Rainy Lake House

by Theodore Catton

  8. National Register 3, no. 13 (March 29, 1817), 197–98.

  9. Ibid.

  10. Leo E. Oliva, “The Army and the Fur Trade,” Journal of the West 26, no. 4 (October 1987), 21–22; Edgar B. Wesley, “Some Official Aspects of the Fur Trade in the Northwest, 1815–1825,” North Dakota Historical Quarterly 6 (April 1932), 201–9; R. S. Cotterill, “Federal Indian Management in the South, 1789–1825,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 20 (December 1933), 337–40.

  11. Chase C. Mooney, William H. Crawford, 1772–1834 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1974), 85–89.

  12. William Crawford to the Senate, March 13, 1816, American State Papers: Indian Affairs, 2:27.

  13. Ibid.; Cotterill, “Federal Indian Management in the South, 1789–1825,” 333–46; Herman J. Viola, Thomas L. McKenney: Architect of America’s Early Indian Policy, 1816–1830 (Chicago: The Swallow Press, Inc., 1974), 6–9; Edgar B. Wesley, “The Government Factory System Among the Indians, 1795–1822,” Journal of Economic and Business History 4 (1931–32), 487–511; Michael Witgen, An Infinity of Nations: How the Native New World Shaped Early North America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 332–37.

  14. William Crawford to the Senate, March 13, 1816, American State Papers: Indian Affairs, 2:28; Mooney, William H. Crawford, 87.

  15. William Crawford to the Senate, March 13, 1816, American State Papers: Indian Affairs, 2:65–66; Mooney, William H. Crawford, 88.

  16. William Crawford to the Senate, March 13, 1816, American State Papers: Indian Affairs, 2:28.

  17. Mooney, William H. Crawford, 13–14, 89, 189.

  18. National Register 3, no. 13 (March 29, 1817), 193.

  CHAPTER 5. ENCOUNTERS WITH THE SIOUX

  1. Nichols and Halley, Stephen Long, 43.

  2. Stephen H. Long, “Voyage in a Six-Oared Skiff to the Falls of Saint Anthony in 1817,” 2nd ed., Collections of the Minnesota Historical Society 2 (1889), 9; Livingston, Portraits of Eminent Americans, 479; Nichols and Halley, Stephen Long, 44.

  3. Reuben Gold Thwaites, ed., “The Fur Trade in Wisconsin, 1812–1825,” Wisconsin Historical Collections 20 (1911), 62; Henry Putney Beers, The Western Military Frontier, 1815–1846 (Philadelphia: Times and News Publishing Co., 1935), 20, 25; Long, “Voyage in a Six-Oared Skiff,” 9; Johnson quoted in Viola, Thomas L. McKenney, 17.

  4. Long, “Voyage in a Six-Oared Skiff,” 60–62; W. Eugene Hollon, The Lost Pathfinder: Zebulon Montgomery Pike (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1949), 63.

  5. Long, “Voyage in a Six-Oared Skiff,” 62.

  6. Ibid., 9–10.

  7. Ibid., 11–13.

  8. Ibid., 18–20.

  9. Ibid., 26–27, 30, 40–44, 47.

  10. Ibid., 42–43, 82.

  CHAPTER 6. RACE AND HISTORY

  1. Nichols and Halley, Stephen Long, 47. Long submitted the earlier report to the American Philosophical Society, but the society declined to publish it. Whatever steps he took to get this one published have not come to light. Late in his life the manuscript finally did get into print under the title Voyage in a Six-Oared Skiff to the Falls of Saint Anthony in 1817, though by then it was no more than a historical artifact.

  2. Long, “Voyage in a Six-Oared Skiff,” 45.

  3. A. Hallam, Great Geological Controversies, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 1–26.

  4. Long, “Voyage in a Six-Oared Skiff,” 44, 52–53.

  5. Ibid., 63–64.

  6. Thomas S. Garlinghouse, “Revisiting the Mound Builder Controversy,” History Today 51, no. 9 (September 2001), 39–40.

  7. Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), 34–38.

