CONTESTED MEMORY AND INDIGENOUS COUNTERNARRATIVES IN THE 

WRITING AGAINST THE FRONTIER: 

NINETEENTH CENTURY 

 
By 
 

 

Aaron Luedtke 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A DISSERTATION 

Submitted to 

Michigan State University 

in partial fulfillment of the requirements 

for the degree of 

History—Doctor of Philosophy 

 

 

2021 

CONTESTED MEMORY AND INDIGENOUS COUNTERNARRATIVES IN THE 

WRITING AGAINST THE FRONTIER: 

 

 

ABSTRACT 

NINETEENTH CENTURY 

 
By 
 

Aaron Luedtke 

  This dissertation explores the effects of settler colonialism on Great Lakes Indigenous peoples 

throughout the nineteenth century. It argues that as settler societies dispossessed Indigenous 

peoples from their lands in order to gain access to natural resources, they engaged in a process of 

narrative erasure of those Indigenous peoples in order to justify the violence of dispossession. 

This narrative tool of settler colonists was also employed in assertions of what I call “frontier 

nationalism” to argue for the prominence of frontier societies in the public arena of print culture 

in an age when citizens of both the young United States and Canada were debating the 

characteristics of national identity. From territorial and colonial administrators like Lewis Cass 

and Sir Francis Bond Head to frontier novelists like Juliette Kinzie in Chicago and Major John 

Richardson in Upper Canada to antiquarian historians who wrote local and regional histories of 

the Great Lakes region, and ultimately to professional historians like Frederick Jackson Turner, 

Great Lakes authors constructed a narrative that celebrated the growth and progress of life on the 

frontier in a manner that mythologized the region’s Indigenous peoples out of existence.  

 

In the meantime, Great Lakes Indians evolved numerous strategies of resistance to both 

thwart dispossession and removal, and to disprove myths penned by settler society of Indigenous 

inferiority, incompatibility with progress and modernization, and the inevitability of Indian 

disappearance. Beginning with the Mohawk siblings, Molly and Joseph Brant, Great Lakes 

Indians developed understandings of various aspects of western culture that they adapted within 

 

their own cultural frameworks to battle the effects of settler colonialism throughout the 

nineteenth century. The Brants used their understanding of British legal tradition, private 

property rights, western plough agriculture, Christianity, literacy, and ultimately narrative 

construction and the public print culture to constantly prove to first British and later Americans 

that they were capable of adhering to western standards of “civilization.” Learning from the 

legacy passed on by the Brants, adopted Mohawk war chief John Norton, Mississauga chief Peter 

Jones, and Potawatomi chief Leopold Pokagon all used their own understandings of western 

expectations for Indigenous peoples to prove they were deserving of governmental exceptions to 

policies of Indian removal. Throughout the nineteenth century, Great Lakes Indians responded to 

the settler colonial violence of narrative construction and Indigenous erasure by turning to the 

world of print. John Norton wrote a history of the Haudenosaunee just after the War of 1812 that 

he intended for publication though it wound up on a shelf for over a century. Peter Jones also 

wrote a manuscript on the history of the Ojibwe people that he intended to publish, but because 

of his early death, it was later published by his wife. Leopold Pokagon’s son Simon earned the 

most acclaim in his lifetime, publishing numerous works including his novel, Queen of the 

Woods, and his Red Man’s Rebuke, which he printed on birchbark paper and distributed at the 

1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. This dissertation argues that these writings all 

serve as evidence of the survivance of Great Lakes Indians in the midst of a settler colonial 

impulse to eradicate Indigenous peoples from the landscape and historical memory. 

 

 

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Copyright by 
AARON LUEDTKE 
2021 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For Rae, my heart 

and 

Olive, Abe, and Peter, 

you make everything worth the work. 
 

v 

 

 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 

  One of the biggest lessons I have learned in my eight years as a graduate student is that no 

matter how introverted and seclusionary my nature might be, great scholarship is truly a 

collaborative effort. That being said, I owe some very deep debts of gratitude. For me, this 

begins with the unparalleled direction I received (and continue to receive) from Dr. Susan 

Sleeper-Smith. When I first began my studies at Michigan State University, I was told by another 

professor that Susan is a “fierce scholar;” and throughout my time at MSU, she has proven to be 

that and so much more. She has pushed me when I felt like I could not be pushed any further, 

and she has lifted me in times when I felt like I had fallen. Her unrivaled expertise on Native 

American histories of the Great Lakes has helped me to find my niche in the world. Susan’s 

influence is woven deeply into this dissertation, from her invaluable initial comments to her 

masterful editorial pen. She is also an amazing example of how I want to be seen by others in my 

field. 

  The other members of my committee, Dr. Michael Stamm, Dr. Emily Conroy-Krutz, Dr. 

Mindy Morgan, and Dr. Sean Forner, each left indelible marks on my scholarship as well. In his 

capacity as a teacher, an advisor, and as the director of graduate studies in MSU’s history 

department, Michael has provided wonderful guidance through the gauntlet that is grad school. I 

will forever value his advice in teaching, writing, and in navigating life in the academy. Emily’s 

professionalism and expertise in early American history has also profoundly influenced my 

evolution as a scholar. From her urging me to participate in the Early American Writing Group 

that she organized, to her advice on presenting at the Society of Historians of the Early American 

Republic conference, to her expert feedback on every chapter of this dissertation, Emily has 

 

vi 

 

helped show me what life can be like as a rising scholar. Mindy’s guidance through the world of 

anthropology, and Sean’s mentorship in social theory and memory studies have both helped to 

round me out as an interdisciplinary scholar who seeks to understand why cultures and societies 

do what they do, particularly within the context of settler colonialism. Thank you all for your 

time and guidance. 

I also owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to the Newberry Library and everyone I have 

interacted with there. Susan first introduced me to the Newberry and its consortium in American 

Indian Studies. In one of our first meetings, she told me plainly, I need to participate in this 

organization as much as possible, and I have. My first spring at MSU, at Susan’s urging, I 

attended a workshop on “Media and Method in Native Archives.” That began a six-year process 

of growth and networking that resulted in a dissertation that focuses in great measure on the 

importance of the Indigenous history of early Chicago. Through the Newberry, I have 

established a web of connections with other scholars who focus on Indigenous history, 

experience, culture, and life from across the United States and Canada. These scholars include in 

no particular order, Phil Round, Kelly Wisecup, Kathleen Washburn, Patricia Marroquin-Norby, 

Will Hansen, Keelin Burke, Rose Miron, Sarah Jimenez, Madeleine Krass, Patrick Del Percio, 

Margaret Cusick, Lisa Schoblasky, Joe Genetin-Pilawa, Samuel Truett, Jennifer Nez Denetdale, 

Madison Heslop, and Naomi Sussman. I have greatly enjoyed our summer schools, archival deep 

dives, tours of Chicago, conference planning, presentations, and conversations over drinks about 

our scholarship, our lives, and everything else under the sun. 

In my time at MSU I have also built some fantastic relationships with other scholars 

(both established and up and coming). Professors Helen Veit, Ethan Segal, Thomas Summerhill, 

Josh Cochran, Ed Murphy, Lewis Siegalbaum, and Peter Knupfer have all acted as tremendous 

 

vii 

 

mentors in my early teaching career. Their patience, understanding, knowledge, and creativity 

have reassured me that I can genuinely make a difference in this profession. My fellow grad 

students, what can I say? This is a process that strips us to the bone and reconstructs us from the 

bottom up. Anh Le and Amanda Brewer, your drive inspired my drive. From our overly 

ambitious scheme to write and record a podcast on life as a graduate student to our run as the 

administration in the Graduate Historical Association, to our venting sessions over coffee at 

Espresso Royale, you two both helped me far more than you can know. To the rest of my cohort, 

John Doyle-Raso, Alyssa Lopez, Lucy Austin, and Patrick Buck, we were in this together, and I 

am so thankful for your companionship. To those who came before, Adrienne Tyrey, Ryan 

Huey, Kathryn Lankford, Heather Brothers, Eddie Bonilla, Dave Newman Glovsky, Alex 

Galarza, John Radley Milstead, and especially Jacob Jurss, you all imparted the wisdom and 

candor that came with your experience, and you made the monster that is grad school that much 

easier to navigate. To those who followed, Ramya Swayamprakash, Jen Andrella, Dawson 

McCall, Anthony Padavano, Eric Kesse, Clay Oppenhuizen, Dani Willcutt, and especially 

Michael Albani, I truly hope I was as helpful to you as others were to me, but I am very glad to 

have gotten to know you all. 

Before I ever made it to MSU, I earned my MA at Lehigh University. There, I made the 

incredible transition from someone interested in history to an actual scholar. The people at 

Lehigh who took time to mentor me or simply offer me friendship will forever hold a special 

place in my heart. Dr. Roger Simon, I count you at the top of it all. Your belief in me, and your 

straightforward approach gave me an example to emulate, especially your Gangs of New York 

class. Dr. Monica Najar and Dr. Michelle LeMaster both proved instrumental in this transition as 

they helped me understand what actual historical research and writing are. Dr. John Savage and 

 

viii 

 

Dr. Jean Soderlund both showed me that my passion actually lies in early American and Native 

American history and not urban or religious history. Then, my fellow grad students at Lehigh, 

Jay Donis, Austin Stewart, Ranah Yaqub, Danielle Lehr Schagrin, Blake Michaels, Chris 

Campbell, Jessie Vander Heide, Andrew Dyrli Hermeling, Samuel Dodge, Rachel Engl Taggart, 

Galina Hanley, Sean Anderson, and John Mount, thank you all for the trivia nights, conference 

panels, and countless conversations about history and life. 

Throughout my dissertation research, I am deeply grateful to the countless librarians, 

archivists, and other support staff with friendly faces that have brightened my visits to unfamiliar 

places. Elise Hansen and Jennifer Desloover, the work you both perform in the history 

department at MSU is of the utmost value to the professors and grad students alike. Trust me, we 

all understand your importance. Dr. Karrin Hanshew, as the director of grad studies in the history 

department, you have helped me tremendously both in securing funding, and in navigating the 

system without tearing my hair out. In my trips to Canada, several people took the time and 

energy to make an American scholar feel at home. Maureen Doyle and Jerry Raso, thank you so 

much for opening your home to me. Maureen, thank you for introducing me to Major John 

Richardson, Canada’s first novelist. Who knew it would prove so crucial to my scholarship? Dr. 

Carl Benn, thank you for all of your input and advice as I did my best to familiarize myself with 

the historiography of early Canada. Dr. Donald Smith and Dr. Victoria Freeman, thank you for 

your help with the history of early Toronto and the Mississauga of Upper Canada. You both set 

me on a path that I am still traveling. Special thanks to Timothy Sanford and the rest of the staff 

at the Archives of Ontario. Also, thank you to Dr. Carolyn Podruchny, Chandra Murdoch, and 

Dr. Kathryn Labelle for making me feel like I belong as I delve further into Canada’s Indigenous 

history. Thank you also to the wonderful people at the Six Nations of the Grand River and the 

 

ix 

 

New Credit Mississauga reserves in Ontario. I am honored to be able to study and teach your 

history. 

This dissertation would not have been possible without the material assistance of several 

institutions who saw value in my work as well. I am extremely grateful to the Newberry Library 

for awarding me a short-term fellowship to fund research trips to both Toronto and Chicago. I 

am also grateful to the Lily Library at Indiana University for awarding me the Everett Helm 

Visiting Fellowship, which funded my trip to Bloomington to visit the Lily and the Glenn A. 

Black Laboratory of Archaeology. Thank you to the Bentley Historical Library for funding my 

research in Ann Arbor at both the Bentley and the Clements. Thank you also to the Department 

of History at MSU for awarding me both the Harry Brown and the Fred Williams endowed 

awards. Lastly, thanks to the Graduate School at MSU for awarding me a dissertation completion 

fellowship. All of this funding made possible my travels to repositories throughout the Great 

Lakes region. Other scholars that have helped me in my travels for both research and conference 

presentations include Nancy Shoemaker, Gregory Dowd, Rob Harper, Lucy Murphy, Alexis 

Guilbaut, Thierry Veyrié, Phil Deloria, John Low, Kelsey Grimm, and Andrew Sturtevant. 

Thank you all. 

Above all else, I am eternally grateful for my family. My wife Rachel Luedtke has been 

by my side throughout this entire adventure, and the sacrifices she has made so I can follow my 

dream have not gone unnoticed. Her patience, love, good humor, and adaptability were all 

incredibly necessary for me to get to this point. Rachel, thank you also for urging me to follow 

my heritage and study Indigenous history. This is one of the best decisions I have ever made. My 

children, Olive, Abraham, and Peter, you have all also traveled this path with me. From late-

night writing sessions with you on my lap, to your interest in learning about Indigenous history 

 

x 

 

and the Anishinaabemowin language, to the excitement that you bring to the job search, this 

journey is all of ours. You four are my rocks. You have grounded me in a way that has allowed 

me to push further without giving up. You are the reason that life is worth living, and dreams are 

worth chasing. I love you all. I am also indebted to my loving mother. Andrea, you have always 

been on my side, showering me with positivity when all else seemed dark. Thank you for 

everything. 

