Her first feeling was annoyance, because she presumed that he was teasing her, and this was too serious. But she saw in his face that he was not joking, and her heartbeat quickened. “Miami people would celebrate with me, the white woman who was permitted to stay?”
“We have been feeding them and hiding them and have not told the whites they are here. By now they know your heart is as red as it always was when you made them medicine and helped their babies come.”
She clenched her left fist in her right hand, squeezed her eyes shut, and was quiet for a long time, until Brouillette said:
“I could not speak for you that you would come. I told them, Maconakwa might protest that she is too old to dance.”
She looked up at him and saw that now he was teasing. She frowned at him, cleared her throat, and said, “Have they a drum?”
“They made one. A deep drum.”
“E heh! E heh! Go shave your face. Then make me a seat in the horse wagon!”
Eh o weh
Eh o weh o weh!
Eh o weh
Eh o weh o weh!
Eh o weh o weh!
O weh o weh o weh!
All night the drum had been like a heartbeat, and the voices sometimes loud, sometimes soft, sometimes joyous, sometimes sad. If the whites living within the horizons heard this, they were probably scared. Eh, let them be scared, she thought. It has been too long since we scared them! Since Tecumseh was alive. And this is my land and I can dance in the woods in the middle of it.
The hiding-away people had started with an honor song for her, and it had swelled her heart so big that she could feel nothing else—not the fatigue in her old legs, not the chill of her muddy, slush-soaked moccasins, not the icy night air on her head and face. She was a Miami, and could dance all night. She shuffled in two-step around the bonfire countless times, sang, nibbled maple-sugar snow and chunks of pure sugar and drank tea sweetened with it; she ate meat and corn bread now and then to keep up her strength for dancing. She smoked her clay pipe while resting between dances and watched the others. It was not as large a circle of dancers as in the old days, nor as colorful; these were ragged, hiding-in-the-woods people. But they seemed as happy as she was to be dancing, and if they had been timid and quiet here in her woods the past winter, they were not now. They had been assured that it was her land and she had a promise written by the highest white chiefs that she could never be chased out of it. That had been promised to them too, all the Miami people, often enough, and the promise always broken, but they were willing to believe her. So there should be no fear if their fireglow was seen, or the drum heard. This was the first Miami thanksgiving dance since the bayonet soldiers came, and it was too good to stop.
It was in the middle of the round horizon, in the middle of her land, in the middle of the woods, in the middle of the circle of dancers, and it was the fire. Everything else was around the fire, which was the center. It melted the snow and made the dance circle muddy. Whether Maconakwa was dancing or resting, there was the fire, the spirit of fire, simple and honest.
Fire made her remember. For almost seventy years she had lived with Lenapeh and Miami peoples, and almost every night of those years she had looked into their cookfires and campfires. She had listened to their stories and learned their languages and beliefs by those fires. By a fire pit Neepah had given her a medicine bag, and by another fire Minnow had given her another. Around the fires she had danced with the People, and she had coupled with her husbands and borne and nursed her babies by those fires, and had brewed the medicines to heal their wounds and illnesses by the fires, had melted lead to mold their musketballs, had baked the funeral bread by the fires, had treated the frozen hands and feet of the People in winter war. She had fired pottery by corncob fires in the ground, and made charcoal and heated paint pebbles to make war paint, and had carried wood to make bonfires for the war dances as well as the thanksgivings. She had dropped meat in fires as sacrifices to the Master of Life and crumbled tobacco into fires to make the smoke that would carry her prayers to him. Over fires she had parched corn and boiled maple sap for the trail foods for hunters and confections for children. Everything useful and necessary and comforting came from fire heat, and all the stories and plannings, counciling, mourning, and laughing of those long years had had fire in the middle. Fire made her remember Rainbow Crow, who brought it from the sun when the earth was cold, and it made her remember Tuck Horse, who had always said that it was alive, a living spirit without which life would be only winter.
But she remembered too, as she watched the embers shimmer and shift and the flames and sparks shower up, the fires of the Long Knife Town Destroyers that had consumed her homes one after another, fire from cannons and guns, fire in the whiskers of a whiskey seller, one of the few times she had ever hurt anyone. Fire could be a destroyer.
And she remembered how the People, after each burning, after each war, would come back and rebuild their wikwams and replant the next year’s crops, using fire in a shell to make smoke for the Three Sisters prayer.…
Always there was fire at the center of everything, fire, the gift of Rainbow Crow, and as Tuck Horse had told it, there was fire in the heart where life burns in a person.
Maconakwa danced on and on around the fire and the heartbeat drum, until the sun was almost up and the wisps of clouds above the eastern horizon glowed a vivid vermilion, the color of the dots the women painted on their cheekbones to identify themselves to Creator so he could find his own True People when they died. Whenever Brouillette asked her whether she had danced enough, she smiled and kept dancing.
She was older than anyone here, two or three times as old as most, and their tongues were almost hanging out, but no one tried to make her stop dancing. With her they danced on and on, around the drum, around the fire, around the heart of their story.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Two days after that dance at the sugar camp, Maconakwa died of pneumonia.
