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Vol. 30:2 ISSN 0160-8460 June 2002
John Tanner's Narrative and the Anishinaabeg in a Time of Change
by John T. Fierst
John Tanner. Engraving used as frontispiece in A Narrative of the Captivity and Adventures of John Tanner (U.S. Interpreter at Saut de Ste. Marie) during Thirty Years Residence among the Indians in the Interior of North America, published in 1830 by G. & C. & H. Carvill. From the author's collection.
John Tanner's narrative of the 30 years he lived with the Anishinaabeg-the Ojibwe and the Odawa (or Ottawa) of the Great Lakes region-was recorded in the summer of 1827 on Mackinac Island, where Tanner was working as an Indian interpreter. Tanner related the account to Edwin James, the U.S. Army medical officer stationed that summer at Fort Mackinac.
In the period in which the narrative unfolds, 1790-1824, great changes occurred in the Ohio Valley-Great Lakes region. Large-scale shifts in population took place, as Americans by the thousands entered the country and displaced its original inhabitants. Tanner's narrative indirectly reflects these changes, but from the point of view of those forced to give way to the advancing flood of newcomers.
At the end of the American Revolution, Great Britain ceded to the United States the region lying south of the Great Lakes and west of the Appalachian Mountains. In the decade that followed, Americans eager to acquire land, like Tanner's father, crossed the Appalachian Mountains and established themselves in the Ohio Valley.
The western Indians, who had fought alongside the British during the Revolution but had not signed the Treaty of Paris, still lived and hunted there. They now wanted the new United States to honor an Ohio River boundary, and they conducted raids in Kentucky and along the Ohio River to discourage white encroachment. The focus of their campaign was to keep American settlement south of the river.
Between 1784 and 1789, the United States constructed a string of forts along the Ohio River boundary, north of the river. Besides these posts, settlers built numerous stockaded forts or stations in the Ohio Valley. To Indian observers, more ominous than the presence of the military north of the Ohio were the permanent settlements also being established north of the river. Tanner's father's station, while it was not north of the river, was in an advanced position on the river, just below present-day Cincinnati.
Tanner's capture was one small incident of war. The year he was taken from his father's station is given in the narrative as 1789, but the correct date, according to the deposition of John Garnett taken 2 weeks after the event, was either April 30 or May 1, 1790, when young Tanner was 9 years old. That date accurately locates the narrative in place and time. A month after Tanner's capture, Secretary of War Henry Knox instructed Josiah Harmar, commander of the troops on the Ohio River, to strike and "extirpate" the Indian confederacy in Ohio.
Harmar failed to accomplish this. In the fall of that year, his army was surprised and defeated by the Indian confederacy, with a loss to the United States of nearly 200 soldiers. Tanner had by then been taken to Michigan and was living with his captors on the Saginaw River. Eventually he was traded to Netnokwa, an Odawa woman from L'Arbre Croche, a village on the northern tip of Michigan's southern peninsula.
In the face of the invasion of the Ohio Valley-Great Lakes region, the Anishinaabeg sought ways to defend themselves and preserve their way of life. Tanner's narrative reveals how a small band of Anishinaabeg, the family of Netnokwa, Tanner's adoptive mother, adjusted to change in this uncertain time. In 1792, 2 years before the defeat of the Indian confederacy at the Battle of Fallen Timbers, Netnokwa and her family left Michigan for the country west of Lake Superior. The narrative does not make clear all the reasons behind Netnokwa's western journey, only that she had a close association with the Montreal-based Northwest Company and that she planned to return to L'Arbre Croche with a harvest of furs. The strength of the Northwest Company was due in large part to its close ties, ethnic ties, to Native Americans in the interior.
By the time of Netnokwa's departure, the Indian Wars in Ohio were having a serious effect on the Great Lakes fur trade. Warfare had brought trade in the Ohio country to a halt, and the prospect of permanent settlement threatened an end to the trade as it had existed in the southern Great Lakes region. These considerations were causing traders to look for new fields beyond Lake Superior, and were encouraging many Anishinaabeg, like Netnokwa, to journey westward as well. Netnokwa's group reached the Forks of the Red River (Winnipeg) in the fall of 1795.
The narrative documents in great detail the adaptability of this small band of Odawa in the west. The chapters in the narrative that describe their journey westward and their early years in what is now western Ontario and southern Manitoba are rich in examples of Odawa practices and are some of the most interesting parts of the narrative. It is claimed that the Odawa who traveled westward adopted a lifestyle more like the hunting/gathering style of their Ojibwe neighbors. While this may be true, there is evidence in the narrative that they retained many of their agricultural practices, introducing corn to the region and continuing, as they had in Michigan, to supply this staple to the fur traders.
Tanner came of age in the world of the Red River fur trade, and he developed into a skillful hunter who was sought after by the traders, "one of the best animal hunters in the country," according to John McLaughlin, the factor at Rainy Lake. The narrative is in part a history of the Red River fur trade in its most dynamic period, and because of its unique point of view, it is central to the documentary evidence that exists about the Great Lakes fur trade generally.
