31
Sorcery and Sickness

Around the time of his break with the North West Company, Tanner also broke up with his first wife. As he and Red Sky of the Morning grew apart, Tanner acquired a rival. His wife’s suitor was one Gi-ah-ge-wa-go-mo of the Red Lake band of Ojibwas. It seems that when Tanner and Red Sky of the Morning chose to part ways, she went and joined Gi-ah-ge-wa-go-mo in his lodge near Red Lake about one day’s journey from the Red River band’s wintering place, which was near the mouth of the Red River on the south shore of Lake Winnipeg.

All might have gone smoothly with the divorce but for the former couple’s disagreement over who should take the children. Evidently Red Sky of the Morning took the two girls, who were then toddler age, while Tanner kept the boy, their firstborn, who was then around six years old. But Red Sky of the Morning was not satisfied with the arrangement.

Gi-ah-ge-wa-go-mo made two attempts in four months to steal Tanner’s son. In both occurrences, Tanner returned from a day’s hunt to learn that Gi-ah-ge-wa-go-mo had come into his lodge and absconded with the child. Both times, Tanner leapt onto his horse, chased his rival down, and recovered the boy unharmed. When he caught up with his son’s captor the second time, he dismounted from his horse, handed the reins to his son, and advanced on Gi-ah-ge-wa-go-mo on foot with his knife drawn. Rather than attack him, however, he stabbed Gi-ah-ge-wa-go-mo’s horse in the neck twice until it fell. Then he challenged Gi-ah-ge-wa-go-mo to shoot his own horse if he dared. His rival did not make a move, nor did he ever again attempt to steal the boy.¹

Tanner’s confrontation with Gi-ah-ge-wa-go-mo stands out oddly in Tanner’s Narrative. Tanner presented the episode out of sequence with the rest of his story. It was the only point in his long narration of his life where he felt compelled to go back in time to an event he had omitted to mention earlier. It would seem that his description of this episode was as much as he could bring himself to say about the breakup of his first Indian family. In the end Tanner did not keep his son. How he later lost the boy to his mother he declined to say. What Tanner’s Narrative does make clear was that in hindsight, at least, Tanner regarded the clash with Gi-ah-ge-wa-go-mo as an important harbinger of his mounting difficulties with the Indians.

Just as Tanner found it expedient to form a new trade relationship with Heney and the Hudson’s Bay Company when things soured between him and the North West trader, so too did he feel the need to form new alliances among the Indians after his breakup with Red Sky of the Morning. In 1809, his old friend Pe-shau-ba, the Ottawa chief, died of an illness. Pe-shau-ba was the closest person to a father he ever had among the Indians. Tanner stayed with Pe-shau-ba’s band for about a year and then joined another band led by the Ottawa chief Sha-gwaw-koo-sink. Sometime after that, Tanner moved with Sha-gwaw-koo-sink’s band to Lake of the Woods.²

At the urging of his companions, Tanner took a new wife. It seems to have been largely a marriage of convenience. He needed a young woman in his lodge to help care for his aging mother and the many small orphans she kept adopting. This young woman had no children of her own when they married. In telling his life story some years later, Tanner never stated her name even though they remained married for a decade and a half and had six children together. Toward the end of their marriage, after she converted to Catholicism on Mackinac Island, she took the name Therezia.³

Not long after Tanner married Therezia, a new prophet arose in their midst. This man, Ais-kaw-ba-wis, had no prior experience as a medicine man. Before his sudden emergence as a spiritual leader, Tanner knew him only as a poor hunter who had allowed his wife to starve to death. Indeed, the circumstances surrounding his wife’s death, two winters past, were suspicious. Tanner, for one, believed he had eaten her to save his own life. Had Ais-kaw-ba-wis admitted to such a thing, the other Ojibwas would have put him to death. Ever since that time, he had been withdrawn and listless. Then one day this marginal member of the band announced that he had received a message from the Great Spirit. Calling the principal hunters together, he produced from under his garment a perfectly round cobblestone about five inches in diameter, painted red, which he claimed the Great Spirit had given him with the injunction that he must show the way in making the whole Earth clean and new like the red ball—or like the Earth was when Nanabozho created it.⁴