  8. William Stanton, The Leopard’s Spots: Scientific Attitudes Toward Race in America, 1815–59 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 3–14.

  9. Berkhofer, The White Man’s Indian, 48–49.

  10. Ibid., 113.

  11. James H. McCulloh, Researches on America: Being an Attempt to Settle Some Points Relative to the Aborigines of America, &c. (Baltimore: Joseph Robinson, 1817), 35, 213–17; Stanton, The Leopard’s Spots, 10.

  12. The Portico, A Repository of Science & Literature 2, no. 2 (August 1, 1816), 103.

  CHAPTER 7. TO CIVILIZE THE OSAGES

  1. Livingston, Portraits of Eminent Americans, 481.

  2. Richard G. Wood, “Stephen Harriman Long at Belle Point,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 13 (Winter 1954), 338–40.

  3. Livingston, Portraits of Eminent Americans, 481; Stephen H. Long, “Hot Springs of the Washitaw,” American Monthly Magazine and Critical Review 3 (1818), 85–87.

  4. Stephen H. Long to Thomas Smith, January 30, 1818, NA, RG 107, Letters Received, M271, Roll 2.

  5. L. Bringier, “Notices of the Geology, Mineralogy, Topography, Productions, and Aboriginal Inhabitants of the Regions around the Mississippi and its confluent waters,” American Journal of Science and Arts 3 (1821), 41; Thomas Nuttall, “A Journal of Travels into the Arkansas Territory,” in Reuben Gold Thwaites, ed., Early Western Travels, 1748–1846 13 (1821; reprint, Cleveland, 1904–8), 191–92.

  6. Stephen H. Long to Thomas Smith, January 30, 1818, NA, RG 107, Letters Received, M271, Roll 2.

  7. Ibid.

  8. Ibid.

  9. Lovely quoted in Grant Foreman, Indians and Pioneers: The Story of the American Southwest before 1830 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1930), 39–40. The two travelers were Thomas Nuttall (Foreman, p. 164) and Henry Schoolcraft (Foreman, p. 53).

  10. Stephen H. Long to Thomas Smith, January 30, 1818, NA, RG 107, Letters Received, M271, Roll 2.

  11. Ibid.

  CHAPTER 8. WESTWARD MIGRATION

  1. Tanner, Narrative, 19–20.

  2. Peers, The Ojibwa of Western Canada, 14–18.

  3. Jeanne Kay, “Native Americans in the Fur Trade and Wildlife Depletion,” Environmental Review 9, no. 2 (Summer 1985), 120–22.

  4. Peers, The Ojibwa of Western Canada, 15.

  5. Tanner, Narrative, 12–13, 27.

  6. Tanner, Narrative, 19–20; Christopher Vecsey, Traditional Ojibwa Religion and Its Historical Changes (Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society, 1983), 60–61.

  7. Tanner, Narrative, 19–22.

  8. Ibid., 20–22.

  9. Ibid., 22–23.

  10. Ibid., 23–24.

  11. There is no surviving record of the Grand Portage trading post for the winter of 1794–95. However, the journal of Charles Jean Baptiste Chaboillez does record the frequent comings and goings of Indians at this post in 1797–98. Harold Hickerson, ed., “Journal of Charles Jean Baptiste Chaboillez, 1797–98,” Ethnohistory 6, no. 3 (Summer 1959), 265–313, and no. 4 (Autumn 1959), 363–427.

  12. Tanner, Narrative, 24; Bruce M. White, “A Skilled Game of Exchange: Ojibway Fur Trade Protocol,” Minnesota History 50 (Summer 1987), 229–30.

  13. Tanner, Narrative, 24–25.

  14. Ibid., 15, 25. In Tanner’s first interview on his return to the United States in 1818, he gave his American name as John Taylor. See “A Captive Found,” The Weekly Recorder 5, no. 5 (September 11, 1818), 39. Tanner’s Ottawa name was translated as “The Falcon” by Edwin James. Recent scholarship finds the true translation to be “The Swallow.” See John T. Fierst, “A ‘Succession of Little Occurrences’: Scholarly Editing and the Organization of Time in John Tanner’s Narrative,” The Annals of the Association for Documentary Editing 33 (2012), 4.

