Tanner and his family had passed Rainy Lake House on their way to Mackinac just a few days before the ambush, the story continued. McGillivray was certain that Tanner’s wife was accessory to his attempted murder. For many years, she and Tanner had been separated and the girls had lived with her. Early that summer, Tanner had gone to the girls’ village, demanding to have his daughters back though he barely knew them after so long a time. The village chiefs had consented on the condition that he would take the girls’ mother as well. So the long-estranged couple had reunited, and the reconstituted family of four was making its way to the States when Tanner was shot.
Somehow the woman had conspired with a young Indian man, who had joined them east of Rainy Lake, to kill her former husband. It was unknown how she had convinced this miscreant to commit murder for her, but McGillivray was sure she had done it. He knew because a few days later she had come to the trading house with her daughters and given herself up. And when Tanner had arrived a few hours after her in a Hudson’s Bay canoe—not dead as she had presumed but still alive—she had panicked and attempted to flee to the woods.
Then McGillivray came to the part of the story that most intrigued his American guests. Although the Hudson’s Bay men had immediately captured and detained the woman, Tanner would not be satisfied with her punishment alone. He had to have revenge on the man who had shot him.5
Listening to the trader present this story, Long and his men fixated on Tanner’s demand for revenge. Dr. Say had challenged Tanner on that very point during his interview with him earlier in the day. Why must he have revenge? Tanner had resolutely answered him: “Why did he shoot me? If he wishes to kill me, it is my duty to kill him, for he is a bad man.” Say later wrote in his notes, “This was uttered in a cold, decisive manner; it was not the result of passion, but of a conviction, founded upon a process of reasoning, to which he had been long accustomed.”6
For Long and his men this was proof that the wounded American had reverted to a near state of savagery during his many years of living among the Indians. To most US citizens in their time, there was no more indelible mark of the savage mind than the hellish desire for revenge.
As devout Protestants, Long and his men were indoctrinated with Christianity’s many injunctions against revenge. At home, these men read the Bible and attended church regularly. They were familiar, in a way that modern people generally are not, with the words of their sacred Scripture. All who take the sword will perish by the sword . . . Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy . . . May the Lord judge between me and you, may the Lord avenge me against you, but my hand shall not be against you. The Christian Bible taught that every act of revenge by one man against another was a wrongful act, for it violated the law of God and worked to perpetuate evil. Christ’s message was that no person was free from sin; therefore, no person could take revenge with a pure heart. Only God could rightfully take revenge. For Long and his contemporaries, the Bible’s many injunctions against revenge were well known and deeply felt. They found the “vengeful Indian” an affront to God. Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against one of your people, but love your neighbor as yourself. I am the LORD.
As men of the American Enlightenment, Long, Say, and the other scientists on the expedition condemned Tanner’s vow of revenge on grounds of civil law, too. Dividing all of humanity into “civilized” and “savage” peoples, they took for granted that virtually all Indians were in the latter category. They assumed that Indians were universally beholden to the revenge principle according to their tribal customs. Long’s own thinking on this went roughly as follows. (1) Civilized peoples had the rule of law; savage peoples did not. In civil society, blood-for-blood revenge had no legitimate place except as meted out through a state-controlled criminal justice system. But when men lived in a primitive condition without the rule of law, by necessity the revenge principle stood in for the rule of law as the elemental rock of justice. (2) In a primitive society, a person who suffered a wrong by another person had both a right and a duty to avenge the wrongful act. Vengeance upon the perpetrator was the perpetrator’s due punishment. Retaliation was the victim’s rightful means of compensation. (3) The fear of revenge acted like a brutish deterrent on all members of the tribe, keeping tribal members’ worst impulses in check.
Tribal law was far more complex than that in reality. But this crude caricature shaped white people’s perceptions of what they heard and saw of Indians’ pursuit of justice. When Tanner uttered his declaration of the revenge principle, the men on the expedition saw their stereotyped impression of a savage mind at work.