Tanner wasted no time telling his fellow tribesmen that Ais-kaw-ba-wis was a faker. How ridiculous, he said, to think the Great Spirit would choose one so lazy and spiritless as this man to serve as divine messenger! Meanwhile, Ais-kaw-ba-wis retired to his lodge, where he began loudly singing, crying, praying, and beating his drum. The incantations went on for days and weeks. Occasionally he stopped to make a round of the village, sharing with each family his latest word from the Great Spirit. Twice he predicted that one of the hunters would kill a moose that day. The first time he was mistaken; the second time he guessed right. His error in the first instance seems to have cost him little, while his lucky guess the second time got much attention. Building on that success, he made a ceremony of collecting and cleaning the bones of the moose and hanging them in a tree out of reach of wolves and dogs. Tanner disparaged Ais-kaw-ba-wis and his pretensions of holiness at every turn, yet his criticisms had little effect. Much to his dismay, the prophet acquired a strong following among the band.⁵

As soon as Ais-kaw-ba-wis thought he had sufficient influence, he made a bid to drive Tanner out of the band. In the middle of winter, he sent messengers to all the hunters to return to the village for an important announcement regarding the Swallow. Tanner duly complied with the prophet’s request, reckoning that he must face his adversary directly. Ais-kaw-ba-wis had planned an elaborate ceremony. All the wigwams were reconfigured into one large lodge. At Ais-kaw-ba-wis’s signal the whole village filed into the lodge. Forming a circle inside, the people danced four times around while Ais-kaw-ba-wis sat in the center with his eyes closed, singing and beating his drum. At the culmination of this ceremony, Ais-kaw-ba-wis somberly announced that the Swallow would soon die. The Great Spirit had told him so in a vision. Drawing in the dirt with a stick, he made a long straight line to represent the life of a good Indian, and beside it he drew a short, crooked line falling away: this was Tanner.⁶

Tanner put no credence in the medicine man’s prophecy of his own imminent death. But the representation of his life as a crooked path was much more troublesome. It cast a pall over his relations with other members of the band. Even his wife’s mother and father began to treat him with suspicion. In all likelihood this was not a sign of disrespect so much as apprehension. They may have suspected that Tanner would resort to sorcery in his conflict with Ais-kaw-ba-wis. The Ottawas and Ojibwas believed that in personal feuds of this kind, supernatural powers might be put in play. According to their worldview, any person was capable of putting a curse on another. And since they believed the Great Spirit had made all of Creation, and that every plant, animal, rock, and water body had a spiritual dimension, it followed that any object under the sun could be summoned by the sorcerer to harm his enemy. A thing as small and insignificant as an insect could be summoned from many miles away to injure or kill the intended victim.

In Ottawa and Ojibwa culture, resorting to bad medicine might at times be justifiable. It could be used, for example, to punish a wrongdoer who could not otherwise be held to account. In that way, the fear of sorcery was a powerful incentive to treat others well; it operated as a deterrent against unethical conduct much like the revenge principle did. But the power of bad medicine was not to be invoked lightly. Most people refrained from its use altogether. Indeed, the very subject caused such anxiety that they avoided even talking about it. In general, bad medicine was thought to be the province of bad people. Tanner, for his part, never considered using it. He prayed for divine assistance many times in his life, but never, it would seem, for the purpose of smiting an enemy. Still, it would have done him no good to forswear the use of sorcery, for just to raise the subject aloud was to engender fear of it.⁷

Tanner hoped that Ais-kaw-ba-wis would soon discredit himself. Once in the early spring, when Tanner and some other hunters were returning from a trip to the trading house, they espied Ais-kaw-ba-wis chasing a woman through the willows a little distance from camp. When they questioned the woman about it, she confided that he had made several attempts to catch her alone in the woods, that she had always eluded him, yet she feared what he might do to her if she voiced a complaint. The principal hunter then requested Ais-kaw-ba-wis to account for himself. But the prophet refused, saying if he was to be questioned it must be in his own lodge. So the hunters sent him a gift of rum—a portion of what they had just obtained at the trading house—to see if he would then condescend to come and speak with them. Ais-kaw-ba-wis still refused, but he accepted the gift and got so thoroughly intoxicated he was observed later that night stumbling around the village stark naked. Tanner got a good laugh over Ais-kaw-ba-wis’s foolishness. Yet he was disappointed to observe that the incident did nothing to diminish the man’s influence.⁸

That year the several bands of western Ojibwas and Ottawas abandoned their summer village site at Netley Creek in favor of an island in Lake of the Woods. Tired of seeing their crops pilfered each year by the North West Company, they decided the island location would afford them greater protection. At the new site, Tanner set to work clearing land for cultivation. He hoped that amidst the sizeable community of Indians gathered on the island his breach with the ridiculous medicine man would not be taken so seriously. However, Ais-kaw-ba-wis continued to undermine him. Tanner sensed it most clearly in the cold treatment he got from his wife’s family. When his feelings of alienation finally became unbearable, he left the new village with his aged mother, her adopted children, and his young wife, and went to hunt on the upper Red River.⁹

