Rainy Lake House

by Theodore Catton

  Both governors saw the fur trade as an extension of statecraft. They hoped to shape it in ways that would help secure peaceful relations between white Americans, Indians, and the British. To that end, they were keenly interested in how the fur trade functioned. Yet, when they encountered John Tanner, the subject never came up. Where they might have recognized in him a white-Indian hunter who knew the business from an Indian perspective, instead they regarded him in more conventional terms. Here was the boy who had been stolen from his home by Indians many years before. The humane thing to do, then, was to restore him to his family.

  Regarding Tanner through the nineteenth-century prism of civilization and savagery, the governors were unable to form a more nuanced view of the man. Governor Cass presented him with a set of American-style clothes and sent him on his way. A few years later Governor Clark did the same thing, entering the expenditure in his account book with the following notation: “four handkerchiefs, $2; four pair socks, $2; four yards cloth, $16, furnished John Tanner and family, returned from the Indians, with whom he was a prisoner.”5 Tanner accepted their gifts with gratitude, but the sentiment behind them did not bode well for him. The governors thought they were helping him reclaim his white heritage, and they assumed the transformation would be quick. They had no conception of a person in his circumstances trying to bridge two cultures. Even as the fur trade formed a meeting ground for Indian and white America and encouraged a mingling of the two races, American society as a whole remained closed to the idea of either a bicultural, white-Indian identity or an interracial family. The governors of Michigan and Missouri territories were as well placed as any US leaders to understand this contradiction and do something about it. That they expected Tanner just to shed his Indianness like a set of clothes was significant.

  Meanwhile, Tanner’s white relatives made heroic efforts to help him. Edward Tanner left his home in New Madrid, Missouri, on August 31, 1818, to go look for his brother in the Red River valley—unaware that John had already arrived in Detroit at the beginning of that month. Edward went first to St. Louis, where he informed Governor Clark of his purpose and obtained papers and instructions for traveling due north through Sioux country to the Red River. When he got to Prairie du Chien, the trader told him that a man fitting his brother’s description had reportedly reached Mackinac. So Edward, hoping to intercept him there, changed his route and proceeded via the Wisconsin and Fox rivers to Green Bay, where he hired an Ojibwa interpreter and boarded a schooner for the passage up Lake Michigan to Mackinac. Only when he reached Mackinac in November did he learn that his brother had met with Governor Cass in Detroit some four months earlier. Changing his route again, he made for Detroit.6

  A few weeks after Edward set out, one of John Tanner’s sisters read in a Kentucky newspaper the notice issued by Governor Cass, and she immediately sent her son to Detroit. By then John had left Detroit with a group of Indians but had fallen sick with a fever while descending the Big Miami River. His nephew found him in the care of a farmer, still quite ill. The nephew took him in a skiff down the Big Miami and Ohio rivers to a cluster of farms on the Kentucky side of the river, where John met numerous relatives, including the sister, another grown nephew, and a younger half-brother whom he had never known. He was still so weak that he had to be carried from the skiff to the house, and when he was finally situated in the home of his half-brother, he lay sick for another month.7

  John could communicate with his relatives only a little, but when a letter from Edward arrived he understood from their conversation that his older brother had gone to look for him in the Red River country. The information in Edward’s letter was out of date and did not disclose how he had changed course and gone to Mackinac. Though John was still unwell, he was walking around again and could ride a horse. Fearing for Edward’s safety, he insisted that he must go north at once to find his brother—they had swapped places! His relatives reluctantly consented to his plan. With about a dozen neighbors, they took up a collection and gave him a purse of silver coins for the journey.8

  Edward met with Governor Cass in December, more than four months after John did. Though his brother’s trail had grown cold, he hoped that John might have found his way to their sister’s place in Kentucky. But soon after Edward acquired a horse and started for home, he received some distressing information. At Fort Meigs, two days south of Detroit, he was told that John had passed by in the other direction just a few days earlier, heading back to the Red River. Turning about, Edward rode swiftly back to Detroit to catch John before he boarded a ship for Mackinac. John, meanwhile, on reaching Detroit, went again to the governor. Fortunately, Governor Cass insisted that he stay there and wait for Edward to return for him. Three days later Edward arrived as the governor had guessed he would. Finally, after months and indeed decades of searching, the two brothers were reunited. As John later recounted, “He held me a long time in his arms.”9

  After twenty-eight years of separation, the brothers were now well into middle age. John thought that Edward bore a strong resemblance to their father. Edward noted a scar on the left side of John’s face and neck that he remembered from their childhood. A newspaperman remarked that the brothers looked very much alike, though John still had long hair past his shoulders like an Indian. Throughout his adult life, he had kept his hair parted in the middle and either braided or loosely tied on each side of his head with a string of broaches made of animal bone. However, before the two paid a final visit to the governor, he allowed his brother to cut off his long braids. Governor Cass approved of the haircut, commenting that he was pleased to see that John had laid his Indian costume aside and was now dressed like a white man.10