 

 

 

xi 

 

TABLE OF CONTENTS 

 

LIST OF FIGURES ..................................................................................................................... xiii 
 
INTRODUCTION ...........................................................................................................................1 
 
CHAPTER ONE: MOHAWK STRATEGIES OF ADAPTIVE RESISTANCE: THE BRANT 
SIBLINGS’ STRUGGLE FOR LAND TENURE IN THE EASTERN GREAT LAKES ...........32 
 
CHAPTER TWO: RHETORIC AND RESISTANCE IN THE AGE OF INDIAN REMOVAL: 
LEWIS CASS, SIR FRANCIS BOND HEAD, AND THE INDIGENOUS COMMUNITIES 
WHO THWARTED THEM ..........................................................................................................85 
 
CHAPTER THREE: FRONTIER NATIONALISM AND THE LITERARY LINEAGE OF 
TURNER’S FRONTIER THESIS ...............................................................................................123 
 
CHAPTER FOUR: MYTHOLOGIZING THE WHITE MAN’S FRIENDS: INDIAN LEADERS 
AND THE WRITING OF CHICAGO’S EARLY STORY ........................................................150 
 
CHAPTER FIVE: WRITING AGAINST THE MYTH: INDIGENOUS INTELLECTUALS, 
AND INDIAN-AUTHORED HISTORIES AS STRATEGIES OF SURVIVANCE .................184 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................................213

 

xii 

 

 

LIST OF FIGURES 

 
 
 
Figure 1.1: Map of the Lower Great Lakes ..........................................................................8 
 
Figure 1.2: Excerpt from Red Man’s Rebuke, printed on birch bark paper .......................13 
 
Figure 2.1: Iroquoia in the Late Eighteenth Century .........................................................38 
 
Figure 2.2: Johnson Hall circa 1772 ..................................................................................41 
 
Figure 2.3: German Flats Conference Site .........................................................................50 
 
Figure 2.4: Boundary Line from Treaty of Fort Stanwix, 1768 .........................................56 
 
Figure 2.5: Upper Canada at the time of the War of 1812 .................................................70 
 
Figure 4.1: Juliette Kinzie ................................................................................................134 
 
Figure 4.2: Major John Richardson .................................................................................138 
 
Figure 6.1: “Simon Pokagon” by E. A. Burbank .............................................................184 
 
Figure 6.2: Catalogue of Exhibits on the Midway Plaisance ...........................................202 
 
Figure 6.3: “Chicago in My Grandfather’s Day” .............................................................209 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 

 

xiii 

 

INTRODUCTION 

 

SIMON POKAGON, FREDERICK JACKSON TURNER, AND SETTLER COLONIALISM 

AT CHICAGO’S WORLD’S COLUMBIAN EXPOSITION IN 1893 

 

In 1893, Chicagoans publicly commemorated their city’s unofficial sixtieth birthday by 

hosting the World’s Fair. They did so in grand fashion, by framing their regional origin story 

within the wider narrative of American progress; one that began with Columbus’s 1492 landing 

in the Caribbean. Embracing the trope of American exceptionalism, Chicagoans used the 

occasion to vaunt a version of their own history that positioned themselves as legitimate 

inheritors of the lands and resources left behind by the region’s vanishing Indians. At this 

World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago celebrated its explosive growth from a regional 

entrepôt on the fringes of American society to a veritable metropolis, the gateway to the west, 

and deserving of the world’s attention. Simultaneously, national debates about what it truly 

meant to be an American played out on this global stage at the Chicago fair.1  

Amidst the cacophony, two men presented very different interpretations of westward 

expansion as a central theme in the nation’s history. Simon Pokagon, a leader of the Pokagon 

 

1 In July of 1833, thirteen of Chicago’s social elites voted for the city’s incorporation. The following 

month, they elected a village board and established a town government. Official incorporation occurred in March of 
1837 when the Illinois State Legislature passed a resolution for the city’s charter. See Ulrich Danckers and Jane 
Meredith, A Compendium of the Early History of Chicago to the Year 1835 when the Indians Left (River Forest, 
Illinois: Early Chicago, Incorporated, 1999), 37-39; In his seminal work, Jürgen Habermas articulated the notion of 
a “public sphere,” which occurred after national and territorial states shifted from feudal systems to early forms of 
capitalist commercial economies in the seventeenth century. Habermas explains that the decline of royal authority 
precipitated a rise in civil society and an accompanying bourgeois society, “which occupied a central position in the 
‘public.’” As Habermas articulates, this shift in social power allowed for a public takeover of the press, which 
opened a venue to challenge the public authority of the state. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public 
Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, translated by Thomas Burger with the assistance of 
Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1991, first published in Germany in 1962), 1-26. 

 

1 

 

Band of Potawatomi, delivered a speech entitled, The Red Man’s Rebuke, which he later printed 

in traditional fashion on birch bark paper and passed out at the fair. At the same time, the young 

University of Wisconsin historian, Frederick Jackson Turner, delivered his now famous essay, 

“The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” Each of these men sold to the public 

visions of America’s history, in which Indians occupied completely different roles. Pokagon 

illustrated the power of survivance strategies that Great Lakes Indians evolved to adapt to the 

continually changing circumstances brought on by settler encroachment while still preserving 

their traditional Indigenous cultures. Turner expressed a sense of frontier nationalism, 

articulating a belief in the exceptional experiences of life on the frontier as a major force in the 

growth and success of the nineteenth-century United States. For Turner, Indians merely 

represented part of a wilderness that needed to be tamed by civilization’s spread in order for 

Americans to truly break away from and surpass their European heritage. Turner spoke of 

“vanishing Indians” while Pokagon celebrated the resilience of Indigenous people and their 

cultures. However, both narratives told a similar story, one in which frontier settlers wrested 

lands from Great Lakes Indians in order to facilitate the westward spread of the United States. 

The tensions between settler societies attempting to force Indians off their homelands and then 

writing them out of existence and the adaptive strategies that Indigenous people evolved to 

insure their survivance frames the research of this dissertation.2 

 

2 For more on Chicago’s World’s Fair in 1893, including the roles of both Turner and Pokagon, as well as 
other American Indians, see Robert W. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International 
Expositions, 1876-1916 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984), 38-71; William Cronon, Nature’s 
Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1991), 341-44; Raymond 
Fogelson, “The Red Man in the White City,” Native Chicago, ed. Terry Straus (Chicago: Albatross Press, 2002); 
Paige Raibmon, Authentic Indians: Episodes of Encounter from the Late-Nineteenth-Century Northwest Coast 
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2005) 34-73; John N. Low, Imprints: The Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians 
and the City of Chicago (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2016), 36-37, 44-47; Richard White, 
“When Frederick Jackson Turner and Buffalo Bill Cody Both Played Chicago in 1893,” Does the Frontier 
Experience Make America Exceptional?, edited by Richard. W. Etulain (Boston/New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 
1999), 45-57. 

 

2 

 

These contradictory versions of history reveal a much larger battle for public memory 

and representation that took place during westward expansion in the nineteenth century. I have 

used the term frontier nationalism to describe Turner’s ideology, which both characterized 

Indigenous people as a dying race incompatible with western progress and glorified white settler 

communities as the beacons and progenitors of progress. For Turner, it was white settler 

communities that were responsible for shaping the nation’s identity and securing its potential. As 

a counter to this white racist narrative, Indigenous leaders, inspired by their own intellectual 

elite, continued to evolve strategies of survivance. Great Lakes Indians were no strangers to 

cultural adaptation. Though white administrators, settlers, and antiquarian historians continually 

maintained that Indians existed in a state of static backwardness and cultural inferiority, Indians 

of the Great Lakes region had been successfully adapting to change since long before they 

encountered Europeans in the early seventeenth century. Indians disproved myths of their 

disappearance and inherent primitiveness by incorporating change, both in their own cultural 

understanding and lifeways, as they had always done.  

In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Great Lakes Indians integrated western 

notions of land usage and private property, European legal traditions, Christianity, formal 

education and literacy, and publishing their own narrative histories in order to demonstrate to the 

dominant culture that they as a people were compatible with western notions of progress and 

civilization. Moreover, Indigenous leaders encouraged their communities to adapt to western 

concepts while preserving much of their own cultural values and customs. This phenomenon was 

far more complicated than cultural assimilation, in which Indigenous people were said to assume 

the language, values, behaviors, and beliefs of white society while compromising their own 

cultural values. Instead, Indigenous communities adopted strategies of survivance, which 

 

3 

 

involved retaining their unique cultural identity simultaneously securing legally enforceable 

access to lands and upholding the communal values of their Indigenous communities.  

While scholars and commentators have relied on the concepts of “assimilation” and 

“acculturation” to describe the adaptation of Indigenous leaders to the dominant Western culture, 

this study subscribes to Gerald Vizenor’s concept of survivance to illustrate the cultural 

continuity of Great Lakes Indians from the nineteenth century to the present day. In responding 

to scholarship on “assimilation” and “acculturation,” Vizenor has argued, such “simulations have 

more in common with political theories in the literature of dominance.” Terms like 

“assimilation” and “acculturation” reinforce the belief that Indianness must be measured by its 

absence of Westernness, as if one is the polar opposite of the other. Vizenor offers instead the 

notion that Indigenous people maintained cultural continuity through the “continuance of native 

stories [which] are renunciations of dominance, tragedy, and victimry.” Through the persistence 

of these stories, Indigenous people continually declare ownership over their own representation, 

and denounce public narratives that seek to vanish them from existence. This study incorporates 

Vizenor’s theory of survivance to capture the vibrant scope of adaptive resistance strategies that 

Great Lakes Indians employed to fight off various aspects of settler colonialism throughout the 

nineteenth century.3 

When Simon Pokagon used the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893 to launch his 

literary career, he tapped into a long lineage of Great Lakes Indians who had been writing their 

own history for Western audiences since the turn of the nineteenth century. This dissertation 

 

3 Gerald Vizenor, Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance (Lincoln: University of 

Nebraska Press, 1994, 1999), 80; Vizenor, Literary Chance: Essays on Native American Survivance (Valencia: 
Universitat de València, 2007), 12-13; Robert Berkhofer provides an excellent overview of the notion of 
“Indianness” as an image being conceived of as antithetical to “Americanness” throughout the nineteenth and 
twentieth centuries. This especially played out in political discussion and policy construction. See The White Man’s 
Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York: Random House, Inc., 1978), 135-
175. 

 

4 

 

focuses on the writings and actions of Indigenous leaders, such as Simon Pokagon, the Mohawk 

siblings Joseph and Molly Brant, the Mississauga chief and Methodist minister Peter Jones, and 

Joseph Brant’s protégé and adopted Mohawk war chief John Norton. By writing against the 

settler colonial narrative, these Indigenous leaders provided the American and Canadian public 

evidence throughout the entire nineteenth century that Indians were not vanishing, that they were 

not inherently inferior, and that assimilation and removal were not the only viable options of 

Indian policy that white governments had at their disposal. 

In order to understand the depth of Indigenous resistance to settler colonialism in the 

Great Lakes, this study focuses on the ways in which white settler colonists attempted to write 

Indians out of existence throughout the nineteenth century. At the Columbian Exposition, Turner 

sought to explain and justify American exceptionalism by way of a process of frontier expansion. 

Turner argued the specific type of encounters that occurred on the frontiers of American 

civilization created an experience that at first proved “too strong for the man [who] must accept 

the conditions which it furnishes, or perish.” In Turner’s telling, those settlers then shed their 

European culture as they adapted to the frontier experience, first mimicking Indigenous customs 

and survival strategies before eventually conquering the wilderness conditions altogether and 

bringing civilization to the frontier. Such conquest, for Turner, led to the creation of a truly 

exceptional American culture. Turner argued that as this process of conquest played out over and 

over along the ever-moving frontier like a wave, it served as the key contribution to the 

tremendous growth that defined the United States up until the end of the nineteenth century when 

the U.S. Census declared the frontier closed. In Turner’s summation, Indians represented a 

primitive culture devoid of civilization and progress, and it was through the conquering of these 

 

5 

 

primitive Indians and the clearing of their lands that the very essence of the exceptional 

American identity developed.4  

Turner’s thesis both contributed to and was informed by an evolving American narrative 

that sought to control the representation of Indians and to relegate them to the past. As this 

dissertation argues, the rhetoric of frontier nationalism permeated the public memory of the 

Great Lakes long before Turner turned heads in Chicago at the exposition of 1893. As Theodore 

Roosevelt stated, Turner essentially “put into definite shape a good deal of thought which has 

been floating around rather loosely.” In other words, Turner stated what many other white 

historians of the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries were thinking, that the experience of 

the American frontier created the exceptionalism of American character and culture. As this 

dissertation proves, Great Lakes writers had been espousing this rhetoric of exceptionalism for at 

least sixty years before Turner took the stage in 1893. Chapters two through four trace the 

evolution of this ideology as it was first articulated by frontier administrators like Lewis Cass 

and Sir Francis Bond Head, then as it was tapped into by frontier novelists Juliette Kinzie and 

Major John Richardson who used it to entertain the greater public, and lastly as it was weaved 

into official historical narratives by antiquarian historians writing in the second half of the 

nineteenth century.5   

In the meantime, Simon Pokagon also inherited a long legacy of cultural survivance 

strategies by Great Lakes Indians when he pushed back against the rhetoric of frontier 

nationalism at the Columbian Exposition. Using the Western values of education, writing, and 

 

4 Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” Annual Report of the 
American Historical Association for the Year 1893 (Washington, D.C.: GPO and American Historical Association, 
1894), 200-1; see also essays in Richard W. Etulain, Does the Frontier Experience Make America Exceptional? 
(Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1999). 

