35
Between Two Worlds

Tanner made two separate expeditions to claim his children from the Indians, the first in 1819–20, the second in 1822–23. On the first expedition, he succeeded in claiming the younger ones, his children by Therezia. On the second, he went back for the older three, the children of Red Sky of the Morning. In narrating these events a few years later for his book, he made it quite clear that his sole purpose for going back both times was to get the children. Yet in the first instance, with regard to his children with Therezia, he gave no details as to how he obtained custody of them. He made no mention of opposition by his mother-in-law, which must have been vociferous, or action of any kind by the village chiefs. We have only this terse comment on how it transpired: “My wife refusing to accompany me, I took the three children and started without her. At Rainy Lake she overtook me, and agreed to accompany me to Mackinac.”¹ Probably what happened was that on his return to the village, Therezia fell back into a tumult over whether she loved him or hated him. Sometime near the end of 1819 she must have allowed him to make her pregnant, for by the time the two of them left for Kentucky together the following June or July, her pregnancy was quite far along. As her condition made it evident that their marriage was, if dysfunctional, still not completely over, the chiefs probably saw Tanner’s claim to the children as a family matter.

So Therezia rejoined Tanner at Rainy Lake and consented to his plan of taking the family to the United States, at least as far as Mackinac. Therezia gave birth to a baby girl just a few days before they reached Mackinac. When they came to Mackinac Island, Tanner set up their wigwam on the beach in front of the small settlement. Soon an old woman came down from the nearest house to investigate. Tanner invited her into his lodge, showed her the newborn, and explained that they needed to rest there a while. When she asked where they were going, he told her they were on their way to Kentucky to join his brother. She went back to her house and returned with a set of white man’s clothes for Tanner to put on.²

The woman was Thérèse Schindler, the daughter of a French fur trader and an Ottawa woman. She was married to George Schindler, an American trader. Around 1810, her husband had had a stroke, which left him partially paralyzed. Since then, she had taken over the business and expanded it. When the American Fur Company entered the upper Great Lakes fur trade in 1816, it enlisted her as a supplier. By 1820, she had become one of the wealthiest citizens on Mackinac Island.³

After a few days, Tanner called on the Schindlers and asked if they would be willing to care for the newborn. He proposed that they keep the girl for three years, at which time he would return for her. Reluctantly, the Schind­lers agreed. He brought them the baby on a cradleboard and they drew up an indenture, which Tanner signed with a mark. A few days later the Schind­lers baptized the newborn in the Roman Catholic faith. A record of the baptism, signed by the two godparents, was preserved by the Schindler family. It read: “On this 4th day of August, 1820, Lucy Tanner, aged sixteen days, has received lay baptism from George Schindler, Mackinac, Michigan.”⁴

Tanner’s actions in giving up the baby shocked Therezia. In her culture, children were treasured from the moment of birth. Placing an infant in the care of a relative was not unusual, but giving it to a stranger was a desperate act. She was in a torment over what to do next: whether to accompany her husband to Kentucky, or await his return at Mackinac, or abandon both him and the children and go back to her people at Lake of the Woods. Tanner finally convinced her to continue on, but she was now as depressed and unstable as ever.

In Tanner’s Narrative, neither the infant daughter, Lucy, nor Thérèse Schindler receives any mention. Despite his candor about so much else, Tanner kept this episode to himself. In a letter Tanner sent to President Van Buren in 1837, however, he did allude to giving up his daughter that year: “I lost [her] on Mackinaw iland—she is [now] 16 years old and I dont know what is become of her.” In the letter, he exonerated himself. “My family is Dear to me more than my own life.”⁵

Apparently, Tanner thought the infant would likely not survive the remainder of their journey. Or, that if the rest of them were so encumbered, it would imperil the lives of his other three children, whose ages were approximately eight, seven, and six. It was not an unreasonable judgment. Having already made the journey to Kentucky once, he knew what a lot of sickness and hardship they were apt to experience. Perhaps, too, he had begun to sense the depth of the whites’ racial prejudice and how it would make this journey even harder than his last. Twice while they were at Mackinac he tried to obtain passage for his family on schooners bound for Chicago. Both times the captain refused him—presumably on account of the family being Indian, for Tanner had the money to pay their fare. He now saw how much better the whites had treated him on his previous trip through the Michigan Territory, when he had come alone.

