Captive!: The Story of David Ogden and the Iroquois

by Jack Harpster, Ken Stalter

David Ogden was born into an unusually tumultuous time in America--the colonials were struggling to throw off the yoke of British rule while also battling the Iroquois tribes for control of their ancestral lands. The biography of anyone who survived a life in the late 1700s frontier days of New York would be a great tale, but David Ogden's story stands alone, even within historical context of his times.



Captive! The Story of David Ogden and the Iroquois is a compelling true adventure story of one young colonial soldier's bravery, choosing a daunting 126-mile race to freedom fraught with the risk of death over being assimilated into an alien society. This story is told with all the factual historical information that was missing from all the original captivity narratives, but accurately retains the flavor of the period and the voice of the 18th-century protagonist.

216 pages, Hardcover

First published July 20, 2010

About the author

I was born in 1937, attended high school in Memphis, TN, and graduated with a degree in Journalism from the University of Wisconsin in 1959. I moved to Southern California and spent 27 years in the newspaper business there, moving to Las Vegas in 1986 where I rounded out my career with a 17-year stint on that city's two newspapers on the business management side of the industry. I retired in 2002 and moved to Reno, Nevada with my wife in 2006, where I currently live.

I have seven books published, and another coming out next April. I have also written dozens of essays and articles on history and biography for magazines and journals.