The conversations around Tanner’s predicament led Long to ponder. Was Tanner an American citizen, or was he now essentially an Indian living beyond the pale of American civilization? His attachment to the revenge principle pointed to the latter. When Long wrote in his journal two days later, he observed that Tanner had “become completely a savage . . . in every respect but complexion.” Only after his long-lost white family had located him and taken measures to “reclaim” him, some four years prior, had Tanner begun to reacquire civilized ways. At the present juncture, Long concluded, Tanner stood somewhere in between, half-savage and half-civilized.7
Americans in Long’s day called people like Tanner white Indians. Since colonial times thousands of individuals of white parentage had opted out of white society, preferring to live among Indians. A large percentage of those individuals were onetime captives who, upon being absorbed into Indian life, declined to return to their families when they had the opportunity. Americans found that troubling. Benjamin Franklin, among others, commented on how seldom it happened the other way around. Comparatively few Indian individuals chose to join white society. It was not right that a nation founded on ideals of equality, freedom, and the pursuit of happiness, a young nation claiming to be the light of the world, should find so many of its citizens defecting to Indian tribes.8
Long and his men had actually learned of the white Indian named John Tanner many days before they reached Rainy Lake House. Coming into the region, the exploring party began hearing reports of a “citizen of the United States” who had been taken captive as a child and who had lived for many years among the Indians, becoming one of them in language, dress, and manner. They learned that this man had recently returned to the region after an absence of a few years and that he had been attacked by an Indian while making his way back to Mackinac with his Indian children. Long and his men eventually connected this person with a captive whom they had read about some years before in the newspapers. Tanner’s story had circulated in the nation’s press around the time that he was finally reunited with his family. “A Captive Found,” one of these stories was headlined. “Indian Captive Reclaimed,” announced another. Nothing drew the attention of American readers like an Indian captivity story. Indeed, more than four years had passed since Long and his men had read those notices, so the fact that they remembered them shows what a strong impression they made.9
As a native of upper New England, Long had grown up with such captivity stories. One of the most popular literary genres in colonial America, captivity narratives retained their hold on the American consciousness for several decades into the nineteenth century. In their most basic, unembellished form they were an American equivalent to the Icelandic saga—narratives particularly suited for great storytellers and passed down by oral tradition. In the eighteenth century, as more captivity narratives were put in writing and published, they became the forerunner of the nineteenth-century dime novel—cheap, popular, sensational reading. But though they were often embellished they were never tales of complete fiction; the power of the genre was that the stories were authentic and dealt with firsthand experience.10 The actual number of non-Indians taken captive by Indians can never be known, but it was a common enough experience that a large swath of the population could count a friend or relative a victim, making the nightmarish scenario not just strongly imagined but in some way personalized.11
/>
Long’s hometown of Hopkinton, New Hampshire, had a few captivity stories of its own. Dating back to Long’s grandparents’ generation and the time of the French and Indian War, these tales were passed down orally with spellbinding detail. One familiar account began with events on the morning of April 22, 1746, when a party of Abenakis slipped through an open gate in Woodwell’s garrison, left unsecured while one of the inhabitants went out to feed the cattle. After a brief struggle inside the garrison, five men, one woman, and two children were taken captive, while a man escaped into the woods, and a woman eluded capture by dashing to the cellar and hiding under a barrel. The Abenakis marched their captives north to Quebec, a twelve-day journey through the wilderness of northern New Hampshire, on one scanty meal a day. The Abenakis had the intention of either trading them as slaves or selling them to the French, who paid a bounty on English captives. Two of the eight died of yellow fever in a Quebec prison, four others were ransomed from the French, and the remaining two—a boy and a girl, both in their teens—lived with the Abenakis for three years until their families finally secured their release.12
