Rainy Lake House

by Theodore Catton

  Elizabeth Thérèse Baird, the granddaughter of Thérèse Schindler, to whom Tanner had entrusted his infant daughter, Lucy, remembered the village on the south end of the island the way it appeared around 1814. “How vividly I still see the clear, shining broad beach of white pebbles and stones, and clear blue water of the ‘Basin.’ The houses were of one story, roofed with cedar bark. . . . True, the houses were quaint and old; however, they were but few, not enough to mar the beauty, but rather to add to the charms of the little crescent-shaped village.”2

  In a less nostalgic vein, an American Fur Company clerk by the name of Gurdon S. Hubbard recorded his first visit to Mackinac in the summer of 1818. “This island was then in its gayest season. All the traders attached to the American Fur Company were assembled there, having brought in their furs, and were preparing to receive their outfits to depart again to their several trading-posts.” Hubbard thought the island had about 500 inhabitants excluding the fort’s garrison of three companies. Most of the villagers were Métis and French Canadians who lived by fishing and trading with the Indians. “With few exceptions,” he wrote, “they were poor and improvident.”3

  An American woman named Myra Peters Mason who spent the summer of 1824 on the island found little in the village to admire. She informed her sister that the Métis were “a grade below any other species of the human race I have ever seen.” Mackinac, she proclaimed, was a “half-way place in every sense of the phrase between civilization & barbarism.”4

  Although Tanner did not record his feelings about Mackinac, he probably looked to it as a haven. Perhaps the placement of a fort, a trading house, an Indian agency, and a largely Métis village all in such close proximity gave him hope of blending into the polyglot community. Possibly, too, the pleasant island setting rekindled old memories of the springtime idyll on Isle Royale he had once enjoyed in his early youth. In any case the strong Métis presence, with its proud embrace of mixed-race families and dual Indian-European heritage, must have appealed to him. He would not have used the terms “civilization” and “barbarism” to describe the juxtaposition of Anglo-American and Métis elements in the community, but he would have agreed with the American woman’s assessment that Mackinac was a “half-way place.”

  Yet this unique social environment was not to last. With the United States consolidating its hold on the fur trade in US territory and the Hudson’s Bay Company coming to serve as the instrument of colonial rule in British territory, frontier communities like Mackinac, Sault Ste. Marie, Prairie du Chien, and Red River were being forcibly restructured. In Mackinac the process of Americanization began with the opening of boys’ and girls’ boarding schools around 1814 and intensified with the establishment of a Presbyterian mission in 1823. A new Anglo-American elite was born, which spearheaded the transformation. The elite included Indian agent George Boyd, the American Fur Company’s Robert Stuart, missionary William Ferry, leading businessmen and fort officers, and the wives of these men—altogether some twelve to fifteen families, all of whom hailed from the eastern United States or Britain. They introduced American law, pushed American forms of local government and commerce, made English the dominant language, preached evangelical Protestantism, and expected the Métis to accept American customs.5 All of which made it impossible for Tanner to adjust and fit in with the community even though that was his hope.

  Tanner’s first experience with the new regime was also perhaps his most devastating. Returning to Mackinac in the early summer of 1824 after an absence of almost two years, he discovered that his three children by Therezia had been bound out to American families. In a practice dating back to colonial times, local authorities bound out needy children to prevent their being a burden on the county’s taxpayers. Binding out was a pauper apprentice system whereby the child’s labor was given to the master in return for the child’s keep and the promise that the child would be taught a craft. Usually the system was restricted to orphans and illegitimate children. When the local authorities bound out Tanner’s children, it showed that they had decided Therezia could not care for them and, furthermore, that they regarded the children as fatherless, since they considered Tanner and Therezia to be unmarried. The oldest child, Martha, was bound out to the fort commander’s family. The youngest, James, just two years old, was placed with the Indian agency’s blacksmith. The middle child, Mary, was put in yet another household. When Tanner learned of their situation, he was furious. He felt betrayed.6

