What happens when a family’s long search ends—but the person they find has already built another home?
For generations, the story was told as the mystery of the “Lost Sister of Wyoming.” A five-year-old girl disappeared from a Pennsylvania farm in 1778. Her family searched. Nearly six decades later, her brothers and sisters found her living beside Indiana’s Mississinewa River.
That version has suspense, sorrow, and a dramatic reunion. It also keeps the searchers at the center. The woman they found had another name, another language, children, grandchildren, and a life that did not fit the ending her birth family expected.
She had been born Frances Slocum. In Indiana, she was known as Mahkoonsihkwa—a name older accounts often render as Maconaquah. Her story is not simply about being taken. It is also about the home she chose to keep.
The name the story usually begins with
According to the Indiana Historical Bureau, Frances Slocum was born in March 1773. On November 2, 1778, Delaware warriors attacked her family’s farm in Pennsylvania’s Wyoming Valley and took her captive. She was adopted and raised by a Delaware family that later moved west to Kekionga, near present-day Fort Wayne.
Nothing about that beginning should be softened. A child was taken from her family during a violent frontier war. But the life that followed cannot be reduced to the moment of capture. She first married a Delaware man and later married Shepancanah, a Miami leader. They raised four children, and she lived with her family in a Miami community along the Mississinewa.
By the time relatives from Pennsylvania arrived in 1837, almost sixty years had passed. The little girl they remembered was now a Miami woman in her sixties. She spoke the Miami language and needed an interpreter to communicate with the siblings, nieces, and nephews who had come to see her.
A family found her—and misunderstood what finding meant
The reunion began with a chance encounter. George W. Ewing met Mahkoonsihkwa along the Mississinewa and later sent a letter asking whether a Pennsylvania family had lost a daughter. When the inquiry reached Joseph Slocum, he and other relatives traveled west in 1837 and identified her as their missing sister.
Their relief must have been enormous. So was the assumption built into their request: now that she had been found, she would return.
She did not.
The historical record preserves the family’s search far more fully than it preserves Mahkoonsihkwa’s own voice. The Indiana Historical Bureau notes that no papers have been located giving her complete account of her life. What the record does show is a decision. Despite her siblings’ efforts to persuade her to move, she remained beside the Mississinewa until her death in 1847.
That choice changes the shape of the story. Her Pennsylvania relatives had found Frances Slocum. They also had to meet Mahkoonsihkwa: a mother, grandmother, widow, landholder, and member of a Miami community who did not regard the East as home.
A portrait she did not ask for
Two years after the reunion, her birth family commissioned English-born artist George Winter to paint her portrait. Winter traveled to her home in 1839. His notes, summarized by the Indiana Historical Bureau, record that she agreed to sit for him for her brother’s sake—not because she wanted a portrait made.
That detail is small but revealing. Even one of the most familiar images attached to her story began with someone else’s desire to preserve, explain, or possess a version of her. The portrait remains valuable evidence, but her reluctance belongs beside it.
Removal was closing around the Mississinewa
Mahkoonsihkwa’s decision to stay unfolded during a far larger crisis. The Indiana Department of Natural Resources notes that the Myaamia had hunted, planted, raised families, and celebrated along the Mississinewa since time immemorial. By 1846, most Miami people in Indiana were forcibly removed west.
Mahkoonsihkwa, members of her family, and others were allowed to remain. The exception protected a household; it did not undo the removal happening around them. Friends, relatives, neighbors, and an entire network of communities were being broken apart. The DNR also makes an essential present-tense point: Miami families continue to live around Mississinewa Lake.
That continuity matters. Indigenous history here did not end with a treaty, removal order, or reservoir. It remains part of Wabash County’s living community.
A cemetery moved, a family still present
Mahkoonsihkwa died on March 9, 1847, and was buried beside her husband and two sons. More than a century later, construction of the Mississinewa reservoir threatened the family cemetery. The Miami Nation of Indians of the State of Indiana records that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers moved eighty graves across the river and slightly upstream in 1965.
The present Frances Slocum Cemetery stands near County Roads 650 West and 900 South. A monument occupies its center, surrounded by family graves. Present-day descendants continue to be buried there.
So the place is not merely a memorial to a famous captive. It is a family cemetery and a Miami place of remembrance. Visitors should approach it with the quiet respect that requires.
Home is not always where the old story says it should be
The “Lost Sister” story once offered readers a tidy emotional path: loss, search, discovery. Mahkoonsihkwa’s life refuses the tidy ending. She had endured a violent separation, yet the family she built and the community she knew were real. When offered a return to Pennsylvania, she chose to remain in Indiana.
That is why this story belongs in the Dials Journal. Local history becomes more meaningful when it does not sand away the difficult edges. The Mississinewa landscape holds grief, survival, forced removal, family devotion, and continuing Miami presence at the same time.
At Dials, we believe a place becomes home through the lives built there and the stories people carry forward. Explore the Dials Local History Series for more carefully sourced stories connecting Wabash County’s past to the places and people still around us.
Cover image: George Winter’s 1839 portrait of Frances Slocum/Mahkoonsihkwa, a public-domain work, incorporated into a modern Dials Journal editorial collage. The surrounding map, river, and typography are contemporary design elements—not historical documentation.