Follow The River by James Alexander Thom is about Mary Ingles gruesome but yet courageous tale of her remarkable 1,000 mile journey home after she had escaped form the captivity of the Shawnee Indians. Through Mary Ingles hard work and determination she proved that all obstacles big and small can be overcome.The book started out with a bloody massacre at Mary Ingles Virginia settlement in 1755. Mary Ingles was pregnant with her third child and twenty-four years of age when the Shawnee Indians came and kidnapped her, her two sons, her sister-in-law, and her neighbor. The journey to the Shawnee village lasted five weeks in the Virginia wilderness, and once the captives arrived at the village they were divided up amongst the Shawnee Indians, leaving Mary alone with no hope but to go home and make a new family with her husband Will Ingles. While in the village of the Shawnee Mary was able to make friends with an elderly Dutch woman who was a captive too, this elderly woman was to be Mary’s companion through the scary wilderness home. Mary and the old Dutch woman were unable to swim but knew that the Ohio River would lead them back home to freedom so they decided to make an escape from the heathen Indians and return home to civilization, not knowing the hardships that would fall on them at the beginning of winter. To start the journey the women had two blankets, one tomahawk, and the clothes that were on their backs, after a week into the trip they lost their shoes leaving them barefoot the rest of the way, and eventually they lost one blanket the tomahawk and their clothes. The two courageous women walked through freezing rivers and climbed up small cliffs for forty days, with hardly nothing to eat since everything was barren because of the winter, overall the two women walked 1,000 miles. Finally Mary was able to find her husband, but after thirteen years she was able to ransom for only one of her sons back and her sister-in-law, t...