5Turner, “Significance of the Frontier in American History,”199-202; Letter from Roosevelt to Turner, 10 

February 1894 quoted in Wilbur R. Jacobs, The Historical World of Frederick Jackson Turner: With Selections from 
His Correspondence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), 4. 

 

6 

 

publishing, Pokagon shared with the public his Potawatomi culture, but he did so by framing the 

violence of settler colonialism as discordant with the country’s Christian values. In his Red 

Man’s Rebuke, Pokagon surveyed the history of white-Indigenous cultural encounter, and he 

illustrated the ways in which the actions of whites would be denounced by the God they 

worshiped and should thus be condemned by Christian Americans. By taking a public stance, 

Pokagon sought to prove to Chicagoans that Indians not only persisted, but that they were the 

true keepers of their own historical record and should be the ones to dictate the terms of their 

representation. Perhaps then, Indians might begin to receive the compensation and rights 

promised to them by the numerous treaties that dispossessed them of their lands.6  

Pokagon was only a boy in 1833, when the Potawatomi signed the final treaty that ceded 

the remainder of their lands in Illinois to the United States government, but his father, Leopold 

Pokagon, and other tribal elders had passed down to him oral accounts of this infamous deal. 

They also passed to Pokagon an Indigenous rendition of the broader history of their 

dispossession at the hands of American settler colonialists. Pokagon claimed he received his 

western education at Notre Dame and Oberlin College, though neither institution has a record of 

his attendance. He most likely attended the Sisters of St. Mary’s Academy near Notre Dame and 

the Twinsburg Institute, fifty miles to the East of Oberlin. Regardless of where he received his 

formal education, Pokagon used his literacy to present the American public with the history 

transmitted by his father and other Potawatomi elders. By the time of the exposition in 1893, 

Pokagon and Turner each represented generations of inherited memory, but from starkly 

dissimilar standpoints. These strains of memory, the settler colonial historical record and the 

Indigenous oral tradition, stretched back long before the treaty of 1833 to the numerous 

6 Simon Pokagon, The Red Man’s Rebuke (Hartford, MI: C. H. Engle, 1893). 

 

 

7 

 

encounters and conflicts that determined the course of intercultural relations between the 

region’s Indigenous peoples and the white settlers, land speculators, traders, merchants, officials, 

and military officers who sought to displace them.7 

Figure 1.1: Map of the Lower Great Lakes8 

Settler Colonialism in the Great Lakes 

Taken together, the narratives penned by Pokagon and Turner reveal several truths about 

settler colonialism, particularly as it played out in the lower Great Lakes during the nineteenth 

 

7 John N. Low, Imprints: The Pokagon Band Potawatomi Indians and the City of Chicago (East Lansing: 

Michigan State University Press, 2016), 40-46; Low, “The Architecture of Simon Pokagon –In Text and on 
Display,” Simon Pokagon, Queen of the Woods (Ogimawkwe Mitigwaki): A Novel (East Lansing: Michigan State 
University Press, 2011, originally published in 1899 by C. H. Engle), 1-23. 

8 This study roughly defines the lower Great Lakes as covering the river basins of Iroquoia in Upstate New 

York that connect to Lake Ontario, the basins of the Grand River and Credit River in modern-day Ontario which 
connect to Lakes Erie and Ontario respectively, the northern half of the Ohio River Valley that covers the northern 
halves of present-day Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and the western-most edge of Pennsylvania, and the southern half of 
Michigan’s lower peninsula. See area circled in Abraham Bradley, Jr., “Map of the Northern Parts of the United 
States of America,” from Jedidiah Morse, The American Gazetteer, Exhibiting a Full Account of the Civil Divisions, 
Rivers, Harbours, Indian Tribes, &c. of the American Continent (Charlestown, Massachusetts: Samuel Etheridge, 
1798), Newberry Library, Case G 80.611, https://dcc.newberry.org/collections/mapping-chicago-and-midwest 
(accessed 7 August 2020). 

 

8 

 

century. See Figure 1.1. Addressing a gap in the scholarship on Great Lakes Indians and the 

U.S.-Canadian borderlands, this study is framed by “settler colonial” theory. Anthropologist 

Patrick Wolfe argued that settler colonists operated under a logic of elimination when confronted 

with how best to obtain the lands inhabited by Indigenous peoples. This dissertation applies 

Wolfe’s framework of settler colonialism to the Great Lakes region by examining frontier 

nationalism, which undergirded settler actions in the nineteenth century. Wolfe maintains, 

“Settler colonies were (are) premised on the elimination of native societies…colonizers come to 

stay—invasion is a structure not an event.” In the nineteenth-century Great Lakes, that process of 

eliminating native societies occurred within a larger context of national identity formation. By 

analyzing the ways in which the rhetoric of frontier nationalism was invoked to write Great 

Lakes Indians out of existence, this research demonstrates how settler societies came to dominate 

the narrative of nineteenth-century U.S. history.9 

This study analyzes the ways that settler colonialism played out in the Great Lakes 

between the Seven Years War and the Columbian Exposition in 1893. I argue that settler 

colonialism is not merely the physical dispossession of Indigenous peoples, but rather, as Wolfe 

puts it, the logic which “strives to replace indigenous society with that imported by the 

colonizers.” As an ideology, settler colonial logic both enabled and reinforced the violent 

physical dispossession of Indigenous people from their lands. Narratives of justification written 

before, during, and after physical dispossession constantly whitewashed the violence as settler 

authors sold their renditions of conquest to the public in an era of expanding print culture. Key to 

the success of such an ideology was the ability of settlers to control representations of 

9 Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of 

an Ethnographic Event (New York: Cassell, 1999), 1-2. 

 

 

9 

 

Indigenous peoples. “Savage” Indians needed to be removed so “virtuous” settlers could spread 

civilization.10 

In his seminal article, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Wolfe 

detailed the ways in which settlers created a colonial discourse that both justified the elimination 

of Indigenous peoples and mythologized them as inevitably disappearing in the wake of settler 

society. Wolfe argues that settler colonial narratives are “resolutely impervious to glaring 

inconsistencies such as sedentary natives or the fact that the settlers themselves have come from 

somewhere else.” This nefarious discourse was and is used to dictate policies that then fulfill the 

myths that it created and creates. For instance, Wolfe argues, “the reproach of nomadism renders 

the native removable…if the natives are not already nomadic, then the reproach can be turned 

into a self-fulfilling prophecy through the burning of corn or the uprooting of fruit trees,” or 

through the destruction or transformation of hunting grounds and the intentional elimination of 

game. In either case, settler societies seek to destroy Indigenous people’s ability to live off the 

land then subsequently define them as savage, backward, incapable of progress, and destined to 

vanish. When Indigenous people resist the violence of settler encroachment, their own 

reactionary bloodshed proves the myths of Indigenous savagery correct in the minds of settler 

societies.11 

Fellow Australian, Lorenzo Veracini, describes the nature of settler colonial 

conceptualizations of sovereignty as inherently autonomous of colonial and imperial aims. 

Building on Wolfe’s thesis, Veracini argued that settler colonialism is characterized by the 

 

10 Wolfe first shaped the field of settler colonial theory in 1999 with his work Settler Colonialism and the 

Transformation of Anthropology, 27; Lorenzo Veracini followed a decade later with Settler Colonialism: A 
Theoretical Overview (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Walter Hixson then applied settler colonial theory to 
the United States in American Settler Colonialism: A History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Jeffrey Ostler 
and Nancy Shoemaker, “Settler Colonialism in Early American History: Introduction,” The William and Mary 
Quarterly, 76, no. 3 (July, 2019). 

11 Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism,” 396. 

 

10 

 

ability of settlers to maintain a sort of sovereignty, which is dependent on perpetuating a 

“particular state of mind and a specific narrative form.” This narrative form does not just give 

credence to the actions of settler societies; it validates those societies to the metropole. In the 

nineteenth-century Great Lakes, settler authors constantly reimagined the bloodshed involved 

with dispossessing Indians of their lands as a necessary battle between good settlers and savage 

Indians. This played out repeatedly in Great Lakes writings long before Turner’s thesis presented 

settlers as justly engaged in cycles of retaliatory violence against the Indians defending their 

lands from settler encroachment.12   

 

The Survivance of Great Lakes Indians in the Nineteenth Century 

Like Turner, Pokagon depended on a century’s worth of evolving literature and action 

when he developed his own fin de siècle posture of resistance. As Chapter Five: Writing Against 

the Myth concludes, Great Lakes Indigenous intellectuals had been articulating their own history 

since the turn of the nineteenth century. Building on this legacy of writing back, Pokagon 

responded to the settler colonial narrative by condemning the land grabbing tactics of whites and 

by pointing out that Indians remained a vital part of an expanding United States society. In his 

Red Man’s Rebuke, Pokagon used the image of the birch bark to draw a crucial connection 

between the land and Indigenous people, simultaneously providing examples of how his 

Potawatomi people were compatible with progress and modernization. He clearly explained, 

“My object in publishing the ‘Red Man’s Rebuke’ on the bark of the white birch tree, is out of 

loyalty to my own people, and gratitude to the Great Spirit, who in his wisdom provided for our 

 

12 Veracini, Settler Colonialism, 12-13; For more on settlers justifying frontier violence via “white victims 
overpowered by numerous savage assailants,” see Richard White, “When Turner and Cody Both Played Chicago in 
1893,” 53. 

 

11 

 

use for untold generations, this most remarkable tree with manifold bark used by us instead of 

paper, being of greater value to us as it could not be injured by sun or water.” Pokagon then 

described the many different uses for birch bark in Potawatomi society, both in spiritual and 

pragmatic contexts before he concluded by stating, “but like the red man this tree is vanishing 

from our forests.” This final line illustrates the pathos that undergirded Pokagon’s entire book, as 

he attempted to both prove the advancement and potential of Indians with the modernization of 

white society, as well as to warn of the deleterious effects of settler society on Indigenous 

culture.13  

Pokagon consistently advocated for schools that offered Indians a formal education and 

he used his understanding of Christian doctrine and western morality against settler colonists 

who had removed Indigenous people from their lands. Rebuking his white audience for its 

history of violence against Indians, Pokagon stated, “In behalf of my people, the American 

Indians, I hereby declare to you, the pale-faced race that has usurped our lands and homes, that 

we have no spirit to celebrate with you the great Columbian Fair now being held in this Chicago 

city, the wonder of the world.” By working within the country’s growing print culture, Pokagon 

relied on his western education to specifically advocate for Indigenous rights.14  

 

 

13 Pokagon, The Red Man’s Rebuke. 
14 Pokagon, Red Man’s Rebuke; These antiquarian historians are discussed in much greater detail in 

Chapter 4. They include Gurdon Saltonstall, The Autobiography of Gurdon Saltonstall Hubbard, edited by Caroline 
M. McIlvaine (Chicago: R. R. Donnelley & Sons Company, 1911); George M. Hollenback, “The Old Settler’s 
Picnic,” Originally published in The Kendall County Record, September 29, October 6, and October 13, 1870, 
Kendall County, Illinois Genealogy website, http://kendallkin.org/county-history/old-settlers-picnic/old-settlers-
picnic-9-29-1870combined.html (accessed 20 July 2016); Nehemiah Matson, Reminiscences of Bureau County 
[Illinois] in Two Parts (Princeton, Illinois: Republican Book and Job Office, 1872), 132-33; A.T. Andreas, History 
of Chicago: From the Earliest Period to the Present Time, Vol. I, Ending with the Year 1857 (Chicago: A.T. 
Andreas, Publisher, 1884); Henry Brown, The History of Illinois, from its First Discovery and Settlement to the 
Present Time (New York: J. Winchester, New World Press, 1844); William Hickling, “Caldwell and Shabonee,” 
Fergus Historical Series, vol. 10, Newberry Library, Ayer MS 51. 

