The Tanner family took possession of a deserted farm on the Kentucky side of the Ohio River across from the mouth of the Big Miami. Squatters had recently cleared the land only to be driven away by Indian attacks. It seems that, in spite of the danger, the Tanners thought they could turn the squatters’ misfortune into their own opportunity. In about two weeks’ time they resurrected the farmstead’s two partially destroyed log cabins, one for the family dwelling and the other for slave quarters, and built a defensive stockade around both buildings. But only a few weeks later they, too, experienced a heavy loss.4
One day at the end of April, all the men and older boys were outside the stockade replanting an old cornfield. The oldest son, Edward, and the slaves were dropping corn in the furrowed earth, while the senior John Tanner stood watch for Indians with his gun in hand. Nine-year-old John was playing in the shade of a walnut tree. Unbeknownst to any of them a Shawnee-Ottawa war party looked on from the edge of the woods. It was the last time the boy would ever see his father.5
Some days prior to this, about 250 miles to the north, an Ottawa named Manitoo-geezhik left the village of Saginaw with his grown son Kish-kau-ko and two other men and headed for the Ohio River to make war on the whites. Near Lake Erie they were joined by three Shawnees, making a war party of seven. Manitoo-geezhik’s goal was to take a young boy captive to bring home for his wife, who was grieving the recent loss of their youngest son. It was a common practice among Indian peoples to replace a child who had died from sickness or a son who had been killed in war with a captive of about the same age. Often such captives came to be treated like adopted children and would remain with the family for years. Besides providing consolation for the bereaved parents, these young people often grew up to bolster the population of the tribe. Adopted males became warriors; adopted females bore children. Numerous whites and blacks and Indians of other nations were to be found among Indian groups in the late eighteenth century, all having come into the tribe by way of capture and adoption. When taking captives, the Indians did not discriminate on the basis of race.6
Manitoo-geezhik and his followers descended the Big Miami, crossed the Ohio under cover of night, and staked out the Tanner farmstead early in the morning. For hours they hid in the woods at the edge of the cornfield, watching the men and one grown boy in the field and waiting for an eligible child to emerge from the stockade. Several times Manitoo-geezhik had to counsel patience, as the younger men wanted to dispatch everyone in plain sight and then search inside the stockade. Finally, about midday, they saw nine-year-old John Tanner come through the gate and settle under a walnut tree, where he began collecting walnuts in a straw hat. Manitoo-geezhik and Kish-kau-ko crept up on the boy and seized him from behind, clapping a hand over his mouth. Kish-kau-ko took the straw hat from the young Tanner’s hands, dumped the walnuts, and put it on the boy’s head. Then, with each one grasping an arm, they lifted him off his feet and whisked him away.7
A mile from the farmstead the seven Ottawas and Shawnees had a canoe and provisions stashed under some bushes on the bank of the Ohio. They offered Tanner dry venison and bear fat, but he was too frightened to eat. Thrusting him into the canoe, they crossed the Ohio and started up the Big Miami. After a while they ditched the canoe and continued their journey on land, Manitoo-geezhik and Kish-kau-ko once more flanking the boy and gripping him by the wrists. Pushed along on his bare feet, Tanner tried to make mental notes of their route so he could find his way back. He thought about how he might get away when they all went to sleep for the night. But when they finally stopped at the end of the day he was so exhausted that he immediately fell deeply asleep and remained so until his captors rousted him in the morning.8
They continued their journey the next day and the next, and mile by mile Tanner lost hope of making his escape. Coming to a large stream, Manitoo-geezhik put the boy on his shoulders and waded across. As the river was wide and the water came up to Manitoo-geezhik’s armpits, Tanner realized that here was a barrier which would once and for all prevent him from returning home on his own two legs.9
When Tanner’s captors reached the northward flowing Maumee River, they built hickory bark canoes and continued their journey on water. Downstream, at the mouth of the Auglaize River, they came to the Shawnee village where Manitoo-geezhik had picked up three of his companions. As they landed their canoes, residents of the village swarmed around them. One young woman, giving a cry, walked up and struck Tanner on the head. Having recently lost close kin in a skirmish with the Americans, she and her relatives wanted to kill the young white captive for revenge. Manitoo-geezhik and Kish-kau-ko had to talk them out of it. Their party, reduced to four men and the boy after the other three men returned to their lodges, remained in the Shawnee village for two days. Surrounded as they were by so many other Indians, whose language was incomprehensible to him, Tanner was soon made to understand that he was under Manitoo-geezhik’s protection. The old Indian knew a few words of English and began ordering him to fetch water, collect firewood, and perform other tasks, treating him more like a slave than a captive. As a matter of self-preservation, the boy readily answered to his commands.10