On March 11, 1847, she was buried on the knoll beside Deaf Man and their sons, with a white flag on a pole over her grave, her favorite brass teakettle and cream pitcher in the coffin at her feet. Her daughter, Cut Finger, died two days later and was buried beside her. There the family lay beside the Mississinewa for 120 years, their legend growing and their descendants assimilating into Indiana society, until the graves were moved to higher ground when the river was dammed to create a reservoir.
Maconakwa’s square mile of land had been put in Yellow Leaf’s name—Ozahshingkwa’s Reserve—and she managed to keep it the rest of her life. She died in 1877, leaving Peter Bondy with nine children.
By then he was Reverend Bondy. Both he and Autumn Brouillette had been converted to Christianity by Isaac Slocum’s youngest son George, so Maconakwa’s beloved sons-in-law ended up as Baptist preachers. Their lives characterized the extreme social changes wrought upon the Miamis, both east and west of the Mississippi, by the encroachment of white settlement. The resourcefulness and adaptability of the Miami people, from Little Turtle’s time to the present day, make an epic story both heartbreaking and inspiring—and not concluded even yet.
Though the defeated Little Turtle has been reviled for signing land-cession treaties throughout the first decade of the 1800s, it is hard to see how he could have done otherwise. He had promised not to fight the white men anymore, and he was a man of his word. President Jefferson’s Indian policy was to make all tribes within U.S. territory dependent upon the national government, through any means including indebtedness. Jefferson wanted the tribes to take up white men’s agriculture and give up their traditional hunting culture. He recommended that traders extend credit till the Indians were in debt, noting that “when these debts get beyond what the individuals can pay, they become willing to lop them off by a cession of lands.” Jefferson’s method of dealing with any recalcitrant tribes was bluntly stated: “… seizing the whole country of that tribe and driving them across the Mississippi, as the only condition of peace, would be an exa
mple to others …”
And the man who governed the frontier Indiana Territory at that crucial time, William Henry Harrison, had no qualms about carrying out such policies. If a chief did not want to sign away his people’s land, Harrison might try to make him more agreeable with liquor. If that didn’t work, he could resort to getting some other Indian’s mark on the treaty, whether that other Indian had any authority to sign or not.
It is interesting to speculate whether Little Turtle would have remained pro-American during the War of 1812 when Harrison ordered his scorched-earth campaign against all Wabash Valley tribal towns whether hostile, neutral, or even friendly. But the seventy-year-old chief had died that summer.
Little Turtle’s successors as chiefs of his people were mostly Miami-French mixed-bloods, wealthy and well-educated men, who no longer had recourse to war; for many years they yielded Miami lands bit by bit under the pervasive pressure of government policy and white settlement. Well versed in law, politics, and trade, such chiefs as Richardville, Godfroy, Le Gros, and LaFontaine drove hard bargains; they manipulated the various ambitions of land speculators, traders, and bureaucrats against each other. But liquor, credit, and Manifest Destiny prevailed, and soon all the Miamis were living in widely separated pockets of land surrounded by white settlers.
Like most other tribes, the Miami did not embrace Jefferson’s assimilation theory very well, and since the government didn’t want enclaves of native culture lingering behind the frontier, the next plan to evolve was that of exiling Indians from their homelands to the far side of the Mississippi. That required a sweeping betrayal of existing treaties and promises, and over it hung the threat of renewed force.
The greed of traders, Indian agents, and politicians took various forms, and the plan to exile the Miamis created a dilemma. While living like parasites on the tribe and sucking up its annuity moneys, the whites also coveted the rich Wabash lands that would fall into their hands when the natives were expelled.
George Ewing, the trader whose correspondence had connected Maconakwa with her Slocum family, was a clever enough entrepreneur to make money off the Miamis at both ends of their trail of tears. He and his brother had been influencing and profiting from virtually every transaction made by and about the Miamis in Indiana, running tribal members into debt. After raking in a huge proportion of the money paid the tribe by the final removal treaty, the Ewings began transferring much of their business to posts in Kansas, the exiles’ destination. If getting Maconakwa’s land had been part of George Ewing’s motive for trying to help the Slocum family find her, he was disappointed when Congress gave her dispensation to keep it.
The names Frances Slocum and Maconakwa remain legendary in Indiana and in the Susquehanna Valley of Pennsylvania. There is a Frances Slocum State Recreational Area in Indiana and a Frances Slocum State Park in Pennsylvania. Several histories of her life were published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There was at least one narrative poem. A pageant about her was performed for a few years by the Miamis themselves. But all those stories ended with her poignant refusal to return to her white family’s civilization, and left off the awful irony of her last years: spared from exile by her white blood and thus separated from the people her red heart had chosen.
The course of Frances Slocum’s life among the tribes, from her capture until her reunion with the Slocums, is based upon her own sketchy account told from memory to her brothers Joseph and Isaac and her sister Mary. The map in this book is derived from that account. She may have traveled with her adoptive Lenapeh parents to places in Canada and among the Great Lakes that she neglected to tell the Slocums; a child in those circumstances probably would not have been cognizant of national and territorial borders.