Near the summer’s end, Tanner witnessed the arrival of the first Scottish colonists in the Red River valley. They came in York boats from Hudson Bay. Numbering about 100 people, they included half a dozen families and four or five young, single women—the first white women he had seen since he was a boy. The colonists camped briefly at the Forks, where their leader, Governor Miles Macdonell, performed a flag-raising ceremony and “seizin’ ” of the land; they then moved upriver to Pembina and immediately set to work constructing cabins, a storehouse, and a stockade, to be known as Fort Daer. Tanner observed their activities with mounting skepticism, for the colonists were clearly ill prepared for winter. They had only a few horses and dogs and knew nothing about how to hunt buffalo. Their situation would have been extremely perilous had they not been under the semiprotection of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Tanner was not surprised, then, when the trader Hugh Heney approached him with an offer to hunt for the Hudson’s Bay Company through the coming season. Largely out of sympathy for the colonists, he accepted the offer.¹⁰

The first problem facing the colony was that the bison happened to be herding in the Pembina Hills that winter, 100 miles west of Pembina. Tanner made his hunting camp at an abandoned trading post near the head of the Pembina River, approximately ten days’ journey from the settlement. There, he lived with four Hudson’s Bay men, including one interpreter, for the next four months. The men assisted Tanner in killing and butchering bison, while about twenty colonists worked in teams, transporting the meat back to Pembina in carts. Due to the size of the operation and distance that had to be covered, less than half the meat ever reached Pembina. By January, the shortage of food at Pembina was so severe that families without small children and most of the single men who were not already employed in the relay system were sent forward to the hunting camp. As these people settled in with them, Tanner was appalled by their wretched condition and bestial manners. Even when there was plenty of food, they ate like ravenous dogs and fought over their rations. The baymen had to beat them to maintain discipline.¹¹

It was the first time Tanner actually lived with traders, and in his view it was they, not the Indians, who behaved savagely. These men, having no women or children to care for, acted almost entirely in their own self-­interest. His experience had taught him to put the welfare of the family group before all else. He had taken care of his aging mother for the better part of ten years. He had provided food and shelter for numerous orphan children through many winters. His wife Therezia had recently borne their first child, a daughter whom they named Martha, which Tanner dimly recalled as being the name of his long-deceased white mother. None of that brought him any esteem among the traders. They showed him little respect and treated his wife insufferably. Indeed, one of the Hudson’s Bay men, a clerk named McDonald, behaved so badly toward Therezia that he finally had to be sent away. For two months in the middle of winter this troublemaker was posted to another hunting camp, where his sole occupation was guarding a mound of frozen buffalo carcasses against scavengers—a fitting punishment for his abusiveness, Tanner had to admit. For Tanner, sharing quarters with these men through the long winter season was indeed a trial, though it did give him the opportunity to relearn some English. It would be years before he could speak it fluently, but at least he had made a start. When spring came, Heney offered to hire him as an interpreter for the Hudson’s Bay Company. Heney said he would have his own cabin in Pembina. Tanner declined, and at Therezia’s urging, they prepared to return to Lake of the Woods. Old Net-no-kwa, choosing to remain at Red River, went to live with her other son, Wa-me-gon-a-biew.¹²

On the eve of their departure, Tanner bought a shirt from one of the colonists that was probably contaminated, most likely with smallpox virus. After they had paddled about twelve days down the Pembina and Red rivers—roughly the incubation period for smallpox—he fell violently ill. His skin broke out in large sores, and in no time he was prostrate. Soon Therezia became ill as well, though she was not quite so severely afflicted. Therezia set up their lodge on the riverbank, and the family subsisted mostly on fish as they struggled through the illness. Tanner lay in the canoe day after day, with pukkwi mats laid across the gunwales to protect him from the weather, and a fishing line coiled around his hands. Whenever he hooked a fish, he called out weakly to his wife to bring it in. Meanwhile, she tried various herbal medicines on him, but nothing seemed to work. Tanner found some relief by mixing gunpowder with water to make a salve that he smeared over his sores. Finally, after about a month, the illness passed. As they were still weak from hunger, they moved on up a tributary of the Red River to a small lake where Tanner knew he would find good hunting. Once they had eaten plenty of fresh meat and recovered their strength, they headed on across the remaining expanse of muskeg to Lake of the Woods.¹³

At the island village, bad news awaited them. The smallpox, or whatever it was that Tanner had caught from the colonist, had been passed to the general Indian population as well. Spreading among the western Ottawas and Ojibwas that spring of 1813, the disease had taken many lives. Therezia’s three younger siblings had all succumbed. Therezia’s parents were devastated by their loss, and they held Tanner responsible for it. Therezia’s father accused him of having caused the deaths by sorcery. The evil prospect frightened Therezia and probably confused her, too, after the ordeal she and her husband had just been through together. Fearful and grief-stricken, she took the baby and returned to her parents’ lodge.