 

12 

 

 

Figure 1.2: Excerpt from Red Man’s Rebuke, printed on birch bark paper15 

Using the nation’s expanding print culture to counter the settler colonial narrative was a 

tactic employed in the Great Lakes long before Pokagon’s turn of the century writings. As 

Chapter One: Strategies of Creative Adaptation explores, at the beginning of the nineteenth 

century, the Mohawk leader Joseph Brant described his own desire to write an Indigenous-

authored history as one of the many strategies he and his sister Molly developed to ensure their 

community’s survivance. The Brants used their understanding of western values to position 

themselves as the key intercultural brokers between the British Empire and Great Lakes Indians, 

while maintaining their Mohawk identity. They did so in an era when many other Indigenous or 

 

15 Photo still of a page from an original copy of Pokagon’s Red Man’s Greeting (Red Man’s Rebuke), 

Newberry Library, Ayer 251 .P651 P7 1893 
https://collections.carli.illinois.edu/digital/collection/nby_eeayer/id/5635 (accessed November 18, 2020).  

 

13 

 

multiethnic intercultural brokers felt mounting pressure to assimilate to British and later 

American customs and standards, or else face marginalization, dispossession, and 

disempowerment. This chapter builds on the rich literature about the Haudenosaunee (Six 

Nations Iroquois), focusing on how the Brants led their Mohawk of upstate New York to their 

new home on the Grand River in Upper Canada following the Revolutionary War. Here, the 

Brants built a community that celebrated traditional Iroquoian values while also embracing 

western education, legal systems, private property, and Euro/American farming practices.16 

Chapter One: Strategies of Creative Adaptation argues that encroaching settler societies 

began aggressively dispossessing Great Lakes Indians of their lands following the Revolutionary 

War. Much of the resistance to settler encroachment came from Mohawk leaders, especially 

Joseph and Molly Brant, who undercut the logic of elimination that settlers used to justify their 

actions. As Haudenosaunee culture was both matrilineal and matrifocal, clan matrons like Molly 

Brant often enjoyed more power than their male chief equivalents. In fact, one of the major 

responsibilities of clan matrons was the appointing of new chiefs. When Molly married the 

British colonial administrator William Johnson, she received access to his colonial coffers and 

diplomatic influence while he benefitted from her status and kinship connections. Johnson took 

Molly’s younger brother Joseph as a protégé, and he taught him Western diplomacy, legal 

traditions, settler style plough agriculture, as well as the European concept of private property. 

Furthermore, Johnson sent Joseph to learn to read and write at Eleazor Wheelock’s missionary 

 

16 See especially Alan Taylor, The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the 

American Revolution (New York: Random House, Inc., 2006), 5-11; see also Timothy D. Willig, Restoring the 
Chain of Friendship: British Policy and the Indians of the Great Lakes, 1783-1815 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska 
Press, 2008); for a groundbreaking study of the roots of the Covenant Chain (the diplomatic ties that bound the 
Haudenosaunee to the British Empire), see Francis Jennings, The Ambiguous Iroquois Empire: The Covenant Chain 
Confederation of Indian Tribes with English Colonies (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1984); A more 
recent study of the evolution of the Haudenosaunee can be found in Jon Parmenter, The Edge of the Woods: 
Iroquoia, 1534-1701 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2010). 

 

14 

 

school, the precursor to Dartmouth College. For the rest of their lives, the Brants employed their 

understanding of western values and customs to continually ensure for their Mohawk community 

a place of importance in British-Indian relations.17 

 Joseph and Molly both illustrated a keen understanding of British diplomacy, and they 

were frequently sought out for their ability to translate Western concepts and ideas to other 

Indigenous leaders. In doing so, the Brants were able to disprove myths of Indian primitiveness 

and incompatibility with Western values and progress throughout their lives. Both Brants 

corresponded prolifically, leaving behind a wealth of historical sources to stand in 

contradistinction to western archives. Under the Brants’ leadership, the Mohawk successfully 

secured from the British government a large reserve of land on the Grand River of Upper 

Canada, which continued to thrive well into the nineteenth century, while other Indigenous 

groups faced forced removal during the turbulent middle decades. Without sacrificing their 

Mohawk identity, the Brants maintained their community’s status as the crucial bridge that 

linked the British colonial administration with the Haudenosaunee and other Great Lakes 

Indians, even after British and Indian loss in the War of 1812 reduced the power and influence of 

most other Indigenous groups. 

While many scholars have examined the intercultural landscape of the Great Lakes in the 

Revolutionary era, particularly after Richard White’s Middle Ground put the region on the 

scholarly map, very few have extended the chronology of their studies past the War of 1812. In 

 

17 Though not for some twenty years, several scholars have explored the important role played by Molly 

Brant in both Haudenosaunee society and Indian-White diplomacy in Colonial New York, and in post-War of 1812 
Upper Canada. See especially, James Taylor Carson, “Molly Brant: From Clan Mother to Loyalist Chief,” Theda 
Purdue, ed., Sifters: Native American Women’s Lives (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Lois M. Feister 
and Bonnie Pulis, “Molly Brant: Her Domestic and Political Roles in Eighteenth-Century New York,” Robert S. 
Grumet, ed., Northeastern Indian Lives, 1632-1816 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996); Gretchen 
Green, “Molly Brant, Catharine Brant, and Their Daughters: A Study in Colonial Acculturation,” Ontario History 
81, no. 3 (1989), 235-50; H. Pearson Gundy, “Molly Brant, Loyalist,” Ontario History 45, no. 3 (1953), 97-108. 

 

15 

 

1991, White’s Middle Ground created a contingent paradigm to explain Indian-white relations 

from the point of contact in the seventeenth century up to American takeover of the region in 

1815. At the heart of White’s argument was the notion that neither whites nor Indigenous 

peoples of the (Great Lakes region) were ever in a position of dominance to dictate diplomacy 

and social interactions for the region. Rather, White argues, this tenuous balance of power 

caused the creation of a middle ground, which “depended on the inability of both sides to gain 

their ends through force [and] grew according to the need of people to find a means, other than 

force, to gain the cooperation or consent of foreigners.” Rather than describing a scene of 

acculturation, White illustrates cultural accommodation. For members of both Indigenous and 

white cultures, the middle ground was a place where “those who created it [justified] their 

actions in terms of what they perceived to be their partner’s cultural premises.” In other words, 

both sides continually attempted to appeal to what they believed to be the cultural understanding 

of the other in order to better frame their own interests. Neither side ever achieved full 

understanding of the other, so diplomacy and social interaction occurred through a process White 

describes as “creative misunderstanding.”18  

For White, and the many scholars who followed in his footsteps, the periods of British 

and American control over the Great Lakes from the 1760s through the early decades of the 

nineteenth century, saw an “erosion of the diplomatic middle ground” as white settlers flooded 

into the region, encroaching on Indigenous lands with blatant disregard of governmental 

oversight or Indigenous sovereignty. The survivance strategies developed by the Brants and 

evolved by other Great Lakes Indians throughout the nineteenth century illustrate the ways in 

which White’s “middle ground” paradigm enjoyed more staying power than he initially 

18 Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-

1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), xiii, 52. 339. 

 

 

16 

 

envisioned. White describes the era that followed Indigenous defeat in the War of 1812 as one of 

“stark choices between assimilation and otherness” for Great Lakes Indians. In an analysis of 

white representations of Tecumseh and his brother Tenskwatawa in the decades following 

American victory in 1815, White describes how Tecumseh was assimilated by Whites as the 

quintessential “noble savage” while his brother became the universal symbol of Indian otherness 

and evidence of Indigenous incompatibility with Western society. White’s conclusion reveals the 

ways that settler society sought to write Indians out of existence, but it does not illustrate the 

many ways in which Great Lakes Indians fought against such a fate. The Brants remembered the 

middle ground well, and long into the nineteenth century, their Mohawk community on the 

Grand River in Upper Canada forced the British to negotiate with them on mutual terms. Then, 

by the end of the century, Pokagon sought to do the same by appealing directly to the American 

public.19 

Several other works have focused specifically on the adaptation strategies of the 

Haudenosaunee and Algonquian Indians of the Northeast, including the Great Lakes, to further 

prove the cultural continuity that marked the region well into the nineteenth century. In The 

Common Pot, Lisa Brooks describes many ways in which Indigenous people of the Northeast 

employed the use of “awikhigan” or the book, which is “at once an activity in which we 

participate, an instrument, and a map,” to maintain cultural continuity from the time they wrote 

on birchbark scrolls up to the present. Brooks’ work sits at the intersection of the “literary and 

historical camp,” especially as it analyzes the production of Indigenous literary sources. As such, 

Brooks is incredibly influential on this dissertation, which seeks to illustrate the ways in which 

adapting to Western literary devices served as a means to ensure cultural continuity through the 

19 White, Middle Ground, 518-23. 

 

 

17 

 

era of Indian removal. Particularly, her chapter titled, Two Paths to Peace: Competing Visions of 

the Common Pot explores the attempts by Joseph and Molly Brant at organizing a pan-Indian 

confederacy based on the model of the Six Nations League. Ultimately, as Chapter Five: Writing 

Against the Myth explains, this dissertation agrees with Brooks’ contention that, “the idea that 

writing has been an instrumental tool for the reconstruction of ‘Native space’ and for resistance 

to colonization is not a new one but has been contemplated by indigenous authors for some 

time.”20 

Chapter Two moves forward in time to the era of Indian removal in the Great Lakes to 

analyze the survivance strategies employed by two Indigenous groups separated by four hundred 

miles and a hardening political border between the United States and Canada. Simon Pokagon’s 

father Leopold used adaptive resistance strategies to maintain Potawatomi cultural continuity 

while incorporating western values, customs, and practices into his community. This enabled 

Pokagon to effectively thwart Lewis Cass’s policies of Indian removal in southwest Michigan 

and maintain legal land tenure for his people while the majority of the Potawatomi in the lower 

Great Lakes were forced west. On the Canadian side of the border, Mississauga chief, Methodist 

minister, and protégé of Joseph Brant, Peter Jones similarly convinced the British government 

that his community had so successfully adapted to western standards that they received legal 

tenure for their lands from the crown. At this same time, Upper Canada’s lieutenant governor Sir 

Francis Bond Head was enacting his own policies of Indian removal and transferring Indigenous 

lands to the colony’s settlers. Unlike the Haudenosaunee, the Mississauga and Potawatomi (both 

related as members of the Anishinaabeg cultural group) were socially structured by local village 

 

20 Lisa Brooks, The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast (Minneapolis: University 

of Minnesota Press, 2008), xxii, xxvii; Philip Round offers a similar argument, that by adapting Western print 
culture, Indians were able to fight against the dominant culture that sought to disempower them in Removable Type: 
Histories of the Book in Indian Country, 1663-1880 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010). 

 

18 

 

communities that were tied together by a larger kinship clan system. In this social structure, both 

the Potawatomi and the Mississauga engaged in strategies of survivance, but on the most local of 

levels.21 

This dissertation also builds on the works of Ben Secunda and John Low. By focusing on 

the ways in which the Pokagon band, or the Woodland Potawatomi, supported the state projects 

of early nineteenth-century road-building, Secunda argues that the Pokagons defied Western 

representations of primitive Indians. The Pokagons instead adapted to the material culture and 

frontier market economy of their white settler neighbors. This dissertation relies on both the 

work of Secunda and Low to unite two generations of the Pokagons. My research analyzes the 

ways in which Leopold thwarted Indian removal, and then how his son Simon wrote back against 

the settler colonial narrative.22 

 

 

 

21 For more analyses of Anishinaabe culture and society, see Heidi Bohaker, “’Nindoodemag’: Significance 
of Algonquian Kinship Networks in the Eastern Great Lakes Region, 1600-1701,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 
Third Series 63, no. 1 (Jan., 2006), 23-52; In addition to Vizenor’s various works on survivance, Jill Doerfler, 
Niigaanwewidam James Sinclair, and Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark edited a collection on Anishinaabeg culture 
entitled, Centering Anishinaabeg Studies: Understanding the World Through Stories (East Lansing: Michigan State 
University Press, 2013); For more on the Potawatomi, see James A. Clifton, The Pokagons, 1683-1983: Catholic 
Potawatomi Indians of the St. Joseph River Valley (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984); Clifton, The 
Prairie People: Continuity and Change in Potawatomi Indian Culture, 1665-1865 (Lawrence: The Regents Press of 
Kansas, 1977); R. David Edmunds, The Potawatomis: Keepers of the Fire (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 
1978); For in-depth studies on Mississauga culture and history, see Donald B. Smith, Sacred Feathers: The 
Reverend Peter Jones (Kahkewaquonaby) and the Mississauga Indians (Toronto: The University of Toronto Press, 
1987); Smith, Mississauga Portraits: Ojibwe Voices from Nineteenth-Century Canada (Toronto: University of 
Toronto Press, 2013); Victoria Jane Freeman, “’Toronto has no History!:’ Indigeneity, Settler Colonialism, and 
Historical Memory in Canada’s Largest City,” Dissertation, University of Toronto, 2010, 21; John Clarke, Land 
Power, and Economics on the Frontier of Upper Canada (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University 
Press, 2001), xxxi. 