The gradual route from her childhood home at Wilkes-Barre to Niagara can be presumed from historical accounts of the war roads and refugee trails used in those turbulent years. It is logical that their flight from Wyalusing would have been in the path of General Sullivan’s well-documented 1779 invasion, that is, up the West Branch of the Susquehanna, through Tioga, north to the Finger Lakes country, then westward through the “Longhouse Road” of Iroquois nations to the rugged Genesee River gorge and on to Niagara, a place she was to remember clearly for the rest of her life. She remembered that she had been taken to Detroit. Her brothers knew those routes and followed them in their tireless searches over the ensuing years. Her mother, Ruth Slocum, actually did go to the prisoner exchange at Tioga.
Maconakwa in her old age remembered enough to tell her brothers about her Lenapeh father Tuck Horse, the chair maker, about her Lenapeh name Wehletawash, her brief and unsuccessful marriage to a Lenapeh warrior who treated her badly, and her family’s rescue and treatment of the wounded Miami warrior Shapahcahnah, who became her second husband and eventually was known as Deaf Man. She could not, or would not, recount details of specific battles that had affected her tribes, saying only that they were many and bloody; that she didn’t like to see scalps but knew white men took them too; and that she had been helpless to do anything about the conflicts. Of course, a quarter of a century had passed since the end of the fighting until her first conversation with her white relatives. Because Maconakwa told so little, I have had to take the liberty of presuming just how certain battles and raids would have beset her home communities. As traumatic as these events are in my portrayal, they probably were far worse.
In twenty years of writing about the Revolution and the Indian Wars, I have had the exhausting task of researching and re-creating scores of battles and campaigns. Such labors were minimal for this book because most of the military actions take place “offstage”—that is, outside the protagonist’s point of view. Here I wanted to emphasize the ways those actions would have disrupted the lives of the innocents, and I think this is a worthwhile theme because wars are generally more devastating to women, children, and elders than to the fighting men, who usually at least get a notion of glory and some bragging rights out of what they’re doing.
A body of forgotten literature exists documenting the role of Quakers as friends of the dispossessed tribes, and it is terribly poignant, worth the reader’s research.
The struggles of the Miami people—both those who were exiled beyond the Mississippi and those who stayed in their homeland—continue to this day. With the Removal, the struggle diverged into two separate travails, each peculiar to its own set of geographical, political, and cultural factors. What both tribes had in common was their patient and stubborn efforts to hang on to whatever small rights and entitlements the U.S. government’s treaty documents had promised them. These were constantly revised and diminished by the government. Both tribes were hurt by the General Allotment Act of 1887, which broke up the reservations they had been given into private holdings, with the surplus put up for sale to whites. Upon this action, tribal governments were supposed to dissolve as entities, meaning that the U.S. government would then be free of its promised obligations. A federal court ruling soon afterward was used to deny the Indiana Miamis recognition as a tribe, and they have been working ever since to regain that recognition.
As for the deported Miamis, as soon as they tried to establish themselves on the reservations made for them in Kansas, they were hit by a surge of white settlement and land speculation on that side of the Mississippi, spurred by the route of railroads through their newly assigned lands. That white invasion was augmented by an association of white settlers whose founding goal was to thwart government protection of the exiled Miamis. And still ahead lay further uprootings, and assignment to hardscrabble reserves in Oklahoma.
That either Miami tribe still exists is a wonder, and it is due to their stubborn belief in themselves as a people. That belief has kept them in the courts, the state legislatures, the Capitol, and the newspapers for most of a century, fighting intelligent and dignified battles for rights and recognition, for the well-being of their people. A detailed and inspiring history of those complex struggles—The Miami
Indians, A Persistent People 1654–1994, by Stewart Rafert—was published this year by the Indiana Historical Society. It is recommended to readers interested in the fate of Frances Slocum’s descendants and the Miami people she loved.
At the time of this writing, Frances Dunnagan is acting chief of the Indiana Miami Tribe, and Phyllis Miley is Tribal Secretary. Both are direct descendants of Frances Slocum. Lora Siders, a chiefress and historian of the Indiana tribe, and Chief Floyd Leonard of the Oklahoma Miamis, have been kind and helpful to me over the years, busy as they are in the present-day conduct of their tribal affairs. Believing that their predecessors must have been as levelheaded, resourceful, wise, and firm as they are, I think I understand how the Miami people have survived and adapted in the two centuries since the Treaty of Greeneville, in the century and a half since the Removal, and in the century of struggle for recognition. It is no wonder to me that Maconakwa came to love the Miami people so much that she refused to leave them.
—James Alexander Thom
Bloomington, Indiana
November 1996
To Sun Spirit and
her daughter Hasuwi,
The Singer
BY JAMES ALEXANDER THOM
Published by Ballantine Books:
PANTHER IN THE SKY
LONG KNIFE
FOLLOW THE RIVER
FROM SEA TO SHINING SEA
STAYING OUT OF HELL
THE CHILDREN OF FIRST MAN
THE RED HEART
SIGN-TALKER
WARRIOR WOMAN (with Dark Rain Thom)
SAINT PATRICK’S BATTALION
The Red Heart Page 64