  Before leaving Mackinac in the fall of 1822, he had arranged for Martha and Mary to attend the new boarding school for girls. The first of its kind in the territory, the school was intended for the daughters of American Fur Company employees. Robert Stuart had seen to its establishment a few years earlier, employing Schindler’s daughter, Marienne, as headmistress. The girls were taught to read and write, keep house, and make their own clothes. Although Tanner’s Narrative says nothing of his children being bound out, it does disclose that while he was away for two years the authorities seized what little property he had in Mackinac to pay for the girls’ board. It appears that the authorities hounded Therezia for the debt, and when she had nothing else to give them they made her surrender the children.7

  Tanner’s mistake was that he had entrusted the children to the company’s care even though his personal affairs might detain him in Indian country longer than the one-year term of his employment contract. Of course, had he not been attacked by Little Clear Sky he would likely have gotten back within twelve months. Returning to Mackinac fully a year later than planned, he finally collected the pay the company owed him for the previous year. Ironically, he had to use every last penny of his income to get his children back. Afterwards he had nothing. “I have no money, no clothing, & nothing to eat,” he informed the Indian agent. “I am in such a situation that I am unable to go anywhere.” All he had left, he claimed, was “one old Blanket.”8

  A month later Tanner found employment as an interpreter for Indian agent Boyd. As an employee of the field service of the US Office of Indian Affairs, he became part of a far-flung bureaucracy within the War Department. The Indian field service had seventeen agencies and twenty-three subagencies in operation that year. Mackinac Agency had a staff of five when Tanner came on board: besides Boyd, there was another interpreter, an assistant interpreter, a blacksmith, and a striker.9 Interpreters were typically paid a dollar per day, making it one of the best-paid positions within the laboring class in fur-trade society. So, the outlook for Tanner would seem to have brightened: he had secured a steady government job in one of the two occupations, interpreter and missionary, most often taken up by repatriated white Indians like himself.

  Yet a good job could not save Tanner from sinking further into disillusionment and loneliness. His adversities were not economic but cultural and psychological. His strange manners, his emotional intensity, his “quick and piercing blue eyes”—character traits that bespoke not just his Indian upbringing but the markings of trauma—put white people off. He could not form lasting relationships. One perceptive observer said that he lacked the submissive and compliant manner that would have helped him get along in his new station as a government interpreter.10 Governor Cass met with him a dozen years after their first acquaintance and found him “a forlorn, heart broken man.”11 Unable to find acceptance, Tanner grew increasingly hard and mean toward his own wife and children, losing their affections one by one. Whites who wrote about him in his lifetime almost invariably cited the disintegration of his family as proof that he was either insane or hopelessly maladjusted after his return to white society. What they failed to see was that their own society was deeply implicated in the family’s undoing.

  On July 30, 1830, Michigan’s territorial legislature enacted a bizarre little law aimed specifically at taking Tanner’s eighteen-year-old daughter Martha away from him. Entitled “An act authorizing the sheriff of Chippewa county to perform certain duties therein mentioned,” the first section authorized the sheriff to remove Martha f
rom her father’s custody and place her in a missionary establishment; the second section provided that if Tanner should threaten Martha or her new custodians, it would constitute a misdemeanor punishable by fine and imprisonment. One Michigan jurist later commented that the act was “probably the only law ever passed in America attaching criminal consequences to injuries to a single private ­person.”12

