34
In Search of Kin

In the summer of 1818, Tanner left Plantation Island in a small birchbark canoe bound for the States. He did not go directly south, for that would have taken him through Sioux country, which he considered too dangerous. Instead, he headed east toward Lake Superior, intending to backtrack over the route he and Net-no-kwa had taken more than twenty years earlier, when they first came west from Lake Huron.

The Hudson’s Bay people told him to expect rough treatment from the Nor’ Westers as he passed by their forts, as they were “much enraged” over his involvement in retaking Fort Douglas. But when Tanner met them in person they were more forgiving. At Rainy Lake, the trader John Warren Dease hailed him from the riverbank and invited him to come inside. Once they were in the house, Dease gave him a chiding, saying by rights he should have barred the door against him. “Why do you not go to your own people of the Hudson’s Bay Company?” he asked reproachfully. Tanner replied that he was now on his way to the States; he had decided the time had come to go search for his American relatives. Dease cogitated on that for a while, and gruffly responded, “It would have been well had you gone long ago.” However, letting bygones be bygones, he offered him a seat in his canoe and took him to Fort William.

At Fort William, Tanner was reunited with Dr. McLoughlin for the first time since lying in a sickbed in his care some four years earlier. When Tanner informed him of his intentions to go to the States, the good doctor was obviously affected. Looking him up and down, as if studying Tanner’s light complexion, long reddish hair, and buckskins for the first time, he said he had something to give him for his journey. He went to the apothecary and came back with some tartar emetic to add to his medicine bag. It was in case he ate something poisonous along the way or contracted dysentery in the unfamiliar country, the doctor explained.

With McLoughlin’s assistance, Tanner rode in a company boat from Fort William around the north shore of Lake Superior to Sault Ste. Marie, where he presented himself with a letter of introduction to the independent trader Charles Ermatinger. A former clerk in the North West Company, Ermatinger had become a successful farmer and middleman, selling grain and other supplies to his former employers. He provided Tanner with lodging in the big house that he occupied with his Ojibwa wife and eight children, and on his next trip to Mackinac he took Tanner along.

At Mackinac, Tanner met with yet more kindness. The US Indian agent, William Puthuff, gave him provisions and a letter addressed to the governor of Michigan Territory, then put him on a schooner bound for Detroit. The agent also furnished him with a canoe for the journey from Detroit to the Ohio. The canoe was lashed to the side of the schooner. After a five-day voyage down Lake Huron, Tanner was in Detroit.¹

With just over a thousand residents in 1818, Detroit was the biggest white settlement he had ever seen. Coming down off the boat, he stood for a long time just gazing about him at horse-drawn wagons and carriages moving up and down the muddy streets and crowds of pedestrians clomping over the boardwalks. At length he began asking passersby for directions to the governor’s house, but no one would respond to his labored attempts at speaking English. So he started walking and soon came to a mansion that looked like the place. It was fifty feet long, two stories high, and had a grand porch facing the street. A rotund man whom Tanner took to be the governor was sitting on the porch. Walking up to him, Tanner held up his letter from the Indian agent. Sure enough, this man was Governor Lewis Cass. After reading the letter, the governor held out his hand in welcome and immediately sent a man to get an interpreter.²

By a remarkable coincidence, the interpreter who was summoned turned out to be none other than Kish-kau-ko, the son of Manitoo-geezhik, Tanner’s long ago captor. Tanner could barely recognize this interpreter as the young man whom he had once called his brother. Kish-kau-ko was naturally reticent about their past relationship. Indeed, he probably avoided communicating to the governor the fact of his own involvement in Tanner’s capture, for Governor Cass remained ignorant of the two men’s past connection; he made no mention of it in the description of Tanner that he gave to the newspapers. Tanner, for his part, had no way of knowing what got translated and had to assume that Kish-kau-ko corroborated his testimony when he told the governor about his capture and two-year stint with the Ottawa at Saginaw. Nonetheless, the governor learned enough to write a lengthy account of Tanner’s background and capture in 1790. This went into the newspapers under the headline “A Captive Found.” It was dated August 2, 1818, and was signed “Lewis Cass.”³

Cass was one of two territorial governors who played important roles in Tanner’s transition back into the white man’s world. The other was Governor William Clark of Missouri. Both governors were deeply involved in Indian affairs, gathering information about tribes, negotiating land-cession treaties, and enforcing the Indian Trade and Intercourse laws. Both men had led troops in the War of 1812 and remained profoundly suspicious of British intentions after the Treaty of Ghent. Both advocated strong US involvement in the fur trade, partly to spur economic growth in their respective territories and partly to take the trade out of British hands and quash British influence over Indian tribes in US territory.