22 Ben Secunda, “To Cede or Seed? Risk and Identity Among the Woodland Potawatomi During the 

Removal Period,” Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology, Vol 31, 1 (Spring 2006), 57-88; Secunda, “The Road to 
Ruin? “Civilization” and the Origins of a “Michigan Road Band” of Potawatomi,” Michigan Historical Review 34:1 
(Spring 2018), 118-49; Secunda, “In the Shadow of the Eagle’s Wings: The Effects of Removal on the Unremoved 
Potawatomi” (PhD diss., Notre Dame University, 2008); John N. Low, Imprints: The Pokagon Band of Potawatomi 
Indians and the City of Chicago (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2016), 22-30. 

 

19 

 

The Evolution of Frontier Nationalism 

Territorial administrators on both sides of the U.S.-Canada border articulated early forms 

of frontier nationalism as they argued for the Great Lakes as a critical frontier region, crucial in 

defining the national identities of both the United States and Canada. On the U.S. side of the 

border, Michigan Territorial governor Lewis Cass spent decades learning all he could about the 

region’s Indigenous inhabitants in order to best facilitate the acquisition of their lands and the 

shaping of public opinion. By the 1830s, after Cass was appointed Andrew Jackson’s Secretary 

of War, he enacted policies of Indian removal that devastated Indigenous communities 

throughout the United States. On the Canadian side of the border, after he was appointed 

lieutenant governor, Sir Francis Bond Head shifted away from the province’s historical stance of 

Indian uplift and civilization policies in order to enact his own Indian removal strategy. To 

justify such violence against Indigenous people, both Cass and Bond Head maintained that Great 

Lakes Indians were destined to vanish as Anglo-Americans pushed west across North America. 

By arguing Indigenous people were inherently incompatible with western notions of progress 

and modernization, these administrators established several foundational myths, adopted by later 

Great Lakes authors and historians, who wrote Indians out of existence for the rest of the 

nineteenth century. 

While emphasizing Indigenous cultural continuity and resistance, this dissertation 

analyzes the evolution of these Great Lakes narratives that glorified settler history while 

mythologizing and vanishing Indians from the public memory. The early nineteenth-century 

political writings of Cass and Bond Head employed rhetorical tropes of romanticization to paint 

Indians as incompatible with Western progress and modernization; destined to disappear in the 

wake of civilization’s spread. Both administrators sought to publicly prove the validity of their 

 

20 

 

controversial Indian policies, especially removal. However, their policies were both fragmented 

and inconsistent. Recent scholarly research has increasingly demonstrated that northern Indian 

removal generally occurred on a much smaller scale and over a longer timeline than in the South. 

In his study of northern Indian removal, John P. Bowes describes a long-term phenomenon of 

fragmented policies with numerous tribes and bands and contends that removal in the North was 

a very contingent process that varied widely based on local circumstances. As such, Bowes 

argues that the Indian Removal Act itself, “established a discourse that has continued to frame 

discussions of the historical era in which it occurred,” but by focusing specifically on that single 

policy, scholars frequently overlook the differences between northern and southern removal 

practices. This dissertation argues that removal policies in the Great Lakes were largely shaped 

by the power struggles that occurred between frontier administrators, like Cass and Bond Head, 

enabling Indigenous leaders to strategically resist removal to thwart them.23  

As Chapter Three: Frontier Nationalism and the Literary Lineage of Turner’s Frontier 

Thesis illustrates, by the middle of the century, a regional literary genre evolved in the Great 

Lakes with frontier authors, like Juliette Kinzie and Major John Richardson, penning semi-

historical novels about the region’s settler roots before and during the War of 1812. These 

authors tapped into the same rhetoric espoused by Cass and Bond Head as they painted the Great 

Lakes’ settler colonial history as both exceptional and inevitable. Their writings provided the 

foundation for the first antiquarian regional histories of the Great Lakes. Most prolifically, many 

of Chicago’s early historians utilized Kinzie’s family reminiscences, particularly regarding the 

 

23 John P. Bowes, Land Too Good for Indians: Northern Indian Removal (Norman: University of 

Oklahoma Press, 2016), 4-10; See also Gary Clayton Anderson, Ethnic Cleansing and the Indian: The Crime that 
Should Haunt America (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014); and Lisa Ford, Settler Sovereignty: 
Jurisdiction and Indigenous People in America and Australia, 1788-1836 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 
2010). 

 

21 

 

“massacre” of Fort Dearborn as factual historical sources, thus perpetuating the rhetoric of 

frontier nationalism that permeated Great Lakes frontier literature.24  

Both Kinzie and Richardson wrote from the perspective of Great Lakes settlers living on 

the frontier, which gave them a certain level of publicly acknowledged authority. Their writings 

appealed to a wide public audience, advancing the notion that the exceptionalism of the frontier 

experience shaped the formation of both American and Canadian national identities. Unlike the 

writings of Cass and Bond Head, Kinzie and Richardson did not design their frontier literature 

with the intention of dispossessing Indians of their lands, but rather as a means of celebrating the 

settler heritage of the frontier generation, and of asserting the primacy of that generation’s social 

authority as both population and infrastructure exploded in the second half of the nineteenth 

century.  Despite this change in emphasis, Great Lakes Indians remained increasingly 

marginalized and dismissed as figments of the frontier past, incompatible with the civilized 

present or future. 

Ann Durkin Keating has written two books on the Kinzies and their contributions to the 

history of early Chicago, although no historians have yet analyzed Richardson’s writings, even 

though he wrote about this same early frontier. Despite the contributions of well-known 

historians like Robert Berkhofer, Phil Deloria, and Alan Taylor, who analyze the works of James 

Fennimore Cooper and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and their mythologizing of Indigenous 

people in early American literature, there are no studies that focus specifically on the writings of 

Kinzie or Richardson within this same framework. This dissertation builds on the assertions of 

Berkhofer, Deloria, and Taylor about the development of tropes like the “noble and ignoble 

 

24 The writings of Cass and Bond Head are the subject of Chapter Two, while Chapter Three analyzes the 

literature of Kinzie and Richardson, and Chapter Four deals with the evolution of Chicago’s historical narrative 
based on the mythologizing of the region’s Indians.  

 

22 

 

savage” and the “vanishing Indian.” An analysis of these same tropes in the frontier literature of 

Kinzie and Richardson reveals the ways their writings formed the mythologized basis of 

Chicago’s foundational story.25 

Chapter Four: Mythologizing the White Man’s Friends follows the continued evolution of 

frontier nationalism as Chicago’s antiquarian historians, such as William Hickling, George 

Hollenback, Gurdon Stalton Hubbard, and A. T. Andreas built upon Kinzie’s foundational 

narrative. These antiquarian historians frequently invoked frontier nationalism, weaving it into 

the warp of public memory, and enabling white Chicagoans to claim a legitimate inheritance to 

the landscape that “vanished” Indians left behind. Antiquarian historians relied on mythologizing 

Indigenous people as either “good Indians” who aided settler society as it spread west or “bad 

Indians” who violently opposed settler encroachment. These histories depict bad Indians as being 

soundly defeated while good Indians willingly ceded their lands, accepted their fate, and 

removed west, enabling settler society to thrive in the Great Lakes. By the end of the century, the 

rhetoric of frontier nationalism fully evolved into the narrative of frontier exceptionalism, which 

Turner expounded upon at Chicago’s Columbian Exposition. Turner’s thesis subsequently 

 

25 Ann Durkin Keating, Rising up From Indian Country: The Battle of Fort Dearborn and the Birth of 

Chicago (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012); Keating, The World of Juliette Kinzie: Chicago Before 
the Fire (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2019); While no American historians have analyzed the frontier 
literature of Richardson, many Canadian scholars have discussed his contributions to the creation of an early sense 
of Canadian nationalism. See especially the edited collection on Richardson, Recovering Canada’s First Novelist: 
Proceedings from the John Richardson Conference (Erin, Ontario: Porcupine’s Quill, Inc., 1984); David R. Beasley, 
The Canadian Don Quixote: the life and works of Major John Richardson, Canada’s first novelist (Erin, Ontario: 
The Poqupine’s Quill, Inc., 1977); Oana Godeanu-Kenworthy, “Fictions of Race: American Indian Policies in 
Nineteenth-Century British North American Fiction,” Journal of American Studies, 52 (2018); Carl Klinck, 
“Introduction,” John Richardson, The Canadian Brothers; or, The Prophecy Fulfilled: A Tale of the Late American 
War (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976); Few scholars have contributed as much to the theorization of 
Indian representation by white Americans as Robert F. Berkhofer, jr. in The White Man’s Indian; Throughout his 
career, Philip J. Deloria has built on Berkhofer’s assessments in Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 
1998); Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004); Deloria, “The Last of 
the Mohicans,” Seeing Red: Hollywood’s Pixeled Skins, edited by Denise K. Cummings, LeAnne Howe, and Harvey 
Markowitz (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2013), 65-68; Alan Taylor provides a very thorough 
analysis of the life of James Fennimore Cooper and his writing of The Pioneers in William Cooper’s Town: Power 
and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic (New York: Random House, 1995). 

 

23 

 

became the foundational myth of United States history and influenced generations of historians, 

until it was increasingly challenged in the 1960s. 

As the ideology of frontier nationalism helped settler societies assert for themselves a 

place of importance in the United States’ national narrative, it also included the expression of a 

settler-autonomy from the administrative reach of the federal government. This study illustrates 

the many ways that frontier nationalism found expression by people at all levels of settler 

society, from early nineteenth-century regional administrators like Territorial Governor of 

Michigan Lewis Cass and Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada Sir Francis Bond Head, to 

midcentury Great Lakes novelists like Juliette Kinzie and Major John Richardson, to historians 

like Turner, whose narratives influenced the generations of scholars that followed. Frontier 

nationalism’s adherents declared the Great Lakes region a place of exceptionalism, where the 

dangers of the wilderness, including encounters with Indians, helped forge a stronger, more 

adaptable body politic, the kind that Thomas Jefferson dreamed into existence as the foundation 

of his empire of liberty.26 

 

The “Frontier” and “Nationalism” 

While much scholarship has been dedicated to the appropriateness of “frontier” as a term, 

this study focuses mostly on the frontier in the minds of early nineteenth-century Americans and 

to some degree, Canadians. The genre of frontier literature emerged following the War of 1812, 

and I use the term “frontier” in the sense that earlier nineteenth-century thinkers would have 

understood it. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the nineteenth-century usage of this term 

as “[t]hat part of a country which forms the border of its settled or inhabited regions,” primarily 

26 For a rich analysis of Jefferson’s ideology, see Peter S. Onuf, Jefferson’s Empire: The Language of 

American Nationhood (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000). 

 

 

24 

 

in the context of colonialism. For Turner, the frontier was the region on the outskirts of 

civilization where pioneers settled the wilderness and paved the way for an ever-expanding 

nation state. Turner’s thesis began by citing the closing of the frontier. He quoted the words of 

the Superintendent of the 1890 Census, “Up to and including 1880 the country had a frontier of 

settlement, but at present the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of 

settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line.” As many scholars of the West have 

argued, Turner’s ideas were far from original. Turner traced his inspiration back to social 

Darwinism. Equally important was his reliance on several sources written in the Great Lakes, 

including the Indigenous author William Warren’s history of his Ojibwe people, the works of 

western historians, Lyman Draper and Reuben Thwaites, the writings of frontier administrators 

Henry Rowe Schoolcraft and Lewis Cass, and the literature of first-generation Chicagoan, 

Juliette Kinzie.27  

While this study frames frontier nationalism within settler colonialism theory and frontier 

and borderlands historiography, it is also situated within the literature of American nationalism. 

 

27 For a great discussion of the evolution of the discourse on the “frontier” as an ideological concept, see 

Jay Donis, “Imagining and Reimagining Kentucky: Turning Frontier and Borderland Concepts into a Frontier-
Borderland,” Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 114, no’s 3 and 4 (Summer/Autumn 2016), 461-73; See 
also Jeremy Adelman and Stephan Aron, “From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the Peoples in 
Between in North American History,” American Historical Review 104 (June 1999), 814-41; Pekka Hämäläinen and 
Samuel Truett, “On Borderlands,” Journal of American History 98 (Sept. 2011), 338-61; Kerwin Lee Klein, 
“Reclaiming the ‘F’ Word,” Pacific Historical Review 65 (May 1996), 179-215; Most recently, Andrew Lipman has 
challenged this discourse by reconceptualizing the frontier as a hydrographic space in The Saltwater Frontier: 
Indians and the Contest for the American Coast (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015); Definition of 
“Frontier,” entry in Oxford English Dictionary, entry 4b, https://www-oed-
com.proxy2.cl.msu.edu/view/Entry/74931?rskey=8oan6H&result=1&isAdvanced=false#eid; 1890 Census quoted in 
Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” Does the Frontier Experience Make America 
Exceptional?, edited by Richard W. Etulain (Boston/New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1999), 18; Turner discusses 
the “social problem” in his common-place notebook a decade before delivering his frontier thesis. He specifically 
argued, “In the past the lower classes have been so completely in ignorance as well as oppression that their condition 
did not fully make itself known to them,” quoted in Jacobs, Historical World of Frederick Jackson Turner, 9-10; for 
Turner’s influences, see William Warren, History of the Ojibway People (Saint Paul: The Minnesota Historical 
Society, 1885); Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, Narrative Journal of Travels Through the Northwestern Regions of the 
United States Extending from Detroit Through the Great Chain of American Lakes, to the Sources of the Mississippi 
River (Albany: E. & E. Hosford, 1821); see previous chapter for works of Lewis Cass. 