  John lived with Edward at his home in New Madrid, Missouri, through the winter and spring. Edward was keen to rehabilitate John. As his brother’s English improved, Edward developed big plans for the two of them. He applied to the American Baptist Board of Foreign Missions to serve as a missionary among the western Indians, with John to act as his interpreter. Edward already had some acquaintance with the western tribes by way of his military experience, and on his journey from Prairie du Chien to Green Bay he witnessed a few of the Indians’ religious ceremonies. These he described in a long letter to the Reverend John M. Peck, who headed the Baptist mission in St. Louis. Peck published the letter in The Latter Day Luminary and sponsored Edward’s application to the board. When the board met in Baltimore in April 1819, it resolved to give his application serious consideration. “This is encouraged by the peculiar circumstances of his brother, who is acquainted with several Indian languages, and whose aid, most probably, may be obtained,” the minutes of the board recorded.11

  John seems to have genuinely entertained the prospect of joining Edward on a mission, but in the meantime he had a more pressing object in mind. Since reuniting with Edward in Detroit, he had been telling his brother that he needed to find his Indian family and bring them to the States. He had in mind not just his young children by Therezia but also his first set of children by Red Sky of the Morning. As for his two wives, he now felt estranged from both of them.12

  In the summer of 1819, the brothers met with Governor Clark to consider how John might reclaim his children from Indian country. Edward told the governor that he wished to accompany John to the Indian village at Lake of the Woods where the children would likely be found. As a former captain in the army, he requested the command of a company of soldiers so that they could seize the children from the Indians should force be necessary. Without acknowledging it, the brothers proposed to deal with the Indians much as the Ottawa-Shawnee war party had dealt with the Tanner family a generation before. Of course, there was one major difference: John Tanner was the biological father of these children. There was, in addition, a significant distinction in tactics: the Indians used stealth to take child captives, whereas Edward Tanner proposed to use intimidation and state power. Despite those differences, the outcome would be strikingly similar: children forcibly removed from their bir
th cultures, permanently separated from their mothers, and thrust into a new life.13

  Governor Clark must have demurred from granting Edward Tanner’s request for a military escort—if for no other reason than that these were British Indians who clearly resided outside his jurisdiction. Moreover, while US troops were often deployed to reclaim white captives, there was no such tradition of sending soldiers after mixed-blood children. Still, there was substantial precedent for white settlers snatching Indian children. Mostly it had been done under the pretext of converting the little innocents to Christianity.14 So, if Edward’s plan did not win approval from the governor, it almost surely met with some sympathy.

  Whatever the governor’s response, John would not agree to Edward’s plan in any case. Following the meeting, he visited Clark again without his brother and informed him he wished to go alone. It was necessary, he said, because no white men, not his brother nor any soldiers, would be able to endure the hardships of the northern winter. He expected to live in an Indian lodge all through the winter and bring his children out after the spring breakup. Clark supported him, writing him a letter of endorsement to show to the traders whom he would meet in the course of his journey.

  However, Clark still did not understand the Indian side of John Tanner’s personality. Clark expected Tanner to travel due north through Sioux country, failing to see that those Indians were Tanner’s mortal enemies. If the Sioux learned he was culturally Ojibwa or Ottawa, it could be his death warrant. In the end, Tanner found it expedient to accept Clark’s offer of assistance, boarding a keelboat laden with provisions, guns, and army tents and manned by a large crew of sixty men. They were going north anyway and would take him as far as the upper Mississippi. Edward, who was by then reconciled to staying behind, wished his brother Godspeed. But as soon as the keelboat passed a little above the mouth of the Missouri, Tanner asked to be put ashore. With two men and a small canoe, he started up the Illinois River—making for Chicago, Lake Michigan, and thence the familiar route via Mackinac. That way, he would avoid the territory of the Sioux.15

  35

  Between Two Worlds

  Tanner made two separate expeditions to claim his children from the Indians, the first in 1819–20, the second in 1822–23. On the first expedition, he succeeded in claiming the younger ones, his children by Therezia. On the second, he went back for the older three, the children of Red Sky of the Morning. In narrating these events a few years later for his book, he made it quite clear that his sole purpose for going back both times was to get the children. Yet in the first instance, with regard to his children with Therezia, he gave no details as to how he obtained custody of them. He made no mention of opposition by his mother-in-law, which must have been vociferous, or action of any kind by the village chiefs. We have only this terse comment on how it transpired: “My wife refusing to accompany me, I took the three children and started without her. At Rainy Lake she overtook me, and agreed to accompany me to Mackinac.”1 Probably what happened was that on his return to the village, Therezia fell back into a tumult over whether she loved him or hated him. Sometime near the end of 1819 she must have allowed him to make her pregnant, for by the time the two of them left for Kentucky together the following June or July, her pregnancy was quite far along. As her condition made it evident that their marriage was, if dysfunctional, still not completely over, the chiefs probably saw Tanner’s claim to the children as a family matter.