  The background to that law is naturally somewhat complicated. Two years before the law was passed, Tanner had taken a job as interpreter for Indian agent Henry Schoolcraft at the Sault Ste. Marie Agency, moving his children to Sault Ste. Marie. The following year Schoolcraft had had to reduce Tanner’s hours and pay; consequently, Tanner had taken a second job as interpreter for the Baptist mission there. He began to assist his second employer, the Reverend Abel Bingham, in translating the Gospels. Schoolcraft and Bingham soon entered into a bitter feud in which Tanner’s shared employment was at first just one irritant among several. However, when Tanner took Bingham’s side in a vicious controversy surrounding one Sophia Cadotte, a pupil at the mission school who was also a servant legally bound to Schoolcraft, it led to a falling out between him and the Indian agent. Schoolcraft was a thug who used the power of his office to settle scores. Besides heading the Indian agency, he also served as a member of the territorial legislature. When he went to Detroit to attend the summer session of the legislature, he not only influenced Governor Cass to remove Tanner from his post, he vindictively pushed that law through the chamber as well.13

  Even before Tanner was betrayed by his employer, other pressures came to bear on his marriage to Therezia. In the mid- to late 1820s, the Presbyterian missionaries in Mackinac entered into a “religious war” with the Roman Catholic laity. Both sides began to measure their strength by how many converts they could make each year, and both sides took their proselytizing to nasty extremes. When the local authorities caught Catholic Métis inducing Indian children to run away from the Presbyterian mission school, they had them stripped and flogged on the public street. In that charged atmosphere, Therezia converted to Catholicism.14

  According to Elizabeth Thérèse Baird’s recollection, when Tanner moved from Mackinac to Sault Ste. Marie he asked Therezia to join him there, but she refused to go unless he would marry her in the Catholic Church. Denying her request, he insisted (once again) that they were already married in the Indian way and she was fully his wife. One wonders if Therezia’s desire to be legally married had less to do with religious conviction than it did with preventing the local authorities from seizing her “illegitimate” children again. In any case, when Tanner would not consent to be married in the Catholic Church she remained in Mackinac, and that was the end of their relationship.15

  A few years later, Tanner himself converted to the Protestant faith at Sault Ste. Marie. The Baptist missionary Bingham performed his baptism in the St. Mary’s River on August 21, 1831. Unfortunately, there is no explicit record of what Tanner thought or felt about his conversion to Christianity. One could imagine that it was in some way an act of desperation, a last bid for acceptance by the white community. When Tanner gave his story to Edwin James, he told him a pertinent anecdote. It was a tale about a baptized Indian, a man who had followed the beseechings of a missionary, renouncing his own people’s religion and adopting that of the whites. After death, the spirit of this man journeyed to the gates of the white man’s heaven and demanded admittance, but the gatekeeper would not let him in, for he was an Indian. “Go,” the gatekeeper said to him, “for to the west there are the villages and the hunting grounds of those of your own people who have been on the earth before you.” So the dead man’s spirit journeyed some more and came to the villages where the dead of his own people resided, only to be met by the chief, who barred him from entering there as well. “You have been ashamed of us while you lived,” the chief told him. “You have chosen to worship the white man’s God. Go now to his village, and let him provide for you.” The Indian having lived by two creeds, his spirit had nowhere to rest. Now Tanner was that Indian.16

  In the year of his religious conversion, Tanner went to Detroit to search for his daughter Martha. Though he did not find her, he met a white woman there whom he married, brought back to Sault Ste. Marie, and introduced to the Baptist church fellowship. Schoolcraft wrote disparagingly in his diary that the bride was formerly “a chamber-maid at old Ben Woodworth’s hotel.”17 Bingham’s daughter, Angie Bingham Gilbert, a more sympathetic source on Tanner, recollected years later that Tanner’s new wife was a widow by the name of Mrs. Duncan. People in Detroit, Gilbert said, became interested in Tanner and recommended the widow to him. “He probably did not give any exhibition of temper while there, and she finally consented to marry him.”18 The marriage lasted less than a year. By the following summer it was rumored that Tanner abused her and threatened to kill her and that when he was away she entertained soldiers from nearby Fort Brady in their home. In the midst of these domestic problems, Tanner’s son James ran away from home. One day, Tanner encountered his ten-year-old son in the village and gave him a severe beating, for which he was arrested and put in jail. When his wife heard that he was incarcerated, she took the opportunity to make her escape. Her church friends took up a collection and bought her passage on the next vessel bound for Detroit. When Tanner was released from jail and learned what had happened, he felt betrayed yet again; his fellow parishioners had spirited away his wife while he was locked behind bars.19

