notwithstanding her children and associates were all Indians, yet it was
found that she possessed an uncommon share of hospitality, and that her
friendship was well worth courting and preserving. Her house was the
stranger's home; from her table the hungry were refreshed;--she made the
naked as comfortable as her means would admit of; and in all her actions,
discovered so much natural goodness of heart, that her admirers increases
in proportion to the extension of her acquaintance, and she became
celebrated as the friend of the distressed. She was the protectress of the
homeless fugitive, and made welcome the weary wanderer. Many still live to
commemorate her benevolence towards them, when prisoners during the war,
and to ascribe their deliverance to the mediation of "The White Woman."

The settlements increased, and the whole country around her was inhabited
by a rich and respectable people, principally from New-England, as much
distinguished for their spirit of inquisitiveness as for their habits of
industry and honesty, who had all heard from one source and another a part
of her life in detached pieces, and had obtained an idea that the whole
taken in connection would afford instruction and amusement.

Many gentlemen of respectability, felt anxious that her narrative might be
laid before the public, with a view not only to perpetuate the remembrance
of the atrocities of the savages in former times, but to preserve some
historical facts which they supposed to be intimately connected with her
life, and which otherwise must be lost.

Forty years had passed since the close of the Revolutionary war, and
almost seventy years had seen Mrs. Jemison with the Indians, when Daniel
W. Banister, Esq. at the instance of several gentlemen, and prompted by
his own ambition to add something to the accumulating fund of useful
knowledge, resolved, in the autumn of 1823, to embrace that time, while