Leaving the Shawnee village, they floated down the Maumee River toward Lake Erie and arrived the following day at a British trading post. When they approached the British traders, Manitoo-geezhik and his followers made no effort to conceal their captive. Nor did the traders betray any alarm at the sight of Tanner, despite his bloody feet and the obvious fact that he had been abducted. Calmly the traders offered to purchase the boy, but Manitoo-geezhik declined their offer, explaining that the boy was to take the place of his deceased son. The traders were already familiar with this Indian practice. They gave Tanner a meal and, after explaining to him what had just passed between them and the old Indian, told him that in ten days they would follow him to the Indians’ village and rescue him. But Tanner sensed this was a lie and, when his captors prepared to leave, began to weep. He was surprised by his own tears, for until that point in his ordeal he had been too tired or frightened to cry.11
In a few more days they came to the frontier settlement of Detroit. The young boy’s interest was piqued as the Indians paddled the canoe close to shore to exchange some words with a white woman walking along the riverbank, but their conversation was in French and after a brief exchange they continued on past the settlement. Once out of sight of the town, the Indians landed the canoe. After a short search in the woods they found what they were looking for, a hollow log in which to hide their captive and assorted valuables while they returned to town. Ordering Tanner to crawl into the log alongside their blankets and kettles, they placed another log against the opening, sealing him in. Tanner stayed imprisoned in there for many hours. When the Indians at last returned, night had fallen, but Tanner could see that they had acquired three horses. The Indians put Tanner on one horse, their baggage on another, and took turns riding the third. With horses they traveled much faster, and about three days later they arrived home at the village of Saginaw. Their mission complete, the small war party disbanded without hoopla.12
Manitoo-geezhik lived in a log cabin that did not look appreciably different from the log cabins Tanner knew in Kentucky. When they arrived in front of Manitoo-geezhik’s home, his wife emerged and immediately began to cry tears of joy and smother the boy with hugs and kisses. Though unprepared for her emotional outburst, he would soon come to appreciate how it made sense in the context of her world. According to her belief system, the courage shown by her husband and son in going to the Ohio River and back had succeeded in “raising up the dead.” She no longer had to grieve the loss of her son, for his spirit had arisen once more in the body of this little boy. Tanner had to accept that he himself was that boy.13
As was generally the case in this form of adoption, most of the Ottawas did not rush to form bonds of affection with the nine-year-old Tanner but waited to see how he would respond to this new phase of his life. Tanner participated at once in all the fa
mily’s activities—planting corn in the spring, going with the whole village to its hunting grounds in the summer, gathering the corn and fishing for sturgeon when autumn came—but until he acquired their language he had to learn how to do things more by observation than by direct instruction. While his mother was mostly kind to him, his father and three brothers treated him badly, beating or knocking him down, as he would later recall, nearly every day. Manitoo-geezhik was particularly violent and cruel on occasion. Once that first summer, he tomahawked the boy in the head and left him bleeding and unconscious outside their camp, seemingly indifferent whether he lived or died. One day the following winter, he grabbed Tanner by the hair and rubbed his face in excrement, then threw him in a snowbank.14
The following spring, Manitoo-geezhik announced that he would lead another war party to the Ohio River. This time his plan was to return to the same farmstead and kill all of the white boy’s relatives. Brutal as it was, his plan had a rational design. He wanted to expunge all thoughts Tanner might have of ever returning to his original family. As Tanner by this time had become conversant in Ottawa, Manitoo-geezhik boasted to his adopted son of what he planned to do. Then he left. A few weeks later he returned with an old white hat, which Tanner recognized from a mark in the crown as his older brother’s hat. Manitoo-geezhik told him that his war party had killed everyone at the Tanner farm—the entire family, all of the slaves, and even the horses.
