Sarah Bishop

Scott O’Dell based the hero of his 1980 novel, Sarah Bishop, on a historical figure who lived in New York during the Revolutionary War. Biographical details about the real Sarah Bishop are sketchy, and even accounts about her published in the early 1800s likely stretched the scanty facts with fiction. An 1831 history schoolbook claimed that after her father’s farm was burned by rabble-rousers, Sarah “left society and […] found a kind of cave” where she lived until her death. O’Dell’s young adult novel spins these alleged facts into a yarn of independence and wilderness survival.

Sarah Bishop begins in the 1770s, when fifteen-year-old Sarah is living with her father and brother, Chad, on a farm on Long Island, New York. Tensions between the American colonists and their British rulers are escalating into a war for independence from England. Sarah’s father is a loyalist, believing the British monarch, King George, should continue to govern the colonies, but her brother has other ideas. When Chad comes home with Common Sense, Thomas Paine’s pamphlet advocating for independence, he and his father argue about the cause. Defiant, Chad leaves to join the battle against Britain.

Conflict brews between the patriots, or those favoring American independence, and those who, like Sarah’s father, remain loyal to King George. After attending a worship service, Sarah and her father leave the church to find their wagon has been stolen, along with those of other loyalists. Shortly thereafter, a band of unruly patriots turns up at the Bishop’s farm. They set fire to the house, and tar and feather Sarah’s father to rebuke his allegiance to England.



Sarah’s father dies from the assault. Now homeless, Sarah takes her family’s Bible and heads to New York City, hoping to discover the whereabouts of her brother. She finds work in a tavern where she meets a British officer who suggests Chad may be a British prisoner. After traveling a good distance to the prison and failing to find Chad, Sarah stops at an inn for the night. When the inn burns down, circumstantial evidence points to Sarah, and she is wrongly charged with arson. Authorities suspect she set the fire to ignite the nearby prison, and so enable her brother’s escape.

While detained in jail, Sarah learns from another British officer that Chad is on an off-shore prison ship. She accepts an officer’s offer to take her to the ship but arrives just hours after Chad has died. As the rowboat transporting her nears the shore, Sarah jumps overboard and makes her way back to the tavern. Her employer allows her to hide in the cellar from the British officers who are searching for her.

When it’s safe to do so, Sarah leaves the tavern, ultimately retreating into the woods. Having made a small campfire, she tears a page from her Bible and, in a gesture of discouragement, tosses it into the flames. The next morning she buys a musket and journeys north.



In White Plains, Sarah makes money cutting off her hair and selling it to a wigmaker. When news of an impending battle triggers a scramble to evacuate the town, Sarah climbs into Sam Goshen’s wagon. She finds herself alone with him; he tries to force himself on her but is startled by her short hair. Sarah takes advantage of his surprise to pull out her musket and escape from him.

After fleeing further north, Sarah happens upon a small cave near a lake. She takes refuge there and, together with a baby albino bat she rescues, makes the cave her home. An Indian soon appears. Despite language differences, he communicates that Sarah is trespassing on his land. Refusing to surrender the cave, she chases him off with her musket.

Sarah survives by fishing, hunting, and foraging for nuts and roots. When winter approaches, two more Indians (and their two children) appear near Sarah’s cave, but they are kind and helpful. John Longknife outfits the entrance of Sarah’s cave with a door, while his wife, Helen, gives Sarah snowshoes and shows her where to find flavorful berries. Before they depart, John also builds Sarah a canoe.



While out in the forest one day, Sarah finds a muskrat caught in a trap and removes the animal. Engraved on the trap is Sam Goshen’s name, and Sarah realizes her would-be assailant is in the surrounding area. The muskrat’s feet are mangled, so she takes the creature back to her cave to care for it.

Sarah follows the trapper’s trail the next day and encounters Sam Goshen himself. As his leg is tangled in his own bear trap, Sam is no threat to Sarah. She frees him from the trap’s jaws, but he is too injured to walk. Sarah tows him back to her cave, where she feeds him, tends to his leg, and reads to him from the Bible. Despite the charity he receives from Sarah and the Christian lessons he hears, Sam remains mean-spirited and menacing. When he is able to leave, he does so.

Spring arrives, and Sarah ventures to a nearby town to earn money as a cook to buy some basic supplies. Then she returns to her cave, but her wilderness retreat turns deadly when a rattlesnake strikes her. John and Helen Longknife find her lying in her canoe, hallucinating. They help her recover from the poisonous snake-bite and then tell her that Isaac, a young man in town has invited her to attend a Quaker meeting.



To Sarah’s surprise and discomfort, the meeting centers a great deal on the evils of witchcraft. Afterward, Isaac reveals that his father, the town’s storekeeper, has been suspicious of Sarah since she first walked into town in early spring. Hard times have hit the community, and there is conjecture among the Quakers that a sinister, supernatural force is targeting them.

Sarah attends another Quaker meeting. This time, six men interrogate her, including Sam Goshen and the store-keeper. When Goshen divulges that Sarah keeps a bat and converses with it, suspicions about her activities increase. Before the Quakers decide conclusively that Sarah is practicing dark arts against them, however, a traveling postmaster reports that disease and drought are common throughout the region. Strange as Sarah’s chosen lifestyle is, they decide she is not the source of such widespread misfortune. They excuse her from further questioning, and when Isaac asks her to join them again, she does not refuse.

The real-life Sarah Bishop died in 1810 and was buried in North Salem, New York. The cave she lived in, which is located near North Salem, bears her name.