 

25 

 

Most scholars of this latter subfield argue that the United States, from its inception, sought to 

differentiate itself from England and other European nations by constructing a uniquely 

American culture with a shared sense of national identity. This study adds to the literature on 

nationalism by expounding on what Eric Hobsbawm refers to as “invented traditions.” In the 

early United States, these traditions were generally invented as a way to distinguish the young 

nation from the British Empire. Because Americans had an extensive English heritage, they 

sought to invent a new culture to both justify and solidify their recently won independence.28  

In The Origins of American Religious Nationalism, Sam Haselby illustrates these 

connections within the framework of territorial expansion into the West and the economic, 

social, and political changes that occurred throughout the nineteenth century. Nationalism was 

not inherently created by the Revolution. It came about in varying forms and was expressed by 

numerous peoples from vastly different social, political, ethnic, and geographic circumstances. 

As the United States expanded in the first half of the nineteenth century, writers, orators, and 

other thinkers expressed their own unique ideas of what it meant to be an American, and what 

comprised the American nation. While people sought to speak for their specific local and 

regional constituents, they did so in an ever-expanding world of print culture that allowed them 

to reach larger audiences and imagine themselves part of a larger nation. From frontier regions, 

such as the Great Lakes, ideas proliferated that argued for the exceptional characteristics of 

frontier inhabitants. As Turner articulated at the turn of the twentieth century, these 

 

28 Eric Hobsbawm argues, “It is clear that plenty of political institutions, ideological movements and groups 

– not least in nationalism – were so unprecedented that even historic continuity had to be invented, for example by 
creating an ancient past beyond effective historical continuity, either by semi-fiction…or by forgery…It is also clear 
that entirely new symbols and devices came into existence as part of national movements and states, such as the 
national anthem,…the national flag,…or the personification of ‘the nation’ in symbol or image, either official…or 
unofficial, as in the cartoon stereotypes of John Bull, the lean Yankee Uncle Sam and the ‘German Michel.’” in 
“Introduction: Inventing Traditions,” The Invention of Traditions, edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger 
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 1-7; for the historiography on the American national identity being 
defined against Native others, see Berkhofer, The White Man’s Indian; and Deloria, Playing Indian. 

 

26 

 

characteristics included adaptability, ruggedness, and most importantly, the ability to 

communicate with and acculturate to Indigenous peoples and their customs. This study takes up 

such claims by explaining the ways in which Great Lakes thinkers sought to influence and direct 

public opinion and policy throughout the nineteenth century.29 

As evinced by the political writings of Cass and Bond Head, the literature of Kinzie and 

Richardson, and late nineteenth-century histories like Turner’s frontier thesis, Great Lakes settler 

societies strove to control representations of Indigenous people in the public imaginary in order 

to assert for themselves a place of privilege in the nation’s eyes. Settler colonial narratives 

mythologized Indigenous people as savage, blood-crazed, inferior, incapable of civilizing, 

incompatible with progress and modernization, and destined to disappear. So, when Indians did 

resist encroachment on their lands, they further reaffirmed these myths in the minds of the 

American public. Settlers devalued Indigenous usage of lands as “primitive,” which justified the 

taking of those lands. For Great Lakes settler societies, private property and individual land 

ownership denoted the American national values of freedom, progress, and manifest destiny, and 

the settler narrative increasingly represented Indigenous people as completely unable to adapt to 

these changes. Additionally, Americans continuously villainized Great Lakes Indians by their 

 

29 Gordon Wood, The American Revolution: A History (New York: Modern Library, 2003); Wood, The 
Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1991); Bernard Bailyn, Faces of Revolution: 
Personalities and Themes in the Struggle for American Independence (New York: Vintage Books, 1992); Benjamin 
E. Park, American Nationalisms: Imagining Union in the Age of Revolutions, 1783-1833 (New York: Cambridge 
University Press, 2018), 5; for other articulations of revisionist ideas on American nationalism building off of Wood, 
and Bailyn, see David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776-
1820 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Simon P. Newman, Parades and Politics of the 
Street: Festive Culture in the Early American Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997); 
Joyce Appleby, Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of 
Harvard University Press, 2000); for a look at nationalisms based on gender, see Rosemarie Zagarri, Revolutionary 
Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 
2007); Mary Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America’s Republic 
(Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Sam Haselby, The Origins of American Religious 
Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). 

 

27 

 

association with Britain, and as such labeled them the national enemy. Indians were constantly 

described as bloodthirsty, savage, warmongering, and spurred to violence by their British allies.30 

Since the publication of Berkhofer’s The White Man’s Indian, many historians of Native 

America have focused on the ways White Americans have sought to control the representation of 

Indigenous people while composing the nation’s narrative. Philip Deloria’s Playing Indian, 

published in 1998, furthered this discourse by showing the mythical nature of the American 

historical narrative and the ways that it had distorted and fictively reimagined the nature of 

American Indian societies. Echoing Berkhofer, Deloria believed that, “savage Indians served 

Americans as oppositional figures against whom one might imagine a civilized national self.” 

Also in 1998, Jill Lepore’s The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American 

Identity analyzed the ways in which Puritans controlled the narrative of King Philip’s War to 

justify Indian destruction and marginalization while supporting Indian removal in the name of 

settler-colonialism. In her highly influential work, Firsting and Lasting, Jean O’Brien identified 

the construction of this national narrative through an analysis of nineteenth-century public 

commemorations by local historical societies in New England. Building on the works of Deloria 

and Lepore, O’Brien explored the ways these public displays of U.S. nationalism created an 

overwhelming sense of American nativism that was built directly on the taking of Indigenous 

lands in the name of first Puritan and then later American progress and civilization. By claiming 

inheritance to romanticized but disappeared Indigenous forebears, nineteenth-century New 

Englanders asserted an American identity and exceptionalism that marked them as not only 

superior to Europeans but to their fellow countrymen throughout the United States as well. 

Chapter Four: Mythologizing the White Man’s Friends applies a similar paradigm to Chicago in 

30 Hixson, American Settler Colonialism, 7. 

 

 

28 

 

the mid-to-late nineteenth century to illustrate the ways that invokers of frontier nationalism 

sought to shape public opinion throughout the United States, particularly through the 

mythologizing of Chicago’s Indigenous people.31 

 

Conclusion: Indigenous-authored Histories as Proof of Suvivance 

While the rhetoric of frontier nationalism had been deeply embedded in America’s 

historical narrative by the time of Turner’s presentation at the Columbian Exposition in 1893, 

Pokagon’s Rebuke reveals the existence of a different narrative legacy. Dating back to Brant’s 

early desire to pen a history of the Haudenosaunee, Indigenous authors repeatedly articulated 

their own versions of history to counter the settler colonial narrative. During his lifetime, Joseph 

Brant translated several books from the Bible into the Mohawk language, and he expressed a 

desire to author a history of the Haudenosaunee. Through his correspondence and actions, Brant 

clearly illustrated an understanding of the importance of public opinion and historical narratives. 

A decade after Brant’s death, his ambition was fulfilled. Brant’s protégé, the adopted Mohawk 

chief John Norton, penned an Indigenous history that challenged the settler colonial monopoly of 

historical representation. Brant’s legacy lived on in the survivance strategies employed by his 

own community of the Grand River Six Nations reserve in Upper Canada under Norton’s 

leadership, as well as among the Mississauga of the Credit, of whom Brant also served as an 

adopted chief.32 

 

31 Deloria, Playing Indian, 3; Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of 

American Identity (New York: Vintage Books, 1998); Jean O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of 
Existence in New England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). 

32 While some scholars make a note of Norton’s significance in Indian-white diplomacy and warfare of the 

nineteenth-century Great Lakes, few have given his life and actions the attention they deserve. Timothy Willig 
devoted an entire chapter to Norton’s contributions as an enigmatic Mohawk leader, but mostly in the context of his 
continued battle with William Claus and other British colonial administrators over Iroquois land rights in Willig, 
Restoring the Chain of Friendship, 161-195; a full-length biography of Norton is forthcoming from Willig; Carl 
Benn has perhaps given Norton the most attention, but mostly regarding his leadership during the War of 1812 in his 

 

29 

 

Chapter Five: Writing Against the Myth returns to the 1893 Columbian Exposition as the 

scene where the rhetoric of frontier nationalism and the strategies of survivance clashed on the 

world’s stage. While Turner maintained Indians were merely an aspect of the wilderness that had 

been conquered by the spread of civilization, Pokagon spoke truth to power when he argued that 

Great Lakes Indians had not disappeared and that they were perfectly compatible with the 

progress and modernization of American society. This chapter traces the work of Indigenous 

intellectuals, whose survivance strategies focused on writing historical narratives from an 

Indigenous perspective. While leaders like Joseph Brant harbored the ambition of writing a 

history of the Haudenosaunee people, he never accomplished this during his own life, but passed 

the dream on to others who achieved that goal. By the time of the Chicago World’s Fair, Simon 

Pokagon was hardly the first Great Lakes Indian to write a counternarrative to the settler colonial 

perspective of American history. As this chapter illustrates, the strategies of survivance evolved 

throughout the nineteenth century, and when Pokagon wrote his novel, Queen of the Woods at 

the end of his life, his fictive Indigenous counternarrative succeeded in reaching a large public 

audience.33 

While this dissertation spans much of the territory in the Great Lakes region, Chicago 

maintains a special position as representative of the potential of place in the settler colonial 

imaginary. Americans in the mid- to late-nineteenth century promoted Chicago’s growth as 

symbolic of the nation’s greatness. These nineteenth-century commentators attributed Chicago’s 

rise almost exclusively to its status as the quintessential American gateway city, one that 

 

introduction to A Mohawk Memoir from the War of 1812: John Norton~Teyoninhokarawen (Toronto: University of 
Toronto Press, 2019); Benn, “Missed Opportunities and the Problem of Mohawk Chief John Norton’s Cherokee 
Ancestry,” Ethnohistory 59:2 (Spring 2012). 

33 For an in-depth analysis of Jones’ writing, see Maureen Konkle, Writing Indian Nations: Native 

Intellectuals and the Politics of Historiography, 1827-1863 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 
2004), 181-87; Peter Jones, History of the Ojibway Indians; with especial reference to their conversion to 
Christianity (London: A.W. Bennet, 1860). 

 

30 

 

according to historian William Cronon, ballooned in size, population, and significance due 

specifically to it linking the West to the East, the resources of the hinterlands in the middle of the 

country to the financial centers of the eastern seaboard. While other cities in the American West 

experienced similar levels of growth, by the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, Chicago 

was the ultimate triumph of the American spirit in the national imaginary. As such, Simon 

Pokagon, presented a powerful Indigenous critique of the white historical narrative that 

celebrated American progress and dismissed Indigenous people. 

Throughout the nineteenth century, as frontier nationalism permeated the public 

imagination, Indigenous people did not vanish. Utilizing a great many strategies, Indigenous 

peoples resisted removal, fought against encroachment, adapted to social, cultural, political, 

economic, and environmental changes, and used their voices and actions to speak and write back 

against the public narratives that depicted them as disappearing. Four figures stand out in writing 

this counternarrative: Joseph Brant at the end of the eighteenth century, John Norton who penned 

a history of the Haudenosaunee, or Six Nations of Iroquois, just after the War of 1812, Peter 

Jones who wrote his own history of the Ojibwe in the middle of the century, and Simon 

Pokagon, who defied racial stereotypes and subverted the settler colonial narrative at the end of 

the century. At the Worlds Columbian Exposition at Chicago in 1893, while Turner was 

delivering his frontier thesis in a small room to an even smaller audience, Pokagon addressed the 

general public and passed out his book, The Red Man’s Rebuke to the multitude of visitors 

entering the fair. In doing so, Pokagon fulfilled Brant’s promise to disprove the myth of the 

vanishing Indian. 

