The Indian Captive / A narrative of the adventures and sufferings of Matthew Brayton in his thirty-four years of captivity among the Indians of north-western America

A first-person account recounts a young boy’s disappearance from a frontier household and the thirty-four years he lived in Native communities of the northwestern interior. It opens with the initial alarm, searches, and family anguish, then proceeds chronologically through capture, cultural immersion, survival, and repeated hardships. The narrative blends episodic adventures, travel and conflict, and detailed observations of daily life and cross-cultural encounters, organized into chapters and supported by witness testimony and documentary claims, while reflecting on identity, endurance, and the long effects of living between Indigenous and settler worlds.