  15. Tanner, Narrative, 26.

  16. Ibid., 27.

  17. Ibid., 27–28.

  18. Peers, The Ojibwa of Western Canada, 31–32.

  19. Tanner, Narrative, 26, 30.

  20. Ibid., 31.

  21. Ibid., 32–33.

  22. Ibid., 34.

  CHAPTER 9. SIX BEAVER SKINS FOR A QUART OF MIXED RUM

  1. Tanner, Narrative, 27, 37–38, 44, 50–53.

  2. Peers, The Ojibwa of Western
Canada, 29.

  3. Tanner, Narrative, 34–35, 44.

  4. Ibid., 35–37, 76.

  5. Ibid., 35–36; Peers, The Ojibwa of Western Canada, 96.

  6. Tanner, Narrative, 36–37. A similar description of these vessels is found in Elliott Coues, New Light on the Early History of the Greater Northwest: The Manuscript Journal of Alexander Henry, Fur Trader of the North West Company, and of David Thompson, Official Explorer of the Same Company, 1799–1814, Exploration and Adventure Among the Indians of the Red, Saskatchewan, Missouri, and Columbia Rivers (New York: F. P. Harper, 1897), 181. Canoe making was one activity in which Ojibwa men and women combined efforts. Buffalohead, “Farmers Warriors Traders: A Fresh Look at Ojibway Women,” 238.

  7. Tanner, Narrative, 31, 37–39; David H. Stewart, “Early Assiniboine Trading Posts of the Souris Mouth Group, 1785–1832: Amplification of a Paper Read Before the Society, November 1928,” Manitoba Historical Society Transactions Series 2, no. 5 (1930); Robert Goodwin, Brandon House Post Journal, Hudson’s Bay Company Archives (hereafter cited as HBCA), B.22/a/8 (entries for September 13 and December 11, 1800, and March 10 and April 30, 1801). The identification of Mouse River Fort as Brandon House is based on Tanner’s later reference to this place as the Hudson’s Bay Company establishment and to its proprietor as M’Kie, or John McKay (120).

  8. Tanner, Narrative, 38.

  9. Hickerson, ed., “Journal of Charles Jean Baptiste Chaboillez, 1797–98,” 277.

  10. Tanner, Narrative, 38–39.

  11. Ibid., 39.

  12. Ibid., 39–40; John McKay, Brandon House Post Journal, HBCA, B.22/a/10 (May 29, 1803); Charles M. Gates, ed., Five Fur Traders of the Northwest (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society, 1965), 108.

  13. Tanner, Narrative, 41–44.

  14. Ibid., 44–46. The matter of Sag-git-to’s paternity is conjectural. Tanner notes there was now a third small child in the group, but he does not state that Sag-git-to was the father. Considering how the group divided up at this point, it would seem to be a safe deduction. Tanner states later in the narrative (52) that all three children belonged to Net-no-kwa’s daughter, though one was given to the young widow of Taw-ga-we-ninne.

  15. Ibid., 44–50. Alexander Henry (the Younger) is known for his excellent journal, which has been edited and published. Henry’s career in the fur trade started in 1791, but the journal unfortunately only begins in 1799, more than a year after this encounter.

  16. Ibid., 51. There is no mention of this incident in Hickerson, ed., “Journal of Charles Jean Baptiste Chaboillez, 1797–98,” as the journal ends in May 1798, probably a few months before this incident occurred. However, the journal makes it evident that twenty-one packs was a very sizeable quantity to find in the possession of one group of Indians. Probably it was this that led the traders to take such coercive measures. The journal notes three instances of Indian women trading at the post, and in each case the traders’ conduct was apparently no different than with Indian men. See also Bruce M. White, “The Woman Who Married a Beaver: Trade Patterns and Gender Roles in the Ojibwa Fur Trade,” Ethnohistory 46, no. 1 (Winter 1999), 126–27.

