Indian Captivity: A True Narrative of the Capture of the Rev. O. M. Spencer by the Indians, In the Neighbourhood of Cincinnati

Cincinnati, Ohio, today is a metropolitan area with a population of over two million people.  In 1790, when nine-year-old Oliver Spencer set out for the area with his family from “New-Jersey,” it was only a two-year-old frontier settlement named Losantiville—although the name had been changed to Cincinnati by the time they arrived—and it was so sparsely settled that two natives of the Shawnee tribe were able to grab him and march him through what is now the heart of a busy metropolitan area without being seen by a single person, white or native.  This is Oliver’s story as it was originally published in 1835, told by himself in his own words, demonstrating once again the power of the first-person narrative.  It was nearly three years before Oliver was re-united with family members in New Jersey and two more years before he was re-united with his parents in Ohio.  The reader will wonder at the primitive state of what we now know as a major metropolitan area, and gasp at the casual cruelty of the native warriors who thought of a young boy as merely a slave and possession, and marvel at the adventures he survived as well as the fortuitous events that eventually led to Oliver’s repatriation.

Preparing old books for digital publication is a labor of love at Travelyn Publishing.  We hold our digital versions of public domain books up against any others with no fear of the comparison.  Our conversion work is meticulous, utilizing a process designed to eliminate errors, maximize reader enjoyment, and recreate as much as possible the atmosphere of the original book even as we are adding the navigation and formatting necessary for a good digital book.  While remaining faithful to a writer’s original words, and the spellings and usages of his era, we are not above correcting obvious mistakes.  If the printer became distracted after placing an ‘a’ at the end of a line and then placed another ‘a’ at the beginning of the next line (they used to do this stuff by hand you know!), what sort of mindless robots would allow that careless error to be preserved for all eternity in the digital version, too?  Not us.  That’s why we have the audacity to claim that our re-publications are often better than the originals.