The governors differed in how they sought to reorganize the fur trade, however. Cass was a great friend of John Jacob Astor and the American Fur Company. After the company moved its field headquarters to Mackinac in 1816, the Michigan governor decided Astor’s organization was the one best suited to compete with the British. He used his authority in issuing traders’ licenses to further the American Fur Company’s monopoly throughout the Michigan Territory. Governor Clark, meanwhile, wanted to Americanize the fur trade through the creation of a government-owned company based in St. Louis. Government ownership was important, he believed, to ensure that the enterprise was sufficiently capitalized to achieve a monopoly position. The St. Louis location seemed necessary to Clark if the Americans were to compete effectively with the British in the upper Missouri. In 1818, the Missouri Territory took in all of the Louisiana Purchase minus the state of Louisiana, while the Michigan Territory included the future states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and part of Minnesota. These were the two big western territories in the United States at that time. As a result, the governors’ ideas carried enormous weight in federal Indian policy.⁴

Both governors saw the fur trade as an extension of statecraft. They hoped to shape it in ways that would help secure peaceful relations between white Americans, Indians, and the British. To that end, they were keenly interested in how the fur trade functioned. Yet, when they encountered John Tanner, the subject never came up. Where they might have recognized in him a white-Indian hunter who knew the business from an Indian perspective, instead they regarded him in more conventional terms. Here was the boy who had been stolen from his home by Indians many years before. The humane thing to do, then, was to restore him to his family.

Regarding Tanner through the nineteenth-century prism of civilization and savagery, the governors were unable to form a more nuanced view of the man. Governor Cass presented him with a set of American-style clothes and sent him on his way. A few years later Governor Clark did the same thing, entering the expenditure in his account book with the following notation: “four handkerchiefs, $2; four pair socks, $2; four yards cloth, $16, furnished John Tanner and family, returned from the Indians, with whom he was a prisoner.”⁵ Tanner accepted their gifts with gratitude, but the sentiment behind them did not bode well for him. The governors thought they were helping him reclaim his white heritage, and they assumed the transformation would be quick. They had no conception of a person in his circumstances trying to bridge two cultures. Even as the fur trade formed a meeting ground for Indian and white America and encouraged a mingling of the two races, American society as a whole remained closed to the idea of either a bicultural, white-Indian identity or an interracial family. The governors of Michigan and Missouri territories were as well placed as any US leaders to understand this contradiction and do something about it. That they expected Tanner just to shed his Indianness like a set of clothes was significant.

Meanwhile, Tanner’s white relatives made heroic efforts to help him. Edward Tanner left his home in New Madrid, Missouri, on August 31, 1818, to go look for his brother in the Red River valley—unaware that John had already arrived in Detroit at the beginning of that month. Edward went first to St. Louis, where he informed Governor Clark of his purpose and obtained papers and instructions for traveling due north through Sioux country to the Red River. When he got to Prairie du Chien, the trader told him that a man fitting his brother’s description had reportedly reached Mackinac. So Edward, hoping to intercept him there, changed his route and proceeded via the Wisconsin and Fox rivers to Green Bay, where he hired an Ojibwa interpreter and boarded a schooner for the passage up Lake Michigan to Mackinac. Only when he reached Mackinac in November did he learn that his brother had met with Governor Cass in Detroit some four months earlier. Changing his route again, he made for Detroit.⁶

A few weeks after Edward set out, one of John Tanner’s sisters read in a Kentucky newspaper the notice issued by Governor Cass, and she immediately sent her son to Detroit. By then John had left Detroit with a group of Indians but had fallen sick with a fever while descending the Big Miami River. His nephew found him in the care of a farmer, still quite ill. The nephew took him in a skiff down the Big Miami and Ohio rivers to a cluster of farms on the Kentucky side of the river, where John met numerous relatives, including the sister, another grown nephew, and a younger half-brother whom he had never known. He was still so weak that he had to be carried from the skiff to the house, and when he was finally situated in the home of his half-brother, he lay sick for another month.⁷

John could communicate with his relatives only a little, but when a letter from Edward arrived he understood from their conversation that his older brother had gone to look for him in the Red River country. The information in Edward’s letter was out of date and did not disclose how he had changed course and gone to Mackinac. Though John was still unwell, he was walking around again and could ride a horse. Fearing for Edward’s safety, he insisted that he must go north at once to find his brother—they had swapped places! His relatives reluctantly consented to his plan. With about a dozen neighbors, they took up a collection and gave him a purse of silver coins for the journey.⁸

Edward met with Governor Cass in December, more than four months after John did. Though his brother’s trail had grown cold, he hoped that John might have found his way to their sister’s place in Kentucky. But soon after Edward acquired a horse and started for home, he received some distressing information. At Fort Meigs, two days south of Detroit, he was told that John had passed by in the other direction just a few days earlier, heading back to the Red River. Turning about, Edward rode swiftly back to Detroit to catch John before he boarded a ship for Mackinac. John, meanwhile, on reaching Detroit, went again to the governor. Fortunately, Governor Cass insisted that he stay there and wait for Edward to return for him. Three days later Edward arrived as the governor had guessed he would. Finally, after months and indeed decades of searching, the two brothers were reunited. As John later recounted, “He held me a long time in his arms.”⁹