  17. Tanner, Narrative, 51–52.

  CHAPTER 10. THE TEST OF WINTER

  1. Calvin Martin, Keepers of the Game: Indian-Animal Relationships and the Fur Trade (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 3.

  2. Arthur J. Ray, “Periodic Shortages, Native Welfare, and the Hudson’s Bay Company 1670–1930,” in The Subarctic Fur Trade: Native Social and Economic Adaptations, Shepard Krech III, ed. (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1984), 1–10; Charles A. Bishop, “The First Century: Adaptive Changes among the Western James Bay Cree between the Early Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries,” in ibid., 22–24, 45–46; Arthur J. Ray and Donald B. Freeman, “Give Us Good Measure”: An Economic Analysis of Relations between the Indians and the Hudson’s Bay Company before 1763 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978), 241–44.

  3. Tanner, Narrative, 52–53.

  4. Ibid., 54–58.

  5. Ibid., 58–59.

  6. Ibid., 60.

  7. Ibid., 61.

  8. Ibid., 52, 61, 66–67; Bruce M. White, Grand Portage as a Trading Post: Patterns of Trade at “the Great Carrying Place” (Grand Marais, MN: Grand Portage National Monument, National Park Service, 2005), 82. See also Carolyn Gilman, The Grand Portage Story (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1992), 87.

  9. Tanner, Narrative, 64–67; Robert Goodwin, Brandon House Post Journal, HBCA, B.22/a/7 (entry for April 23) and B.22/a/8 (entry for September 13); Podruchny, Making the Voyageur World, 217–20. The Hudson’s Bay Company employed Indians as “Fort hunters” in the Far North, too. See Shepard Krech III, “The Trade of the Slavey and Dogrib at Fort Simpson in the Early Nineteenth Century,” in The Subarctic Fur Trade, 114.

  10. Tanner, Narrative, 64–65.

  11. Ibid., 65–66.

  12. Ibid., 67.

  13. Ibid., 68.

  CHAPTER 11. RED SKY OF THE MORNING

  1. Tanner, Narrative, 48.

  2. Ibid., 66, 69.

  3. Peers, The Ojibwa of Western Canada, 47; Harold Hickerson, “The Genesis of a Trading Post Band: The Pembina Chippewa,” Ethnohistory 3, no. 4 (Fall 1956), 308.

  4. Frank Raymond Secoy, Changing Military Patterns on the Great Plains (17th Century through Early 19th Century) (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1953), 1–5, 104–6.

  5. Tanner, Narrative, 70, 76–77.

  6. Net-no-kwa may have felt differently. The following year, Tanner put all six horses in fetters and left them in his mother’s charge with instructions to remove the fetters at the first snow. She did not do it, and the horses all died. Tanner, Narrative, 80.

  7. Daniel W. Harmon, A Journal of Voyages and Travels in the Interior of North America (1922; reprint, New York: AMS Press, Inc., 1973), 51–52. The Gros Ventre were allied with the Blackfeet nation against the Assiniboine, Cree, and western Ojibwa. For a discussion of the intertribal alliance systems on the northern Great Plains, see John C. Ewers, “Intertribal Warfare as the Precursor of Indian-White Warfare on the Northern Great Plains,” Western Historical Quarterly 6, no. 4 (October 1975), 397–410.

  8. Harmon, A Journal of Voyages and Travels, 51–53.

  9. Ibid.

  10. Tanner, Narrative, 76. The trader was probably the proprietor of Swan Lake House. Unfortunately, the post journal for Swan Lake House for 1801–2 has not survived.