As Tanner suspected, the accusation of his evil-doing ultimately came from Ais-kaw-ba-wis. About a month earlier, when Therezia’s young siblings had fallen sick, the parents had gone to the medicine man for help. Ais-kaw-ba-wis had confirmed in their minds that their son-in-law was probably behind it. As Tanner was far away from the village still, the medicine man had determined to channel his spirit and interrogate his spirit as to what evil he had done to make the children sick. The Ojibwas had a ritual for such occasions. It involved the use of a temporary, booth-like structure they called a jiisakiiwigaan. The structure was built like a wigwam but was smaller and more conical in shape. Normally the conjurer would get inside it, and when the spirit of the dead or distant person was summoned, the structure would lift off the ground and sway from side to side. The English term for the jiisakiiwigaan was “shaking tent.” When Ais-kaw-ba-wis performed the ritual and emerged from the structure, he told the distraught parents that Tanner’s spirit had confessed to having “shot bad medicine” into the children. Their wayward son-in-law, he indicated, was exercising the power of life and death over their helpless little offspring. When all three children subsequently died, the parents were convinced that their son-in-law was responsible.¹⁴

As Tanner saw it, at least in hindsight, the epidemic spread not only death but fear, which worked to strengthen the medicine man’s influence against him. At the time, he seemed to be unsure whether to confront this new challenge or try to distance himself from it. While not everyone in the village believed the evil things Ais-kaw-ba-wis said, a considerable number did, including Therezia. After just four days back in the village, Tanner found an excuse to go away again, joining a war party against the Sioux. Clinging to the familial connections, though, he announced that his reason for going was to protect his “little brother”—that is, Therezia’s brother, his brother-in-law—who was taking the warpath for the first time. As this young man was in mourning over the deaths of his small siblings, he was apt to be reckless with his own life and would need a protector. The young man accepted Tanner as his guardian, notwithstanding the fact that he lay under a cloud of suspicion with the rest of the family.¹⁵

As often happened, the war party wandered about for several months without ever coming across the enemy. The Assiniboines and Crees contributed great numbers of warriors to the enterprise, and as the intertribal force spawned its own set of internal conflicts, acts of bravery were demonstrated against other members of the expedition instead of the enemy. In one brawl, three Ojibwas died; in another, two horses belonging to the Assiniboines were killed. As this particular war party numbered several hundred men, the casualty rate was not high.

The war party threw Tanner and his brother Wa-me-gon-a-biew together after a separation of some years. Their old sibling rivalry had grown even more bitter in their adulthood. In Tanner’s view, Wa-me-gon-a-biew was shamefully deficient in the cardinal Indian virtues of bravery and generosity. His face was disfigured—some six years earlier a man had bitten off the end of his nose in a drunken brawl—and he did not bear this indignity well. Quarrelsome by nature, he picked fights with weaker men. Near the outset of the expedition, he threatened to kill Tanner’s young brother-in-law, alleging that he was a remote kin of the man who had mortally wounded their father with a thrown rock so many years earlier. When Tanner warned that he was determined to defend the young man even if it meant fighting his own brother, Wa-me-gon-a-biew settled for breaking Tanner’s gun instead.¹⁶

The war party returned to Pembina in the fall, where a big bout of drinking preceded the general dispersal. Although Tanner usually disparaged such occasions, this time he joined in the spree. On his last night with his brother, they were sitting with a group around a fire, quite intoxicated, when one of those present recalled how Wa-me-gon-a-biew had insulted Tanner by breaking his gun. Finding the man’s remark an affront to his honor, Tanner grabbed a wooden skewer from beside the fire, ran over to his brother’s horse, and stabbed it in the neck. The horse folded to the ground, bleeding to death. Wa-me-gon-a-biew did not react, yet the expectation of further violence loomed. The five men with whom Tanner had expected to journey back to Lake of the Woods the next day did not want to be drawn into a fight between brothers, so they set out later that night rather than waiting till sunup. Tanner delayed his own departure until his brother was up the next day so as not to be called a coward later. That morning, he loitered near his brother’s lodge until the two had exchanged several meaningful glances, then, feeling satisfied that the matter of his gun had been put to rest—one outrage suitably answered by another—he took off after his companions.¹⁷