 

 

31 

 

CHAPTER ONE 

 

MOHAWK STRATEGIES OF ADAPTIVE RESISTANCE: 

THE BRANT SIBLINGS’ STRUGGLE FOR LAND TENURE IN THE EASTERN GREAT 

LAKES 

 
 

On April 3rd of 1796, prominent Mohawk leader Joseph Brant complained to his friend, 

Surveyor General of Upper Canada D. W. Smith about encroaching settlers and land speculators. 

The letter denounced the actions of Detroit fur trader John Askin, particularly his attempts to 

swindle Great Lakes Indians out of their lands. He complained to Smith that, “Mr. Askins and 

some other Merchants have been seducing several Indians to make over the lands to them.” Brant 

added that, “If the English government do not take some measures to put a stop to these 

proceedings of their subjects I am apprehensive it may occasion some confusion amongst the 

Indian Nations.” This letter came in the wake of Anthony Wayne’s military victory over the 

confederation of Ohio Valley and Great Lakes Indians at the Battle of Fallen Timbers and the 

subsequent Treaty of Greenville in August of 1795. Brant lamented the terrible defeat, for it 

signaled a wide scale loss of diplomatic power for Indigenous peoples across the region. 

Furthermore, Wayne’s treaty pressured Great Lakes and Ohio Valley Indians into confirming 

and expanding upon prior cessions in the region, as well as other smaller strategic cessions for 

the construction of military trading posts. In this environment, Brant mourned, “It is certainly 

very hard for poor Indians, that what land Wayne left them these fellows with their rum will 

endeavour to strip them of—And Mr. Askins has expressed himself in such a manner, as shews 

 

32 

 

he would make no scruple to endeavour to excite a war among the different nations to answer his 

selfish purposes.”34  

Brant himself was a land speculator. By the date of this letter, he had amassed a sizeable 

homestead for himself at Burlington Bay on the western end of Lake Ontario, and he had also 

established a large and thriving community for his Mohawk followers on the Grand River thirty 

miles to the west. While Brant gained personally from his land speculating, his primary concern 

remained the welfare of his Mohawk community. Brant complained that Askin and the other 

Detroit merchants demonstrated little concern for the wellbeing of their Indian trading partners, 

and actively sought to coerce Indigenous peoples out of their lands. Brant concluded, “It grieves 

me to observe that it seems natural to Whites, to look on lands in the possession of Indians with 

an aching heart, and never to rest ‘till they have planned them out of them.” Brant’s clear 

understanding of the logic of settler colonialism, primarily in regard to land speculation led him 

to spend the better part of his life combatting its effects. He did so by developing strategies of 

adaptive resistance that combined a working understanding of Western notions of private 

property, plough agriculture, the European legal system, Christianity, and Euro/American 

literacy and print culture.35 

By the mid-1790s, Joseph and his older sister Molly both had a long history, over fifty 

years, of challenging British administrators, western land speculators, and settler encroachments 

on Indigenous lands. When the Revolutionary War devastated Iroquoia (the Haudenosaunee 

homelands of present-day western New York) the Brant siblings led their community across the 

 

34 Joseph Brant to D. W. Smith, 3 April 1796, E. A. Cruikshank, ed., The Correspondence of the 

Honourable Peter Russell with Allied Documents Relating to his Administration of the Government of Upper 
Canada during the Official Term of Lieut.-Governor J. G. Simcoe while on Leave of Absence, Vol I (Toronto: 
Ontario Historical Society, 1932), 2; for an analysis of the Greenville Treaty and the specific land cessions that took 
place, see Francis Paul Prucha, American Indian Treaties: the History of a Political Anomaly (Berkeley and Los 
Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), 92-94. 

35 Brant to Smith, 3 April 1796, Peter Russell Papers, 3. 

 

33 

 

border, to Niagara in Upper Canada. From there they evolved several strategies to resist settler 

colonial encroachment and Indigenous dispossession in an era when most Indigenous groups 

failed to survive the onslaught of imperial governments and settler societies. The Brants served 

as intercultural brokers, highly respected by British, U.S., and Indigenous communities alike. 

The Brants’ strategies of adaptive resistance, which melded western social customs with 

Indigenous cultural traditions, would prove crucial to Haudenosaunee survivance into the 

nineteenth century.36  

Molly and Joseph were both raised in a Mohawk cultural environment around the village 

of Canajoharie on the Mohawk River just to the northwest of Albany. As part of the 

Haudenosaunee, or the Five Nations League of Iroquois, this meant they were raised in an 

Iroquoian cultural environment. At the core of the Iroquois social and political system is the 

concept of reciprocity. Everything is organized and governed from a kinship perspective, starting 

with the nuclear family, then ranging to the longhouse, then to the clan, and outward to the 

confederacy. Iroquoian social organization took the symbolic form of the longhouse, based on 

the physical makeup of their villages. The physical longhouse is a structure that ranges from 

eighty feet to four hundred feet long by about twenty-five feet wide. They are subdivided into 

apartments on either side of an aisle that spanned the entire length of the building. Along the 

 

36 This chapter builds upon the existing scholarship of “settler colonialism.” I primarily accept the theories 
advanced by Lorenzo Veracini, Patrick Wolf, and Walter Hixson. These scholars agree that “settler colonialism” is 
essentially the logic employed by societies of settler colonists to dispossess Indigenous peoples of their lands and 
resources in order to gain control of those lands and resources for their own gain. Lorenzo Veracini, Settler 
Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Bethel Saler, The Settler’s Empire: 
Colonialism and State Formation in America’s Old Northwest (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 
2015), Walter L. Hixson, American Settler Colonialism: A History (New York: Palgrave, MacMillan, 2013); and 
Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research, 8:4 (2006), 
387-409; I borrow term “survivance” from Gerald Vizenor, who defines it as the continuance of Indigenous cultural 
identity through the maintaining of traditional stories and lifeways, not as simply a survival of people, but of an 
active presence of culture, see Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance (Lincoln: University of 
Nebraska Press, 1994).  

 

34 

 

aisle there was a fire for every apartment. Each apartment housed a nuclear family of five to six 

persons, and the families on either side of the aisle shared the fire. Along each wall, a platform 

protruded to serve as a bench/bed with partition walls separating each apartment. These 

platforms served as benches for sitting during the day and beds for sleeping at night. In between 

the apartments were storage compartments for food and firewood, and tobacco was hung from 

the ceiling. As Fenton argues, “the longhouse was synonymous with a residential unit, the 

household or maternal lineage; it was their own symbol of identity, and together the Iroquois 

were ‘the People of the Longhouse,’ as they called their confederacy.” Each physical longhouse 

contained an entire maternal lineage. These longhouses served as a microcosm of Iroquoian 

communities.37 

A typical Iroquois village consisted of between thirty and one hundred and fifty 

longhouses and was surrounded by a palisaded wall. For this reason, Iroquois villages came to be 

called castles by European observers. Each village is made up of one or more clan segments 

(lineages), which comprise a core of mothers, sisters, and daughters, as well as their spouses who 

were of other lineages. Within each longhouse, the senior living female or head matron of each 

lineage presided over the household in social and political matters. Matrons claimed ownership 

and control over the village, the fields, and the household. Ranking matrons presided over clan 

chiefs in all matters, and they maintained the power to both nominate and recall them. While 

males engaged in warfare in addition to hunting, it was the matrons who determined whether or 

not the clan went to war. This is because the reasons for warfare in Iroquoian culture were to 

cover the losses of dead family members. 

37 William N. Fenton, The Great Law and the Longhouse: A Political History of the Iroquois Confederacy 

(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), 24. 

 

 

35 

 

Joseph and Molly Brant’s maternal grandfather and their stepfather were both respected 

chiefs and skilled mediators between Indigenous and British worlds. More importantly, their 

mother Margaret was a clan matron, which meant that Molly eventually became a clan matron as 

well. Because of this, when she was a young woman, Molly's intimate relationship with British 

administrator William Johnson greatly enhanced her prestige and authority among the Iroquois, 

while allowing her to promote the interests of her younger brother, Joseph. Thanks to the 

emphasis that Iroquoian culture placed on reciprocity, when Molly was able to use William 

Johnson’s imperial coffers to generously distribute presents, she rose to incredible heights in the 

Haudenosaunee social hierarchy. 

The Brant siblings honed diplomatic skills that enabled them to negotiate with British 

officials and devise strategies to protect their Mohawk community. Joseph’s efforts even 

extended beyond his own people when he organized a pan-Indian confederacy based on the 

model of the Haudenosaunee, which incorporated Indigenous people throughout the Ohio River 

valley to resist the advances of American settler society. In the 1790s, when leadership of the 

confederacy shifted away from Joseph to the more militaristic Shawnee Blue Jacket and Miami 

Little Turtle, the Brants’ focus returned to their own Mohawk community. They secured lands 

from the British for their people along the Grand River in Upper Canada and groomed successors 

who helped to resist dispossession well into the turbulent 1830s.  

Throughout their lives, the Brants increasingly came to realize that the key to resisting 

imperial domination and settler encroachment was the ability to claim a legitimate right to land 

ownership by demonstrating that Indigenous people could own and farm their lands according to 

western standards. They also well understood the necessity of communicating such land right 

claims to the British government, political backers, philanthropists, and other members of the 

 

36 

 

British intelligentsia. The Brants continually asserted property rights through legal channels, 

challenging encroaching settlers and surveyors with petitions and lawsuits. They simultaneously 

fostered the notion among first the British and then the U.S. Indian departments that the Mohawk 

were the key to Indigenous diplomacy along the western frontier. The Brants clearly understood 

that so long as colonial administrators believed in Mohawk influence, they could make demands 

that ensured their Mohawk community’s protection and survival. Using strategies of creative 

adaptation, the Brants incorporated all of this knowledge without sacrificing their Iroquois 

cultural identity. 

Koñwatsiˀtsiaiéñni, generally known as Molly, was most likely born at Canajoharie, one 

of the principal Mohawk castles or villages in New York sometime around 1736. Her brother 

Thayendanegea, baptized Joseph Brant, was born at Cayahoga, near present-day Akron, Ohio 

about six or seven years later. Their biological father, Tehowaghwengaraghkwin appears 

throughout records as a great Mohawk warrior, but little else is known about him. He died 

shortly after Joseph was born. Their mother, Margaret then married a man named Aroghyadecka, 

or Nickus Brant. By many accounts, their stepfather was the principal chief of Canajoharie. 

According to Joseph Brant’s memoir, “He was the youngest son of a distinguished Mohawk 

Chief, mentioned in various records and traditions, under the English or German name of 

‘Nickus Brant,’ between whom and Sir William Johnson it is said a close intimacy subsisted.” 

The marriage may have left a deep impression on Molly because it elevated her mother’s social 

status among the Haudenosaunee or the Six Nations Iroquois as well as British traders.38  

 

38 For data on births and early lives of both Joseph and Molly Brant, see corresponding entries in 

Dictionary of Canadian Biography, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/thayendanegea_5E.html and 
http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/konwatsitsiaienni_4E.html; for information on Nickus Brant, see Stone, Life of 
Joseph Brant, 5-16; and Memoir of the Distinguished Mohawk Indian Chief, Sachem and Warrior, Capt. Joseph 
Brant: Compiled from the Most Reliable and Authentic Records, Including a Brief History of His Life, with an 
Appendix (Brantford, Ontario: C.E. Stewart & Co., 1872), 5. 

 

37 

 

 

Figure 2.1: Iroquoia in the Late Eighteenth Century39 

In the middle decades of the eighteenth century, few Europeans wielded more social, 

diplomatic, or military influence in Iroquoia than William Johnson. See Figure 2.1. After 

arriving in the Mohawk Valley in the 1730s, Johnson began integrating himself into 

Haudenosaunee cultural networks. In 1756, he received a royal commission as “Colonel of . . . 

the Six united Nations of Indians, & their Confederates, in the Northern Parts of North America” 

and “Sole Agent and Superintendant of the said Indians.” This position allowed Johnson to play 

a pivotal role during the French and Indian War in the middle of the century, and he successfully 

led Six Nations raids into Canada and helped to ensure a British victory over New France. 

Throughout the war, the Haudenosaunee, particularly the Mohawk, attained a reputation as the 

fiercest warriors, and became the most influential of Britain’s Indigenous allies. In turn, 

39 Map of Iroquoia, gifted to William Tryon from Guy Johnson in 1771, in E.B. O’Callaghan, The 

Documentary History of the State of New York, Vol IV (Albany: Weed, Parsons & Co., 1851), 1090. 