Another story told of two Hopkinton youths who were taken on the morning of April 13, 1753. The first captive, Abraham Kimball, was driving his father’s cow over the road from Putney’s fort to Kimball’s fort when he was seized. The second was engaged in burning a brush pile outside the Putney farm. That night, while the Indians were trying to make off with yet more captives, they were attacked by a pack of dogs and the two boys escaped. As the Kimballs and the Longs were related by marriage, Stephen probably heard this story when he was a boy, possibly in repeated tellings.13
Both Long’s father and maternal grandfather had fought in wars, so the young Stephen would also have heard stories about his elders’ service in the military. His maternal grandfather, Captain Stephen Harriman, fought in the French and Indian War before becoming a tavern keeper in Hopkinton in the 1760s. Prominent afterwards in town government, he later served as a delegate to the Exeter convention in 1775, which was called to reform New Hampshire’s colonial government on the eve of the American Revolution.14 Stephen’s father, Moses Long, served in the Continental army in the Revolutionary War. He endured hardships at Valley Forge in the winter of 1776–77, and witnessed the surrender of General John Burgoyne at Saratoga. Among the prized possessions in Stephen’s boyhood home was his father’s “queen’s arm,” a gun that he had traded for a captured Hessian musket before he left the army. After his military discharge in 1780, Moses Long became a farmer and cooper in Hopkinton. He and Long’s mother, Lucy Harriman, married in 1783. Stephen Harriman Long was born on December 30, 1784. Stephen was the second of thirteen children, and the oldest of ten to survive infancy. Such a large family was not uncommon in New England in that era.15
The threat of Indian raids in northern New England had long since ended by Stephen’s time. This relative security attracted a new wave of settlers around the year he was born. But the thousands of people who poured into New Hampshire and Vermont after the Revolution faced other challenges: a shortage of fertile farm land, limited access to markets, and high taxes. By the time Stephen was a boy, the tide of migration had reversed. Many young people, unable to take up farms near their parents’ homes, left upper New England in search of better opportunities elsewhere.16 Stephen himself and at least three of his eight brothers would eventually join that out-migration.
The Hopkinton of Stephen’s boyhood stood at the threshold of this northern frontier. By the early 1800s, when he was in his upper teens, the town had a population of about 2,000 people. Cows and sheep dotted the hillsides, watermills stood on the banks of every major stream, and the village square bustled with artisans’ shops and mercantile stores. A few years later the town would become a stop on a new stage route between Boston and Quebec.17
As in most New England towns, Hopkinton’s religious life centered on the Calvinistic Congregational church. Both the Long and Harriman families were active in the church; Moses Long was a deacon. During the 1790s, when Stephen was a boy, a schism occurred in the congregation, which left the town with two places of worship, known henceforth as the east and west Congregational meeting houses. In the early 1800s, an evangelist Baptist meeting house appeared in the town, too, further dividing the faithful between New Light and Old Light denominations. The New Lights believed in the power of individual salvation through worship, while the Old Lights held to the sterner teachings of predestination. Long’s family stuck with the Old Light faction in the community.18
Stephen Long’s religious upbringing in Hopkinton laid the foundation for a devout Christian outlook in his adult life. On his expedition to the Rocky Mountains in 1820, he would make it a rule to rest the party on Sundays, directing everyone to attend to their health and cleanliness.19 His Christian faith would also color his views on Indians.
Stephen Long’s parents valued education as well as religion. Stephen’s uncle, Enoch Long, owned a bookbindery and bookstore in Hopkinton, and his father later produced a local history for the New Hampshire Historical Society.20 Stephen and at least three of his brothers pursued a college education. At the age of nineteen or twenty, Stephen entered Dartmouth College, New Hampshire’s first school of higher learning. Dartmouth offered a liberal education, including philosophy, history, classical literature, mathematics, and engineering. He was a voracious reader: in his freshman year, he not only read his assigned texts of Homer, Virgil, and Cicero but devoured another twenty books from the college library, including Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and Plutarch’s Lives. He joined the school choir and served as vice president of the Handel Society, developing an active interest in music that continued well into his adult life. Years later, while on his way up the Rainy River, he would record in his journal in musical notation a few bars of Ojibwa music from what he described as a scalp dance.21