The country between Pembina and Lake of the Woods was at that time one vast muskeg. The word “muskeg” comes from Ojibwa and refers to a type of peat bog, flecked with tussock mounds, which covers extensive areas in the boreal regions. It is generally too lumpy and spongy to walk across, yet too clogged with decaying matter and vegetation to float a canoe. When the fur traders traveled between Pembina and Lake of the Woods, they avoided the muskeg altogether and followed the Red, Winnipeg, and Rainy rivers, their route making a wide detour around the area. Tanner and his compatriots preferred a more direct route across the muskeg, as they possessed an intimate knowledge of the area’s connecting lakes and streams. But this time they had no sooner got out into the middle of it than the temperature plummeted and a thin ice formed over everything. The ice was not solid enough to hold their weight, but it was too thick for their canoes to get through. They seemed to be hopelessly stranded there.

By chance, Tanner’s wife, together with three other women, started across the muskeg from the other direction almost on the same day as their men did, thinking that they would either find them at Pembina or encounter them along the way. The men were sitting on their haunches on a bit of high ground, pondering what to do, when they sighted the four women dragging a pair of light canoes toward them through knee-deep muck and snow. The women, who had brought a generous supply of food and did not feel any alarm at the weather, enjoyed a hearty laugh when they came up and found their returning warriors looking so crestfallen. Taking counsel, they all decided that they would go to Red River for the winter.¹⁸

In this way Tanner was reunited with his wife. But the resumption of their marriage was more along the lines of a truce than a reconciliation. When they returned to Lake of the Woods in the spring, he found the medicine man, Ais-kaw-ba-wis, still poisoning the people’s minds against him and his wife’s parents still under his spell. Through the following year, Therezia vacillated between counting her husband her enemy or her intimate. Though she and Tanner mostly lived apart, they did produce two more children in close succession. It was around this time that Tanner broke some ribs in a fall from a tree and found himself under the care of Dr. John McLoughlin, the North West trader at Rainy Lake. Over the winter, when Tanner convalesced at a small trader’s house on White Fish Lake, Therezia refused to live with him. But she did visit him there on occasion. Toward the end, she placed their two toddler-age girls in his charge while she cared for their nursling.

In the spring, as he was going up the Rainy River to see the doctor, his canoe struck a rock and sank. He managed to keep a grasp of his children as they went into the rushing water, and as he found his footing in the waist-deep channel he was able to carry them to safety. But the dousing in the cold river made him sick again. McLoughlin took them into the trading house and invited him to stay until he was well. He lingered only long enough to recuperate, for he was anxious to get home to his wife. Then, back in the village at last, he was disappointed to find that Therezia still kept her distance from him.¹⁹

Once, some months later, when another sickness ran through the village, Tanner’s mother-in-law attacked him with a hoe while he slept. Fortunately, he was able to ward off the blows and avoid serious injury. Though the attack took him by surprise, the fact that his mother-in-law would actually assault him came as no surprise at all. He had even anticipated it. Indeed, to a certain degree he sympathized with her. Later he was told how she had been standing in the cornfield when she suddenly began to wail over the loss of her little children. The sickness in the village reminded her afresh of the earlier sickness that had taken their lives. She still suspected that Tanner had had something to do with their deaths. So she acted on impulse from grief, charging into his lodge with her hoe raised to strike. Tanner held her less accountable for the attack than he did the medicine man.²⁰

When the village dispersed for the winter, Tanner set out with his three children in one canoe, Therezia with her parents in another. Whether by accident or design, Tanner went ahead with some other canoes, and he and his wife failed to join up again. Left to his own resources with three tiny children—the oldest, Martha, was only three—Tanner was in a tenuous situation. He might have joined another subsistence group, but shame and pride prevented it.

One of the chiefs, having observed Tanner’s dysfunctional marriage from afar for some months, urged him at this point to take another woman to wife rather than risk going to the winter hunting ground with only his small children and no helpmate. Tanner refused to take the chief’s advice. Instead, he went to a trader for provisions, and with a pair of sled dogs he managed in two trips to set up camp in his prearranged hunting territory. There, he performed the work of two people all through the winter: tending the fire, preparing food, bathing and clothing the children, dressing moose skins, making moccasins, chopping wood, and bringing home game. Each time he went out on his trap line, he hastened back to the lodge as quickly as possible lest a wolf discover his unattended children, or the low fire he left burning in the lodge should happen to die. Escaping those perils, the children luckily survived. Among the Ottawas and Ojibwas it was customary to divide into small groups for the winter, but never a group this small. This was aberrant. Alone with two toddlers and an infant, Tanner had virtually cut himself off from the tribe.²¹