Giving up on the schooners, Tanner bought an old canoe from some Indians and set off with his family down the Lake Michigan shoreline. A little way south they came to an Ottawa village, where they fell in with a group of Ottawas going south to the Illinois country as well. A few days’ short of Chicago, they learned from some Indians coming from the opposite direction that the swampy portage between the Chicago and Illinois rivers was very difficult on account of low water. It seems that these Indians may have alerted them to the presence of a bad sickness in the area as well, for the Ottawas decided then and there to turn back. Therezia wanted to turn back, too, but Tanner would not. Moreover, he insisted on taking his children with him. Therezia, still in despair, got into the northbound canoes without her children. Of this latest breakup of his family, Tanner would only say in his Narrative that his wife returned with the Ottawas.⁶

A few days later, as they arrived at the tiny settlement of Chicago, Tanner fell ill with a fever. Considering the season, the location, the fever’s severity, and the fact that he did not pass it to his children, the ailment was most likely yellow fever. (Although yellow fever is highly infectious, it is not usually contagious between people, being transmitted by the bite of a mosquito.) The infection rendered him too weak to move, much less hunt, and soon he and the children had run out of provisions.

Feverish and anxious for the health of his hungry children, Tanner finally went to the US Indian agent at Chicago, a man named Alexander Wolcott, Jr. Tanner had met Wolcott briefly one year earlier, when he made his way north. He was certain Wolcott would remember him. However, Wolcott took one look at his sallow face and refused to let him into his house or offer him assistance of any kind.

The Indian agency stood on the north bank of the Chicago River just above Fort Dearborn. A little farther upriver there was a wild rice marsh where hundreds of redwing blackbirds were feeding on the rice grains, filling the air with their noisy chatter. With the last of his failing strength, Tanner towed their canoe to a piece of dry land in this place and erected a shelter in which to lie down out of the sun. For several days he lay in his sickbed, occasionally summoning the strength to raise himself to a sitting position and shoot a blackbird for the children to divide and eat.

When his fever at last subsided, Tanner made another attempt to get help from the Indian agent. Using two sticks for walking canes, he hobbled the short distance back to Wolcott’s house and begged him for food for his starving children. Once more, Wolcott drove him away. This was the point at which Tanner nearly broke, crying like a woman—as he thought—because he could not contain his sorrow.⁷

They were discovered by a French trapper and his Ojibwa wife, who agreed, for a fee, to carry the four of them and their canoe over the portage in their horse-drawn cart. But after this couple had conveyed them several miles beyond the end of the Chicago River, the trapper was suddenly seized with fever and diarrhea. He insisted on offloading his passengers and turning his cart around right there. Now they were marooned with their canoe midway across the portage, which, in that low-water year, was reckoned to be a distance of sixty miles.

An old Potawatomi man came along on foot and offered to help. Tanner put his children and baggage back in the canoe, and the two men began towing it through the shallows, Tanner pulling at the bow and the older fellow pushing at the stern. This soon proved too slow and arduous to get them anywhere. When they rested, Tanner had to admit that they were well and truly stuck. But while they were sitting there, another Potawatomi man with two horses happened by. The older man, who was called the Smoker, spoke to the younger man in their Potawatomi tongue, bargaining on Tanner’s behalf. The younger man finally offered to transport the children and baggage on his horses in exchange for a blanket and a pair of leggings. He would go one way while the Smoker and Tanner went another with the empty canoe and they would meet where the stream once again became navigable for the fully laden canoe. Tanner was suspicious of his proposal, especially since the rest of the baggage that he would entrust to the man had value. Yet what choice did he have? They were stranded in the middle of a vast swamp, sick, hungry, and exhausted. The Smoker promised him that this other Potawatomi was trustworthy. Tanner finally agreed to the arrangement, saying not another word as the younger Potawatomi put the three children on one horse and the baggage on the other. In three days, the man said, he would meet them at the mouth of a certain stream—the Smoker knew the one.

When Tanner and the Smoker came to the designated place, they found the man with his two horses waiting for them, the children all in good shape. At last they had reached water deep enough to float their canoe. Tanner paid the man, who went off with his horses, while he and his family, accompanied by the Smoker, threaded down the stream to the Illinois River. As they navigated this river across the prairie, Tanner was able to kill plenty of game. Finally eating well again, they recovered their strength and regained their health.⁸

It was mid-October when they reached St. Louis. They had been traveling nearly four months since departing Lake of the Woods, and they had covered more than a thousand miles, nearly all of it in small, birchbark canoes. Considering all the sickness, the children’s young ages, and the necessity of hunting for food as they went, the journey was a remarkable feat. Tanner must have felt some pride in their accomplishment, even though the ordeal had nearly killed them all, and had driven away his wife. Docking their last canoe on the waterfront in St. Louis, Tanner led his children and the Smoker to the Indian agency to inform Governor Clark of his return.