An unusual feature of Long’s college experience was that he lived on campus with a handful of Indian students. Dartmouth College was founded for the purpose of acculturating and Christianizing young Indians as well as educating young whites. By the time Stephen matriculated, the missionary zeal of the college’s founding years had diminished. Still, five Indian students appear in the records of Dartmouth College during the years when Long was a student.22 One, a Mohawk from New York by the name of Eleazar Williams, boasted that he was descended from Eunice Williams, a white captive of the Iroquois raid on Deerfield, Massachusetts, in 1704. Eunice Williams became famous as “the unredeemed captive” for her refusal to rejoin white society.23 Her great-grandson Eleazar led an unusual life in his own right, repeatedly reinventing himself. After leaving Dartmouth, Eleazar became an ordained minister and worked for the American Board of Missionaries among the Iroquois. During the War of 1812, he served American interests as a spy in Canada. In the 1820s, he became an Indian political leader, persuading Christianized New York Indians to seek a new home in Wisconsin. Late in life, in his most beguiling transformation of them all, Eleazar claimed to be the Dauphin, the long-lost heir of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, allegedly spirited away as an infant at the onset of the French Revolution, protected by anonymity in an Iroquois village in Quebec until the age of ten, and grown to manhood among Indians in the backwoods of upstate New York. More than a few European aristocrats were taken in by this story, and he lived on their charity until his death in 1858.24 One wonders what impression Eleazar Williams made on Long when they were students together at Dartmouth. Though Williams’s tenure at the college was brief, this fellow, so mercurial in later life, might even then have struck Long as a living legacy of Indian captivity.
Graduating from Dartmouth in 1809, Long spent the next four years as a school principal and teacher in Salisbury, New Hampshire, and in Germantown, Pennsylvania. Toward the end of the War of 1812, he applied for an officer’s commission in the Corps of Engineers. Owing to his skills as an engineer and inventor, he was among a handful of officers appointed to the new US Topographic
al Engineers. He then taught mathematics for one year at West Point Military Academy while the Corps of Engineers went through a reorganization and the Topographical Engineers temporarily folded after the war.25 On April 24, 1816, Congress reauthorized the Topographical Engineers for the purpose of surveying and mapping the western territories. Two days later, Long applied for a new commission. For some time, he had been nurturing a desire to travel and explore. At the age of thirty-one, he found the opportunity.
2
The Hunter
In the years after the American Revolutionary War the Ohio valley was the scene of much raiding and fighting between whites and Indians. Settlers pushed north out of Kentucky and west out of Pennsylvania into southern Ohio, encroaching on the hunting grounds of the Shawnee, Delaware, Wyandot, Ottawa, Ojibwa, and Kickapoo nations. Under pressure from the US military, all of the Indian nations met in council with the Americans at Fort Harmar save one, the Shawnees. Over the next year, as fighting between the Americans and the Shawnees intensified, US forces attacked and burned the principal Shawnee towns and drove the tribe northward. But even as the Shawnees regrouped on the Maumee River nearer to their British allies, they made frequent raids into southern Ohio in an effort to hold the line on white settlement at the Ohio River.1 Shawnee war parties challenged the Americans all up and down the Ohio, attacking farms, killing settlers, and taking away captives. Into this cauldron of war in the early spring of 1790 came a Virginian named John Tanner with his wife and six children, including a nine-year-old boy by the same name.
The Tanner family traveled by wagon from Elkhorn, Kentucky, to the Ohio River. When they got to the Ohio, the senior John Tanner bought three flatboats for transporting his horses, cattle, household goods, few slaves, and family down the river. The nine-year-old John Tanner would later recall that the sides of these flatboats were bloodstained and bulletholed and that previous passengers had been killed in an Indian attack. Tanner’s childhood memory accords with the accounts of other emigrants who were setting out down the Ohio from western Pennsylvania during that same spring. Emigrants were advised to keep to the middle of the river and ignore all pleas for help from people on land, no matter how anguished, for the Indians were known to use white captives as decoys for luring victims to the riverbanks, where they would be ambushed and taken prisoner or slain.2 The Tanner family saw no hostile Indians on their trip on the Ohio, but as they were passing Cincinnati (a small settlement of about 60 log cabins and 200 inhabitants in 1790) they had another close call. The flatboat carrying the family’s livestock sank. John’s father leaped aboard the sinking vessel and cut loose the horses and cattle, and although the animals went into the river they survived.3
Rainy Lake House Page 3