Many years passed before Tanner learned that this massacre never happened. Although the war party did indeed go back to the Tanner farm, they killed no one. They took Tanner’s older brother Edward captive, but he escaped in the night from the Indians’ first camp on the Big Miami. And yet the whole thing worked out according to Manitoo-geezhik’s plan, for when he returned from the raid and told Tanner his horrible lie, it had exactly the psychological impact he had intended. Tanner was too young and naïve not to believe him, especially when presented with Edward’s hat as evidence. Tanner would take to his new life as an Indian more readily with the belief that all his white kin were dead.15
After two years, the abusive Manitoo-geezhik finally did his adopted son one good turn: he sold him to another Indian, a woman. Her name was Net-no-kwa, and she was a village chief among the Ottawas. Her people lived on the northern shores of Lake Huron and on the upper and lower peninsulas of Michigan. She was related through kinship to Manitoo-geezhik. In the summer of 1792 she visited her kinsman who, notwithstanding his wife’s lamentations, sold his adopted son for the price of some blankets, trinkets, and tobacco, and a ten-gallon keg of whiskey.16
When Net-no-kwa adopted Tanner, the boy once more replaced a child of similar age who had died. Although the trade made him a newcomer in a strange family all over again, Tanner quickly recognized that this second adoption was favorable for him, for Net-no-kwa treated him much better than Manitoo-geezhik ever did. Net-no-kwa gave him a mother’s affection, something he had not really enjoyed since his original mother had died when he was two years old. His relationship with his Ottawa mother would grow into one of the strongest, most enduring bonds he would ever have. Though she was already older when she adopted him—she may have been forty years old—she still possessed great energy and a subtle command over her whole family. In the eyes of the eleven-year-old boy, she had a beautiful face as well.17
Tanner soon learned the makeup of his new extended family. Net-no-kwa was married to a much younger man, and her husband had two other wives who were about his own age. Net-no-kwa had one grown daughter and two adolescent sons from a past marriage. The daughter had a husband and two small children. That made eleven people in the family, counting Tanner. Net-no-kwa was the esteemed elder in this three-generation family. Tanner was the youngest family member other than the two small children, and as an adoptee he was the lowest in the family hierarchy. Although Net-no-kwa was tender-hearted, she still treated him as the family drudge.18
Taw-ga-we-ninne, Net-no-kwa’s husband, was seventeen years younger than she. Indeed, he was not much older than Net-no-kwa’s daughter. Net-no-kwa’s children addressed him as their father, and he addressed Net-no-kwa’s children in speech as he would his own daughter and sons, but in actual manner he treated them more like equals. He had a gentle, affable way. Tanner saw that Taw-ga-we-ninne generally deferred to Net-no-kwa’s decisions for the family and that Net-no-kwa owned everything. Net-no-kwa’s superior age and Taw-ga-we-ninne’s subordinate role were not the usual pattern in Ottawa families, but they were not that exceptional either.19 In part, the young Tanner observed a family dynamic that contrasted sharply with the rigidly patriarchal family structure he had known in Kentucky.