The complex of buildings that made up the Indian agency covered over half a block along Main Street and included the governor’s private residence, office building, factory house, blacksmith, gunsmith, and council house. The latter building, constructed according to Clark’s personal specifications, featured a long meeting hall with a conference table down the center and display cases along the walls. The many glass cases exhibited more than 200 Indian artifacts collected from all over the West. Clark had designed the hall specifically for receiving Indian visitors and tribal delegations.⁹

Clark received them warmly. The governor doted on the children, presenting each one with a comb. Then he thanked the Smoker for his help in seeing the family safely to their destination, gave him a present, and offered assistance for his homeward journey. The old Potawatomi soon departed, while Tanner and the children remained in the city several days as the governor ordered a set of clothes made for each one of them. Clark also gave Tanner another letter, this time to the Indian agent at Cape Girardeau.¹⁰

When Tanner came to the Mississippi River town of Cape Girardeau, he happened to see the explorer, Stephen H. Long, then returning from his expedition to the Rocky Mountains. Tanner gave this incident only passing mention in his Narrative, so it would seem that he merely observed the members of the expedition from afar. That he had this encounter at Cape Girardeau three years before meeting Long for a second time at Rainy Lake House in 1823 was a coincidence and nothing more, though it speaks to what a small world the United States was in 1820, when the nation had fewer than ten million people.¹¹

Tanner’s white kin lived on both sides of the Mississippi River around Cape Girardeau, some in Missouri and others in Kentucky. They formed a large clan—perhaps a dozen brothers, sisters, and nephews, together with their spouses and many offspring. In the thirty years that John had been absent from the family, they had migrated from eastern Kentucky down the Ohio River valley to its junction with the Mississippi. They were part of a great migration of “southern plainfolk” who trekked across the Appalachians following the American Revolution and down into the Mississippi valley after the Louisiana Purchase. Southern plainfolk were yeoman farmers who typically cleared their own land, grew a patch of corn, raised a few dozen head of livestock, and subsisted their families by a combination of farming and herding. As their mode of living was well adapted to the sparsely populated frontier, they often pulled up stakes and moved farther west when other families settled nearby. A few, such as Tanner’s father, owned slaves, but as they never owned more than a few at a time they were not part of the Southern slaveholding aristocracy. Although they often migrated in clans, like the Tanners did, generally each nuclear family worked its own land. As a people, they put a high value on self-reliance.¹²

Tanner did not thrive in this new environment. Despite the love and affection his relatives had shown him during his previous stay, he seems to have been ill at ease on his return. For whatever reason, he did not go back to his brother Edward’s place. Edward’s idea of their going on a mission together fell by the wayside. John lived with one sister on the Missouri side of the river for four months, then with another on the Kentucky side. He and his children were often sick. They suffered most in fall and winter, when the houses became stuffy and dank. They felt a terrible craving for fresh air. On Tanner’s prior visit to the region, he had finally taken to sleeping outdoors, finding that it improved his health. But now his children were not permitted that option. His sisters, determined to raise them like white children, made them sleep in a bed indoors. That winter, all three children became ill with a fever that swept through the local population. The older two finally recovered; the youngest one died.¹³

After a year went by, John Tanner decided he could not stay there. He was simply not interested in farming, and as he remained quite odd to the Tanner clan in many ways, it is likely he wore out his welcome.

Perhaps most revealing of his inability to assimilate is this: his relatives finally quarreled over how they should collectively provide for him. At issue was the family’s slave property. Several of John’s relatives wanted to sell the slaves and put the proceeds into a trust fund, while another faction opposed that plan. The slaves had once belonged to John’s father and now belonged to the father’s estate; in other words, they were the property of the whole clan. Probably the several Tanner households took turns keeping these slaves and owning their labor; such an arrangement was not unheard of, and it would explain why no one had authority to sell them outright. The matter came to a head when John’s stepmother took matters into her own hands and sent the slaves to the West Indies—apparently under lease, to keep them off the auction block in St. Louis. Those in the family who advocated setting up a trust fund for John took her to court, challenging her right to have done so without their consent. The matter had not yet been settled by the time John left.¹⁴

