Mary Jemison (Deh-he-wä-nis) (1743 – September 19, 1833) was a Scots-Irish colonial frontierswoman in Pennsylvania and New York, who became known as the "White Woman of the Genesee."

As a young girl, she was captured and adopted into a Seneca family, assimilating to their culture, marrying two Native American men in succession, and having children with them.

During the French and Indian War, in spring 1755, Jemison at age 12 was captured with most of her family in a Shawnee raid in what is now Adams County, Pennsylvania.

They "squatted" on territory that had been purchased by the Penn family in 1736 from chiefs of the Iroquois Confederacy, six nations that were based in central and western New York.

En route to French-controlled Fort Duquesne (present-day Pittsburgh), the Shawnee killed Mary's mother, father, and siblings, and ritually scalped them.

Sheninjee took her on a 700-mile (1,100 km) journey to the Sehgahunda Valley along the Genesee River in present-day Western New York state.

As a widow, Mary and her child were taken in by Sheninjee's clan relatives; she made her home at Little Beard's Town (where present-day Cuylerville, New York later developed).

She married again, to a Seneca named Hiokatoo, and together they had seven children: Nancy, Polly, Betsey, Jane, John, Thomas, and Jesse.

She and others in the Seneca town helped supply Joseph Brant (Mohawk) and his Iroquois warriors from various nations, who fought the rebel colonists.

After the war, the British ceded their holdings east of the Mississippi River to the United States, without consulting their Native American allies.

When she was given her liberty, she decided to stay with the Senecas, because her eldest warrior son was not allowed to go with her and, mostly, she feared her relatives "... would despise [my Indian children] if not myself; and treat us as enemies; or, at least with a degree of cold indifference, which I thought I could not endure.

[1] Jemison's heirs later changed their surname to "Jimerson" and established the community of Jimersontown on the Allegany Indian Reservation.

Extremely fatigued, and very hungry, we were compelled to lie upon the ground, without supper or a drop of water to satisfy the cravings of our appetites.

Each of us, being very hungry, partook of this bounty of the Indians, except father, who was so much overcome with his situation, so much exhausted by anxiety and grief, that silent despair seemed fastened upon his countenance, and he could not be prevailed upon to refresh his sinking nature by the use of a morsel of food.

Toward evening, we arrived at the border of a dark and dismal swamp, which was covered with small hemlocks or some other evergreen, and various kinds of bushes, into which we were conducted; and having gone a short distance, we stopped to encamp for the night.

Here we had some bread and meat for supper; but the dreariness of our situation, together with the uncertainty under which we all labored, as to our future destiny, almost deprived us of the sense of hunger, and destroyed our relish for food.

As soon as I had finished my supper, an Indian took off my shoes and stockings, and put a pair of moccasins on my feet, which my mother observed; and believing that they would spare my life, even if they should destroy the other captives, addressed me, as near as I can remember, in the following words: 'My dear little Mary, I fear that the time has arrived when we must be parted for ever.

During this time, the Indians stripped the shoes and stockings from the little boy that belonged to the woman who was taken with us, and put moccasins on his feet, as they had done before on mine.

A number of times in the night, the little boy begged of me earnestly to run away with him, and get clear of the Indians; but remembering the advice I had so lately received, and knowing the dangers to which we should be exposed, in traveling without a path and without a guide, through a wilderness unknown to us, I told him that I would not go, and persuaded him to lie still till morning.

My suspicion as to the fate of my parents proved too true; for soon after I left them they were viciously tomahawked to death and scalped, together with Robert, Matthew, Betsey, and the woman and her two children, and mangled in the most shocking manner After a hard day's march we encamped in a thicket, where the Indians made a shelter of boughs, and then built a good fire to warm and dry our benumbed limbs and clothing; for it had rained some through the day.