After twenty-eight years of separation, the brothers were now well into middle age. John thought that Edward bore a strong resemblance to their father. Edward noted a scar on the left side of John’s face and neck that he remembered from their childhood. A newspaperman remarked that the brothers looked very much alike, though John still had long hair past his shoulders like an Indian. Throughout his adult life, he had kept his hair parted in the middle and either braided or loosely tied on each side of his head with a string of broaches made of animal bone. However, before the two paid a final visit to the governor, he allowed his brother to cut off his long braids. Governor Cass approved of the haircut, commenting that he was pleased to see that John had laid his Indian costume aside and was now dressed like a white man.¹⁰

John lived with Edward at his home in New Madrid, Missouri, through the winter and spring. Edward was keen to rehabilitate John. As his brother’s English improved, Edward developed big plans for the two of them. He applied to the American Baptist Board of Foreign Missions to serve as a missionary among the western Indians, with John to act as his interpreter. Edward already had some acquaintance with the western tribes by way of his military experience, and on his journey from Prairie du Chien to Green Bay he witnessed a few of the Indians’ religious ceremonies. These he described in a long letter to the Reverend John M. Peck, who headed the Baptist mission in St. Louis. Peck published the letter in The Latter Day Luminary and sponsored Edward’s application to the board. When the board met in Baltimore in April 1819, it resolved to give his application serious consideration. “This is encouraged by the peculiar circumstances of his brother, who is acquainted with several Indian languages, and whose aid, most probably, may be obtained,” the minutes of the board recorded.¹¹

John seems to have genuinely entertained the prospect of joining Edward on a mission, but in the meantime he had a more pressing object in mind. Since reuniting with Edward in Detroit, he had been telling his brother that he needed to find his Indian family and bring them to the States. He had in mind not just his young children by Therezia but also his first set of children by Red Sky of the Morning. As for his two wives, he now felt estranged from both of them.¹²

In the summer of 1819, the brothers met with Governor Clark to consider how John might reclaim his children from Indian country. Edward told the governor that he wished to accompany John to the Indian village at Lake of the Woods where the children would likely be found. As a former captain in the army, he requested the command of a company of soldiers so that they could seize the children from the Indians should force be necessary. Without acknowledging it, the brothers proposed to deal with the Indians much as the Ottawa-Shawnee war party had dealt with the Tanner family a generation before. Of course, there was one major difference: John Tanner was the biological father of these children. There was, in addition, a significant distinction in tactics: the Indians used stealth to take child captives, whereas Edward Tanner proposed to use intimidation and state power. Despite those differences, the outcome would be strikingly similar: children forcibly removed from their birth cultures, permanently separated from their mothers, and thrust into a new life.¹³

Governor Clark must have demurred from granting Edward Tanner’s request for a military escort—if for no other reason than that these were British Indians who clearly resided outside his jurisdiction. Moreover, while US troops were often deployed to reclaim white captives, there was no such tradition of sending soldiers after mixed-blood children. Still, there was substantial precedent for white settlers snatching Indian children. Mostly it had been done under the pretext of converting the little innocents to Christianity.¹⁴ So, if Edward’s plan did not win approval from the governor, it almost surely met with some sympathy.

Whatever the governor’s response, John would not agree to Edward’s plan in any case. Following the meeting, he visited Clark again without his brother and informed him he wished to go alone. It was necessary, he said, because no white men, not his brother nor any soldiers, would be able to endure the hardships of the northern winter. He expected to live in an Indian lodge all through the winter and bring his children out after the spring breakup. Clark supported him, writing him a letter of endorsement to show to the traders whom he would meet in the course of his journey.

However, Clark still did not understand the Indian side of John Tanner’s personality. Clark expected Tanner to travel due north through Sioux country, failing to see that those Indians were Tanner’s mortal enemies. If the Sioux learned he was culturally Ojibwa or Ottawa, it could be his death warrant. In the end, Tanner found it expedient to accept Clark’s offer of assistance, boarding a keelboat laden with provisions, guns, and army tents and manned by a large crew of sixty men. They were going north anyway and would take him as far as the upper Mississippi. Edward, who was by then reconciled to staying behind, wished his brother Godspeed. But as soon as the keelboat passed a little above the mouth of the Missouri, Tanner asked to be put ashore. With two men and a small canoe, he started up the Illinois River—making for Chicago, Lake Michigan, and thence the familiar route via Mackinac. That way, he would avoid the territory of the Sioux.¹⁵