  So Therezia rejoined Tanner at Rainy Lake and consented to his plan of taking the family to the United States, at least as far as Mackinac. Therezia gave birth to a baby girl just a few days before they reached Mackinac. When they came to Mackinac Island, Tanner set up their wigwam on the beach in front of the small settlement. Soon an old woman came down from the nearest house to investigate. Tanner invited her into his lodge, showed her the newborn, and explained that they needed to rest there a while. When she asked where they were going, he told her they were on their way to Kentucky to join his brother. She went back to her house and returned with a set of white man’s clothes for Tanner to put on.2

  The woman was Thérèse Schindler, the daughter of a French fur trader and an Ottawa woman. She was married to George Schindler, an American trader. Around 1810, her husband had had a stroke, which left him partially paralyzed. Since then, she had taken over the business and expanded it. When the American Fur Company entered the upper Great Lakes fur trade in 1816, it enlisted her as a supplier. By 1820, she had become one of the wealthiest citizens on Mackinac Island.3

  After a few days, Tanner called on the Schindlers and asked if they would be willing to care for the newborn. He proposed that they keep the girl for three years, at which time he would return for her. Reluctantly, the Schind­lers agreed. He brought them the baby on a cradleboard and they drew up an indenture, which Tanner signed with a mark. A few days later the Schind­lers baptized the newborn in the Roman Catholic faith. A record of the baptism, signed by the two godparents, was preserved by the Schindler family. It read: “On this 4th day of August, 1820, Lucy Tanner, aged sixteen days, has received lay baptism from George Schindler, Mackinac, Michigan.”4

  Tanner’s actions in giving up the baby shocked Therezia. In her culture, children were treasured from the moment of birth. Placing an infant in the care of a relative was not unusual, but giving it to a stranger was a desperate act. She was in a torment over what to do next: whether to accompany her husband to Kentucky, or await his return at Mackinac, or abandon both him and the children and go back to her people at Lake of the Woods. Tanner finally convinced her to continue on, but she was now as depressed and unstable as ever.

  In Tanner’s Narrative, neither the infant daughter, Lucy, nor Thérèse Schindler receives any mention. Despite his candor about so much else, Tanner kept this episode to himself. In a letter Tanner sent to President Van Buren in 1837, however, he did allude to giving up his daughter that year: “I lost [her] on Mackinaw iland—she is [now] 16 years old and I dont know what is become of her.” In the letter, he exonerated himself. “My family is Dear to me more than my own life.”5

  Apparently, Tanner thought the infant would likely not survive the remainder of their journey. Or, that if the rest of them were so encumbered, it would imperil the lives of his other three children, whose ages were approximately eight, seven, and six. It was not an unreasonable judgment. Having already made the journey to Kentucky once, he knew what a lot of sickness and hardship they were apt to experience. Perhaps, too, he had begun to sense the depth of the whites’ racial prejudice and how it would make this journey even harder than his last. Twice while they were at Mackinac he tried to obtain passage for his family on schooners bound for Chicago. Both times the captain refused him—presumably on account of the family being Indian, for Tanner had the money to pay their fare. He now saw how much better the whites had treated him on his previous trip through the Michigan Territory, when he had come alone.

  Giving up on the schooners, Tanner bought an old canoe from some Indians and set off with his family down the Lake Michigan shoreline. A little way south they came to an Ottawa village, where they fell in with a group of Ottawas going south to the Illinois country as well. A few days’ short of Chicago, they learned from some Indians coming from the opposite direction that the swampy portage between the Chicago and Illinois rivers was very difficult on account of low water. It seems that these Indians may have alerted them to the presence of a bad sickness in the area as well, for the Ottawas decided then and there to turn back. Therezia wanted to turn back, too, but Tanner would not. Moreover, he insisted on taking his children with him. Therezia, still in despair, got into the northbound canoes without her children. Of this latest breakup of his family, Tanner would only say in his Narrative that his wife returned with the Ottawas.6

  A few days later, as they arrived at the tiny settlement of Chicago, Tanner fell ill with a fever. Considering the season, the location, the fever’s severity, and the fact that he did not pass it to his children,
the ailment was most likely yellow fever. (Although yellow fever is highly infectious, it is not usually contagious between people, being transmitted by the bite of a mosquito.) The infection rendered him too weak to move, much less hunt, and soon he and the children had run out of provisions.

  Feverish and anxious for the health of his hungry children, Tanner finally went to the US Indian agent at Chicago, a man named Alexander Wolcott, Jr. Tanner had met Wolcott briefly one year earlier, when he made his way north. He was certain Wolcott would remember him. However, Wolcott took one look at his sallow face and refused to let him into his house or offer him assistance of any kind.

  The Indian agency stood on the north bank of the Chicago River just above Fort Dearborn. A little farther upriver there was a wild rice marsh where hundreds of redwing blackbirds were feeding on the rice grains, filling the air with their noisy chatter. With the last of his failing strength, Tanner towed their canoe to a piece of dry land in this place and erected a shelter in which to lie down out of the sun. For several days he lay in his sickbed, occasionally summoning the strength to raise himself to a sitting position and shoot a blackbird for the children to divide and eat.