in life. Two years after she was kidnapped, the Indians took
Mary and other captives to Detroit, where the British paid them for scalps.
However, sympathetic French living there helped Indians’ captives
escape; they spirited Mary away from the Indians and hid her for at least
two months. In the hope of finding a way home, Mary traveled to
Virginia, where she lived with a family for whom she worked. Meanwhile her
brother, who’d never stopped searching for her, was in Kentucky and
heard about a girl fitting her description. He traveled to Virginia, found
her, and brought her home.
When Mary was in her seventies, she, her husband
(George Spears), and their family moved to Clary’s Grove, immediately
west of New Salem.
Mary became a proficient natural healer, building on
skills she learned from the Indian women. “Medical practitioners were
very scarce in that region,” said Harper’s, “and her success soon made her so celebrated that
her aid was sought in every direction. One man was sent forty or fifty
miles to her for the cure of a white swelling [hip disease].”
One fan was Lincoln, according to Miller, who said
that he was present when Lincoln said farewell to Mary. “He turned
about and said: ‘Grandma, I am going to Springfield; maybe I’ll
never see you again;’ while he took her hand between his long-lean
hands, said ‘Good-bye — God bless you,’ and she returned
his salutation . . . when both stood for a moment while the tears trickled
down their cheeks.” Afterward, Mary told Miller that Lincoln was so
smart she “would not be surprised if he was president some
day.”
Mary died in 1852 at age 90. She’s buried in
Tallula’s Greenwood Cemetery.
Contact Tara McClellan McAndrew at TMcand22@aol.com.
This article appears in Jun 19-25, 2008.
