John H. Froehlich Ma-con-a-quah — Frances Slocum Oil on Canvas ©SMPA

Ma-con-a-quah and Frances Slocum were two names given to the same person. To those who knew the woman as the daughter of Quaker Jonathan Slocum, a five year old child kidnapped by Delaware Indians in 1778, she would have been Frances Slocum. To her husband, a Miami Indian Chief, her four children and three grandchildren she would have been known as Ma-con-a quah. 

After nearly sixty years of endless searching for their sister, the Slocum siblings finally found their long lost sister. Over the years they had unknowingly been within only miles of Frances, yet it was a complete stranger who would lead them to her. Colonel George Ewing sought refuge from a storm in an Indian cabin where he was intrigued by Ma-con-a-quah’s uncharacteristically light features. She confided that she was taken as a child from her parents’ home along the Susquehanna River and raised by the Indians.  Ewing recounted the story in a letter and sent it to the postmaster of Lancaster, Mary Dickson, who was also the publisher of the Lancaster Intelligencer. It was not until two years later that the Intelligencer’s new owner John W. Forney found and published the letter. The Slocum family received a copy of the paper and alerted one of Frances’s brothers. Two brothers and one sister went in search of the sister they hadn’t seen in years. 

The siblings were unsuccessful in convincing Frances to come back to the homestead on the banks of the Susquehanna. She preferred her life as an Indian. Speaking the Indian language, wearing the traditional clothing, marrying and raising children among the other Indians, she said she preferred to die the way she lived . . . as an Indian. Ten years later she would die as she lived and be buried alongside her husband on the banks of the Wabash River. 

Frances Slocum’s story has been the subject of many books, articles, even operas, and, of course, paintings. Froehlich, a staff artist at The State Museum of Pennsylvania, portrayed the austere, older woman who was much less Frances Slocum and far more Ma-con-a-quah in this painting completed for The State Museum under the order of former museum director, Dr. C.F. Hoban in the 1930s.

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