With his two daughters, Tanner made the long journey back to Mackinac. He knew that Therezia was living there, working as a domestic for Thérèse Schindler. In his Narrative, Tanner stated that a principal reason for going to Mackinac was to secure a job as interpreter for the US Indian agent, George Boyd. He had had repeated invitations from Boyd to come back and serve in that position once his English-speaking ability improved. After sixteen months with his white relatives, Tanner’s proficiency with the language had indeed become much better. However, Tanner’s own actions point to two other reasons for returning to Mackinac that he was disinclined to acknowledge. The first was to reconnect with Therezia. He was loath to admit it, but he missed her. In fact, the two resumed their tumultuous marriage as soon as he got there and she quickly became pregnant again. His second reason for settling in Mackinac would have been more difficult for him to explain in that era, but it was probably no less real for that. He wanted a community in which interracial, white-Indian families were not freakish, where he and his wife and children would suffer less prejudice.¹⁵

Mackinac would allow him to straddle two worlds. Existing at a crossroads between white and Indian peoples, the small settlement with its military fort, trading post, and boarding school was home for a few, a meeting place for many more, and a jumping-off point for still others. Both whites and Indians regarded Mackinac as a portal into the world of the other. The tragedy for Tanner was that he had known one world and then the other, yet he had become estranged from both. Paradoxically, his unusual experience bridging two worlds had come to limit his options rather than broaden them. The old Ottawa man, Wah-ka-zhe, who once told him he would have to make his way among the whites as an interpreter, had turned out to be right. It was almost the only occupation left to him. And going hand in hand with that, the little village of Mackinac, with its predominantly Métis population, must have seemed like one of the few communities still open to him. Alienated from both his Indian people and his white heritage, he may have hoped to find some sense of belonging there. At the very least, it would be a refuge.

In the summer of 1822, he and Therezia set about building a new life together. They found a dwelling on the island and bought a few modest furnishings for it. According to the Schindler granddaughter, whose memory may have been skewed on this point, Therezia then requested that her husband marry her in a Catholic service. Like so many white-Indian couples who married in Indian country and later came to live among the whites, the two came under pressure to sanctify their nuptials in the Christian faith. Whether or not Therezia accepted the Church’s position that they were living in sin, she may have wanted a Christian ceremony simply to ease their way in their new community. Tanner refused. As the Schindler granddaughter recollected: “He said he had married her as they were all married in the Indian country, and she was his wife.”¹⁶

Meanwhile, Tanner pursued a wage-earning job. It was not the first time he had worked for wages (the Hudson’s Bay Company had paid him in cash when he hunted for the Red River colony, and he may have worked for wages in Kentucky as well). But now he considered taking wage work as a mainstay in place of his usual occupation of hunting. Boyd, the Indian agent, was as encouraging as ever about Tanner’s long-range prospects for employment as an interpreter for the US Indian Office. Though he could not yet offer him a position, he proposed to put Tanner on as a striker in the blacksmith shop until he could find him one. Tanner was still weighing this offer when he went to see Robert Stuart, the American Fur Company agent at Mackinac.

The company offices were located in a brand new, three-story building on Market Street. Stuart was a second-generation fur trader whose father and uncle had both worked for the North West. He himself had sailed aboard the Tonquin around Cape Horn to serve two years at the Pacific Fur Company’s outpost near the mouth of the Columbia River. At the end of that stint he had led an overland expedition from the Oregon country eastward. Since then, he had become prominent in John Jacob Astor’s rising empire, overseeing the American Fur Company’s expansion into the upper Great Lakes region. When Tanner inquired with Stuart about work, the trader could appreciate Tanner’s unusual circumstances. In particular, he understood Tanner’s desire to reclaim his children from Indian country.

Stuart drew up a labor contract tailored for Tanner’s particular needs. He was to join William Morrison’s Fond du Lac outfit. From Fond du Lac (modern day Duluth, Minnesota) he would go with the company of men to Rainy Lake, where he would hunt and trade with Indians through the winter. In late spring, when the others returned to Mackinac, he would be released to go to Red River to find the children of his first marriage and bring them out. In this last endeavor, he would be strictly on his own. For his services to the American Fur Company, he would be paid $225 per annum plus one set of clothes and a daily allowance of food.¹⁷

Tanner signed the contract with his mark, and walked out of the building with a renewed sense of purpose. This was to be his last journey to Red River.