  After that episode, Tanner’s relations with the community rapidly deteriorated. People feared that in retaliation for the removal of his wife he would harm somebody. In Gilbert’s words, he became “a source of worry to nearly every one.” Although the Reverend Bingham still valued Tanner’s skill as an interpreter and translator, he could no longer pay his salary. In October 1833 Bingham reluctantly dismissed him from employment. At the same time, acceding to the wishes of his parishioners, Bingham banished Tanner from the church fellowship.20

  Ostracized by the community, robbed of his daughter Martha, and deserted by his son James and his wife from Detroit, Tanner had no one. His daughter Mary had left him sometime before, though the circumstances of her departure are not known. Around this time, word came to him that she had been shot dead by an Ojibwa man somewhere up north. She was twenty years old.21

  Tanner lived out the rest of his years in Sault Ste. Marie as a semirecluse. He mostly withdrew to his house, which stood on the bank of the St. Mary’s River near the Indian agency. Increasingly given to fits of rage, he was jailed from time to time for making a public disturbance. The children of the village came to regard him as the “bogeyman.”22

  As he approached old age he still craved friendship. It seems he found a small measure of what he was looking for in the Reverend Bingham’s two young daughters. They were of a size and manner to remind him of his own two daughters by Red Sky of the Morning. The girls often passed by his house while he sat in the door gazing toward the sunset. Sometimes they came to visit him. On other occasions, just as they came into view, they would suddenly join hands and scurry past his house. Maybe they saw something in his look that made them take fright. The younger of the two, Angie, would later remember, “When he was pleasant we were interested in seeing him but when angry, we were very much afraid of him.”23

  Nearly seventy years later, Angie Bingham Gilbert presented her recollections of Tanner to the Michigan Pioneer and Historical Society. Notwithstanding her childhood fear of him, it was a surprisingly sympathetic, admiring portrait. He was a “remarkable man,” very intelligent, with “many beautiful ideas.” Her father had informed her that Tanner had once been an excellent interpreter and missionary. When Tanner was not in a rage, she remembered, he could be pleasant, interesting, and even “gentlemanly.”

  She recalled his striking appearance. “He was a very strange and in some ways a noble looking man. He was tall and spare, with long white hair which he wore parted in the middle and drawn back behind his ears like a woman’
s. He had a fierce eye, and his countenance was most forbidding.”24

  Gilbert was not alone in forming a strong impression of Tanner’s “fierce eye.” One Dr. Charles A. Lee of New York met Tanner late in life when he tried to interview him about Indian medicine. He found in his eyes “the most savage, vindictive, suspicious and I may add demoniac, expression I ever saw.” He was too frightened to go through with the interview.25

  Henry Schoolcraft dwelt on Tanner’s eyes, too, when he wrote about him in his diary following a tense confrontation the two men had several years after Tanner lost his job at the Indian agency. Going into a canoe-house on the agency grounds, Schoolcraft turned around to find Tanner had followed him in. They stood facing each other in the confined space between the raised canoes. “He began to talk after his manner,” Schoolcraft wrote. Then, looking him in the eyes, Schoolcraft “saw mischief . . . in their cold, malicious, bandit air.” Schoolcraft shook his cane at him. Tanner backed out.26

  On the evening of July 4, 1846, Tanner’s house was engulfed in flames. People assembled to try to put out the fire, but they kept their distance after someone discovered gunpowder had been placed around the perimeter of the property as if to ignite an even bigger conflagration. As the crowd stood back and watched the house burn to the ground, people speculated that “Old Tanner” would be found dead inside. Picking through the charred ruin the next day, however, they found no human remains.