  11. Ibid., 80; on Hugh McGillis, see Coues, New Light on the Early History of the Greater Northwest, 215.

  12. Tanner, Narrative, 84–85, 101.

  13. Ibid., 84–85.

  14. Ibid., 89–90; Roger M. Carpenter, “Womanish Men and Manlike Women: The Native American Two-spirit as Warrior,” in Gender and Sexuality in Indigenous North America 1400–1850, Sandra Slater and Fay A. Yarbrough, eds. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2011), 146–64; Walter L. Williams, The Spirit and the Flesh: Sexual Diversity in American Indian Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986), 1–3, 21–22, 31, 41–42; Edward D. Neill, “History of the Ojibways, and their Connection with Fur Traders, based upon Official and other Records,” Collections of the Minnesota Historical Society 5 (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society, 1885), 452–53.

  15. Tanner, Narrative, 90–91; Williams, The Spirit and the Flesh, 93–94.

  16. Tanner, Narrative, 100–102.

  17. Ibid., 101–3.

  CHAPTER 12. WARRIOR

  1. On the causes of intertribal warfare on the northern Great Plains, see W. W. Newcomb, Jr., “A Re-examination of the Causes of Plains Warfare,” American Anthropologist 52, no. 3 (July–September 1950), 317–30; Secoy, Changing Military Patterns on the Great Plains; Ewers, “Intertribal Warfare as a Precursor of Indian-White Warfare on the Northern Great Plains,” 397–410; Richard White, “The Winning of the West: The Expansion of the Western Sioux in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” Journal of American History 65, no. 2 (Sep
tember 1978), 319–43; Gary Clayton Anderson, “Early Dakota Migration and Intertribal War: A Revision,” Western Historical Quarterly 11, no. 1 (January 1980), 17–36; and Tim E. Holzkamm, “Eastern Dakota Population Movements and the European Fur Trade: One More Time,” Plains Anthropologist 28, no. 101 (1983), 225–33.

  2. Harold Hickerson, The Chippewa and Their Neighbors: A Study in Ethnohistory (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1970), 64–88.

  3. Peers, The Ojibwa of Western Canada, 6–7; William W. Warren, History of the Ojibway Nation (1885; reprint, Minneapolis: Ross and Haines, 1957), 163–65, 187, 231, 235, 257, 355–56.

  4. Tanner, Narrative, 108–9.

  5. Ibid., 111–14.

  6. Alexander Henry, The Journal of Alexander Henry the Younger, 1799–1814, Barry M. Gough, ed. (Toronto: Champlain Society, 1988), 2:173–74; Tanner, Narrative, 124–25.

  7. Henry, The Journal of Alexander Henry the Younger, 2:174.

  8. Tanner, Narrative, 125; Warren, History of the Ojibway Nation, 264.

  9. Henry, The Journal of Alexander Henry the Younger, 2:175; Tanner, Narrative, 125.

  10. Tanner, Narrative, 125–27.

  11. Ibid., 127–28.

  12. Ibid., 126–31.

  13. Ibid., 129–31; Ernest Alexander Cruikshank, “Robert Dickson, The Indian Trader,” Wisconsin State Historical Society Collections 12 (1892), 138; Louis Arthur Tohill, “Robert Dickson, British Fur Trader on the Upper Mississippi,” North Dakota Historical Quarterly 3, no. 1 (October 1928), 21–24.

  14. Tanner, Narrative, 132–41.

  CHAPTER 13. FORT WILLIAM

  1. Henry, The Journal of Alexander Henry the Younger, 2:144.

  2. White, Grand Portage as a Trading Post, 113.

  3. Victor P. Lytwyn, “The Anishinabeg and the Fur Trade,” in Jean Morrison, ed., Lake Superior to Rainy Lake: Three Centuries of Fur Trade History (Thunder Bay, ON: Thunder Bay Historical Museum Society, 2003), 34.

  4. The earliest physical descriptions of McLoughlin by his contemporaries appear somewhat later in his career, so his appearance at this time must be somewhat conjectural. See, for example, Frederick Merk, ed., Fur Trade and Empire: George Simpson’s Journal (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1931), 23.

  5. Chapin, “Letters of Dr. John McLoughlin,” 293–94.