Taw-ga-we-ninne was not Ottawa but Ojibwa. His tribe and Net-no-kwa’s tribe both belonged to a large group known as Algonquian for the similarities of their languages and cultures. Algonquian tribes occupied an expansive territory extending from the Atlantic Coast far into the interior of North America, but they were most numerous around the Great Lakes. The Algonquian peoples included the Shawnees, Potawatomis, and Kickapoos, among many others. Besides being affiliated through language and culture, the Algonquian peoples also encouraged intermarriage to strengthen their place in the world. By way of marriage alliances, they recognized and honored elaborate kinship networks that not only extended beyond the family and band but reached into other tribes as well. Thus, Net-no-kwa recognized Manitoo-geezhik as her relative, even though they lived in widely separated villages and may not have ever met before. Through her marriage to Taw-ga-we-ninne, she acquired relations among the Ojibwas who lived many miles to the west.20
Net-no-kwa’s band of Ottawas lived on the northern tip of Michigan’s lower peninsula, where the waters of Lake Michigan mingle with the waters of Lake Huron through the five-mile-wide Straits of Mackinac separating Michigan’s upper and lower peninsulas. This junction of the upper Great Lakes had been a center of the fur trade since the days of Jean Nicolet and Père Marquette. Just east of the Straits lies Mackinac Island, where the British had built a fort in 1780, replacing one on the mainland that the French had occupied since 1715. Net-no-kwa’s village of Cheboygan stood on the shore of Lake Huron about fifteen miles east of the Straits of Mackinac. Another Ottawa village, called by the French L’Arbre Croche for a crooked tree that the Indians held sacred, stood at the base of a sandy spit jutting into Lake Michigan a few miles west of the Straits. Along with the two Ottawa villages there were small settlements of Ojibwas bordering the Straits on Bois Blanc Island and Point St. Ignace, the latter village occupying the site of an old Jesuit mission. Tanner came to know all of these places in the course of his family’s wanderings, and he took pride in the fact that Net-no-kwa was a principal chief of the Ottawa. The traders at Fort Mackinac recognized her canoe by the Union Jack she flew in their honor, and they gave her a salute with the fort’s cannon every time they saw her approaching.21
Tanner had been with Net-no-kwa for about a year when she announced one day that it was time for her son to learn how to hunt. Taw-ga-we-ninne owned a cavalryman’s pistol, which he at that moment loaded and handed to Tanner, telling him that if he managed to kill anything with it then he would be given his own gun and taught how to use it. The boy had been among the Indians long enough now to know what a propitious offer this was. Eagerly he rose, took the pistol, and went out. Only a little distance from camp, a pigeon flew in and obligingly plumped down on a nearby bush. Carefully the boy cocked his piece, held it to his cheek, and pulled the trigger. The discharge seared his cheek and knocked him down, and the pistol flew from his grasp. But when he got to his feet he was delighted to find the pigeon lying dead beneath the bush. Taw-ga-we-ninne kept his promise, not only teaching him how to hunt with a gun, but also how to make traps and catch marten. Now in his twelfth year, Tanner found that by becoming a hunter he rose markedly in the Indians’ esteem.22
3
The Trader
It was no coincidence that the adult John Tanner, after being ambushed and badly wou
nded in Canada that summer of 1823, ended up in the care of Dr. John McLoughlin. McLoughlin was then the only surgeon in all of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s vast domain. For two decades, he had provided medical services for sick and injured fur traders, who came for treatment often from hundreds of miles away. During his many years with the old North West Company from 1803 to 1821, he resided most summers at Fort William, the Nor’ Westers’ great gathering place on the north shore of Lake Superior. There he ran a hospital and apothecary, attending to the many cases of venereal disease, hernias, and broken bones incurred by the several hundred employees who congregated for the yearly rendezvous. Indians came to him for help as well. He had given medical aid to John Tanner on two prior occasions: once when Tanner suffered broken ribs after falling from a tree and another time when he fell sick after overturning his canoe in an icy river. Not all of McLoughlin’s patients came to see him at Fort William or Rainy Lake; sometimes he took his medical kit and traveled by canoe for days to visit a patient at some isolated outpost.1
Rainy Lake House Page 4