Tanner's memory was surprisingly full and accurate. Such robust memory seems incredible, although in this respect it is important to remember that the narrative had its origins in an oral culture. Tanner saw the world as an Anishinaabe would see it. He shared the collective representations-the ideas, values, images-of the Annishinaabeg. The principles through which he internalized experience were Anishinaabe.
The Anishinaabeg who journeyed to the west did not escape the disruptive changes at work on the continent. By moving to the west, the Anishinaabeg themselves brought pressure to bear on those already living there. Such pressure often took the form of a competition for resources, but could also express itself in open conflict. In the fall of 1804, Tanner joined an Anishinaabe war party, a practice he would continue through 1812. Usually these parties were organized to attack the Dakotas (or Sioux). The Ojibwes in the west were putting great pressure on the Dakotas, and in this period fighting between these traditional enemies was, as Tanner's narrative makes clear, intense.
Echoes of the larger struggle between the United States and Great Britain can also be heard in the narrative. Tanner states in the narrative that he was deterred from making a journey to United States in the summer of 1807 because the frontiers of the United States "were then the scenes of warlike operations." Tanner was correct. Tensions on the frontier had increased that summer. When the Leopard, a British warship, fired on the American frigate Chesapeake, and the two countries seemed on the brink of war, American officials feared that in the west the followers of Tecumseh and the Shawnee Prophet Tenskwatawa would side with the British and rise up against the United States.
Tenskwatawa called for Indians to cast off all white influences. His message of spiritual renewal and resistance was in response to the continuing cultural strife that expansionism imposed on the Indian nations. The teachings of Tenskwatawa and other revitalist leaders like him reached the Red River country and, as the narrative shows, strongly influenced Tanner and those around him.
The effects of colonization, which could not be escaped, reached those in the west directly when a permanent settlement was planted at the Forks of the Red River, the heart of the fur trade country. When Lord Selkirk of the Hudson's Bay Company established his Red River colony there and disrupted the supply routes of the Northwest Company, he touched off what came to be called the "Pemmican War," pemmican being the pounded buffalo meat used to provision the trading posts and canoe brigades. In this conflict Tanner sided with Selkirk and the Hudson's Bay Company, and in one important instance acted as their guide. The two companies eventually merged into the Hudson's Bay Company. But the conflict and the establishment of the colony marked the end of the fur trade as the Anishinaabeg had known it.
Tanner made two journeys to the United States before returning there permanently in 1824. Netnokwa never returned. A reference to her death can be found in the Rainy Lake journals of the Hudson's Bay Company. Tanner made his first return journey in 1818. On that journey, on his way through Detroit, he met Lewis Cass, Governor of Michigan Territory. Cass, who later become Andrew Jackson's Secretary of War, also served as the Superintendent of Indian Affairs in the territory, and more than anyone else in the Old Northwest was responsible for clearing lands of Indian title, a policy he advocated and pursued aggressively.
Cass also had a humanitarian side to his personality, and he befriended Tanner; yet there is some irony in his doing so, since he held Indians in such low esteem. He advertised Tanner's return in the western papers and sent Tanner forward to a council meeting being held on the St. Mary's River that fall. (The St. Mary's River flows through northwestern Ohio, near the route along which Tanner's captors had led him 28 years earlier.) A certain irony can also be discovered in the council itself, where Tanner witnessed the Indians in attendance, including many Anishinaabeg, cede to the United States their last claims to land in what had now become the state of Ohio.
American historians have celebrated the growth of the United States and have taken pride in the westward expansion of the republic. Until recently, however, less attention has been given to the transformations forced upon the Indian nations uprooted in that process. This is due in part to a lack of documentation reflecting an Indian point of view. John Tanner's narrative reflects an Anishinaabe perspective and is in this way an unusual document.
Skillfully recorded, it saw publication in 1830, the year Congress passed and President Jackson signed the Indian Removal Bill. G. & C. & H. Carvill printed the narrative under the title A Narrative of the Captivity and Adventures of John Tanner (U.S. Interpreter at the Saut de Ste. Marie) during Thirty Years Residence among the Indians in the Interior of North America. The manuscript of the original narrative has never been recovered. Therefore, the first edition is considered the closest copy, and is the text used by the John Tanner Project. There are no Tanner papers per se; the project's documentary research has been in support of the Tanner narrative.
The lengthy title, which served to advertise the narrative, was a convention publishers of captivity accounts had been employing since the early 17th century. Besides the titling convention, other formal conventions characteristic of captivity narratives of the same period-such as the inclusion of organized sections of ethnographic knowledge and the editorial claim to be rendering the account in a plain style-are identifiable in the Tanner narrative, providing clues to both the intentions of its editor and the expectations of its readers.
Tanner's story, however, never fit comfortably into the form its editor and publishers had framed for it. The title and form have always belied the value of the book's contents and have contributed to the lack of scholarly attention the narrative has received. Because of Tanner's experience, the abundance of detail contained in his narrative, and the unique point of view from which it is rendered, A Narrative of the Captivity and Adventures of John Tanner is a document of lasting importance to the study of American culture. The editorial work being done by the John Tanner Project, which has received NHPRC grant support, will help to establish this by providing readers of the narrative deeper access to the historical and cultural contents of this extraordinary work.
John T. Fierst is the editor of A Narrative of the Captivity and Adventures of John Tanner.
