Source:Brown, James Moore. Captives of Abb's Valley (1854)

Bibliographic Citation

Brown, James Moore, 1854. The captives of Abb's Valley: a legend of frontier life.

See also: Source:Brown, James Moore. The captives of Abb's Valley (1942) for a later revision of this work.

Description

From Archive Books Description:

Written in 1854 by the son of one of the captives, the story of Mary Moore's early life, capture and later return provides the reader with details of early pioneer life as well as its dangers. Both Mary and her brother James and their companion in captivity Martha Evans survived and left numerous descendants who intermarried with the Brown, Crow, Hummer, Morrison and Taylor families, among others.

Electronic Sources

Open Library

The copy used for the imaging of this work was obtained from the University of California. This particular copy lacked a title page, and the image begins with a frontice piece image, and the Table of Contents. The frontice piece is drawing illustrating the "James Moore farm", with the notation "Page 24". This implies that the image was taken from page 24 of the Brown, 1854; that page, however is completely filled with text. The frontice piece shown in this electronic copy may have come from another work, rebound into the original to replace the missing title page.

See also: Ancestry for the Brown and Woodworth 1942 editon of this work.

This work is currently (February 2008) available on CD from Archive Books

Publication History

This work was originally published in as an anonymous edition in 1854. It was well known that the author was James Moore Brown, the son of Mary Moore, one of the "captives" of the title. Authorship in bibliographic citaions of the work is normally attributed to Brown.

In 1942 William Bell Woodworth reprinted Browns original work, with substantial additional information. He copyrighted the work under his own name at this time, but left primacy of authorship as Brown. While most of the Woodworth additions are at the end of the work, the two sets of material were somewhat integrated so it is not always possible to tell what came from Brown, and what from Woodworth, without examining the two versions side by side.

Usage Tips

The Woodworth reprint of this work is of value simply because it made an otherwise rare work readily available to the public. Some caution should be exercised, however, in that the validity of some of the family relationships added by Woodworth have been called into question. As a son of one of the captives, Brown has the advantage of being a close contemporary of the relationships he described, and his treatment of family relations can be presumed to be reasonably accurate. Woodworth, however, wrote at a date considerably later than Moore, adding information that he thought to be correct, but which later research has been shown to be inaccurate.