 

 

38 

 

Johnson’s influence over Haudenosaunee leaders greatly enhanced his own standing within the 

British Empire.40 

Johnson’s close friend and ally, Nickus Brant, or “Old Brant,” was the critical link in 

maintaining Britain’s diplomatic alliance with the Mohawk. During the Seven Years’ War, 

Nickus frequently led the Mohawk from Canajoharie into battle alongside Johnson and the 

British, he and was known to show “a great Dale of zeal for ye English Intrest.” When Principal 

Sachem, Theyanoguin, or King Hendrick as the British knew him, died in the Battle of Lake 

George, Nickus achieved even greater prominence. Nickus repeatedly appeared throughout 

Johnson’s correspondence as a close friend and associate. In 1758, he is listed in Johnson’s 

account book as “Nickus chief Sachem of Conajahare.”41 

Johnson routinely stayed at Nickus’ house whenever he journeyed to Canajoharie. From 

there, Johnson even entertained Haudenosaunee visitors and diplomats. During a 1759 visit, 

Johnson called a council to discuss the best way to ensure an alliance with the Westernmost 

Haudenosaunee. Because he was a chief, Nickus’ house was a separate structure from the 

longhouse. In Iroquoian villages, the chief’s lodge was designed to house visiting emissaries 

from other clans. Nickus and Margaret would have routinely hosted visitors both Indigenous and 

European. Before he established his own household, Johnson made Nickus’s lodge the base of 

his operations, and the Mohawk at Canajoharie aided him in his diplomatic affairs. Nickus 

publicly insisted to Johnson that, “You may depend upon our attachment and assistance; being 

determined, as we declared to you at the beginning of this war, to stand or fall with you.” 

40 “William Johnson,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography, 

http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/johnson_william_4E.html.  

 

41 References to Nickus and “Old Brant” in The Papers of Sir William Johnson, II (Albany: The University 
of the State of New York, 1849), 579, 610; “great Dale of zeal…” in George Croghan to William Johnson, 12 March 
1758, Johnson Papers, II: 779-80; “Nickus chief Sachem…” in Johnson Account Book, November 1758, Johnson 
Papers, III: 150. 

 

39 

 

Johnson relied on Nickus to mobilize the Mohawk and by extension, the Haudenosaunee, a 

loyalty that earned Johnson a baronetcy by the end of the war.42 

Throughout the Seven Years’ War, Johnson sought to further enhance his status among 

the Mohawk by linking his name with Nickus’s daughter, Molly. In the midst of this war, 

Johnson married Molly according to the “custom of the country.” Their union proved mutually 

beneficial. Johnson’s fictive kinship ties to the Mohawk were cemented with his actual 

relationship to the chief and matron at Canajoharie. This boosted his Indigenous prestige and 

influence by while also ensuring Molly’s access to trade goods and social connections. Her 

gifting of goods created a web of obligations throughout Iroquoia and enhanced her symbolic 

capital among the Haudenosaunee. These connections proved pivotal in when she sought to 

enlist Mohawk warriors during wartime and sway influential chiefs during peacetime. Scholar 

Gretchen Green argues, “all this she achieved quietly at her husband’s and the government’s 

expense, perhaps even without his notice.” Perhaps Johnson noticed, but Molly’s generosity 

helped secure Haudenosaunee allies, especially among the Mohawk. Largely with Molly’s help, 

he learned to speak Mohawk, and adopted many Haudenosaunee customs. Ultimately, Molly 

Brant provided Johnson the power and influence in Haudenosaunee society that he so dearly 

sought.43 

42 Nickus Brant speech to William Johnson in Council at Canajoharie, 19 January 1759, Johnson Papers, 

 

XX: 87. 

43 Marriage according to the “custom of the country” occurred when French traders engaged in Indigenous 

marriage rites without legal European sanctioning. This practice evolved into a cultural hybrid that incorporated 
elements of European marriages as well. See Susan Sleeper-Smith, Indian Women and French Men: Rethinking 
Cultural Encounter in the Western Great Lakes (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), 168-69n; for a 
discussion on “symbolic capital,” as defined by Pierre Bourdieu, see Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 
translated by Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 6, 36, 40; Richard Harker, Cheleen 
Mahar, and Chris Wilkes, eds., An Introduction to the Work of Pierre Bourdieu: The Practice of Theory (New York: 
St. Martin’s Press, 1990); Craig Calhoun, Edward LiPuma, and Moishe Postone, eds., Bourdieu: Critical 
Perspectives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Gretchen Green, “Molly Brant, Catherine Brant, and 
their Daughters: A Study in Colonial Acculturation,” Ontario History 81, no. 3 (September 1989), 238-39; Feister 
and Pulis, “Molly Brant,” 296; Taylor, Divided Ground, 47-49. 

 

40 

 

 

Figure 2.2: Johnson Hall circa 177244 

Molly’s kinship network extended well beyond her stepfather Nickus. Through her 

 

mother’s line, she was descended from the famed chief Hendrick. Molly’s upbringing in her 

parent’s lodge allowed her to transition easily into Johnson’s large European household. Johnson 

most likely knew Molly and her young brother, Joseph from a young age thanks to his frequent 

visits with their stepfather Nickus. After the death of Johnson’s wife, Catherine Weisenberg in 

1759, Molly’s “country” marriage to Johnson enhanced the Brant family’s status in much the 

same manner as her mother’s marriage to Nickus did a decade earlier. Molly’s new home, 

Johnson Hall, served as a center of intercultural diplomacy in Iroquois country with Johnson 

frequently entertaining any and all-important Indigenous emissaries who journeyed to 

Canajoharie.45  

 

44 “Johnson Hall (Sir William Johnson Presenting Medals to the Indian Chiefs of the Six Nations at 

Johnstown, NY, 1772),” painting by Edward Lamson Henry, 1903, Albany Institute of History & Art, 
https://www.albanyinstitute.org/details/items/johnson-hall-sir-william-johnson-presenting-medals-to-the-i.html 
45 Feister & Pulis reference evidence from an archaeological excavation at this house in “Molly Brant,” 

299-300.  

 

41 

 

Following their union, Johnson commonly referred to Molly as “my prudent & faithfull 

Housekeeper.” This did not mean she toiled in the household, but rather that she managed 

Johnson’s servants and household business, and successfully melded the authority of a clan 

matron with the wife of a prominent British political leader. In this capacity, she maintained 

access to the Indian department budget, and frequently hosted powerful guests both of 

Indigenous and European backgrounds. In contrast, Johnson’s previous wife exhibited no such 

command over the household or Indian Department accounts before she died. Molly also 

provided Johnson with an extensive kin network that stretched throughout Iroquoia, further 

deepening his relational connections to the Haudenosaunee. In his journal, adopted Mohawk 

chief, John Norton wrote, “Sir William, having lost his Lady,—married Capt. B.’s [Brant’s] 

Sister,—they had Six Daughters and Two Sons.” Though they never legally married according to 

English law, Johnson gave his eight children by Molly his own name, and he provided for them 

all throughout their lives, as well as after his death in 1774.46 

Molly’s brother Joseph also enjoyed the benefits of growing up in his parents’ household, 

where he attracted Johnson’s attention in 1755. As a thirteen-year-old, he accompanied Johnson, 

King Hendrick, his stepfather Nickus, and the rest of the Mohawk to the bloody Battle of Lake 

George, which was among Johnson’s most celebrated French and Indian War victories. 

Afterward, he continued to serve with Johnson throughout the war. As Johnson’s affection grew 

for Molly, he also increasingly favored the young Joseph. Johnson sent him to Eleazar 

Wheelock’s school in Connecticut (the forerunner to Dartmouth College) to receive a formal 

 

46 John Norton, The Journal of Major John Norton, 1816, edited by Carl F. Klinck, James J. Talman, and 
Roger Hall (Toronto: The Publications of the Chaplain Society, Vol. 72, 1970), 271; “My prudent & faithfull…” in 
“Will of Sir William Johnson,” 27 January 1774, Johnson Papers, XII: 1070; Green, “Molly Brant, Catharine 
Brant,” 237; Feister and Pulis, “Molly Brant,” 301; “Sir William, having lost…” in Norton, Journal of Major John 
Norton, 262. 

 

42 

 

education. There, Joseph learned to read and write English, and gained an extensive education in 

Christian theology and western cultural customs and laws. Officially, the school trained young 

men of both Indigenous and British descent to become Protestant missionaries to North 

American Indians, but Joseph’s education served as the basis of his adaptive resistance, 

preparing him for the intercultural diplomacy that was key to his success throughout his adult 

life.  

Wheelock specifically sought Mohawk students because he, like so many others believed 

the Mohawk were crucial to influencing the rest of the Haudenosaunee, and imperative in 

garnering the support of Great Lakes and Ohio valley Indians. As Wheelock’s first Mohawk 

student, Brant connected the hopes of Protestant missionaries in New England with the colonial 

ambitions of William Johnson, as well as the fate of the Haudenosaunee in the British Empire. In 

a letter to Johnson dated November 2nd, 1761, Eleazar Wheelock stated, “Joseph appears to be a 

considerate, Modest, and manly spirited youth. I am much pleasd (sic) with him. If his 

Disposition, and Ability, upon further Trial, shall appear as inviting as they seem to be at present, 

there shall nothing be wanting, within my Power, to his being fitted, in the best Manner for 

Usefulness.” Wheelock hoped that Johnson would provide him with other Mohawk boys who 

exhibited a similar aptitude and would serve as the foundation for what he imagined could be the 

most important missionary project in the West.47 

Despite Wheelock’s glowing praise of Brant’s progress, the young Mohawk lasted no 

more than two years at the school when Pontiac’s Rebellion disrupted the plans of both Johnson 

and Wheelock. Though Wheelock lamented the loss of his star pupil, describing him as “of a 

 

47 Wheelock to Johnson, 2 November 1761, Johnson Papers, III: 556-57; Johnson to Wheelock, 21 July 

1762, Johnson Papers, III: 832, 880; James Strachan, “A Sketch of Joseph Brant, the Mohawk Chief,” A Visit to the 
Province of Upper Canada in 1819 (Aberdeen: D. Chalmers & Co., 1820), 151. 

 

43 

 

Sprightly Genius, a manly and genteel Deportment, and of a Modest, courteous and benevolent 

Temper,” Molly summoned her brother back to the Mohawk Valley to continue his military and 

diplomatic training under her tutelage and that of her husband William Johnson. Brant returned 

home armed with an advanced understanding of British ways and thought.48 

At the outbreak of Pontiac’s War, while Molly relied on her husband’s British 

connections and standing to continually elevate her own prestige in Haudenosaunee society, 

Johnson used his strategic positioning as a British government official and his ever-growing 

influence and power among the Mohawk to speculate in Indigenous lands, while fending off 

rival land speculators. In March of 1763, Johnson held a council at Canajoharie with “About 30 

Indian Men, together with 33 of the principal Women,” as well as the deputy agents for Indian 

affairs and “several justices of the peace for the County of Albany.” The council was called by 

“Order of his Excellency the Governor & Council for the Province of New York” in order to 

settle a land dispute between ill-reputed speculator, George Klock and the Canajoharie Mohawk. 

Klock, whom Johnson referred to as “the most troublesome, and worst man I ever knew,” had 

purchased a deed that was allegedly signed by several Mohawk earlier in the century. At the time 

of the council, Klock had already begun surveying the territory. The tract of land outlined in the 

deed proved especially controversial because it overlapped several of the Canajoharie Mohawk’s 

houses and planting fields.49 

As a sachem, Araghiadecka (Nickus Brant) attended the proceedings of the council, but 

his name also adorned the problematic deed in question. The Canajoharie fought the validity of 

48 Eleazar Wheelock to Rev. Andrew Gifford, 24 Febrary 1763, Letters of Eleazar Wheelock’s Indians, ed. 

 

James Dow McCallum (Hanover: Dartmouth College Publications, 1932), 70; Taylor, Divided Ground, 49-51. 

49 “most troublesome…” in Johnson to Goldsbrow, 13 March 1762, Johnson Papers, III: 647; Proceedings 
from “A Meeting with Canajoharies,” 10 March 1763, Johnson Papers, IV: 50-57; Isabel Thompson Kelsay, Joseph 
Brant, 1743-1807: Man of Two Worlds (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1984), 78. 

 

44 

 

Klock’s deed on the basis that the signatories that allegedly ceded away Mohawk lands were in 

no way authorized to do so. Cayenquiragoa, one of the principal Mohawk sachems spoke on 

their behalf. He bluntly stated, “we find that Liquor must have been the Cause of whole, and we 

now deliver you a Bottle of Liquor with which we were beguiled by George Klock.” 

Cayenquiragoa produced several empty bottles, he and stated that over the years Klock 

manipulated the Mohawk by constantly supplying individuals with alcohol and then coerced 

them into signing deeds while they were intoxicated. Nickus confirmed this when he later stated, 

“it is probable that I might have formerly signed it when in Liquor, as ‘tis said I have lately done 

so…I have often been urged to sign it by George Klock and offered 60 Dollars for that purpose, 

which I always refused.” Regardless, at the time of his signing, Nickus held no authority among 

the Mohawk, and he was certainly never authorized to cede lands on their behalf.50 

In fact, in Haudenosaunee society, men in general did not hold authority over the lands. 

Haudenosaunee women maintained control over both the household and the village, which 

included any lands used for farming. When Johnson asked the council “whether the Women 

were looked upon, as having any right in the Disposal of Lands,” Cayenquiragoa, speaking for 

all of the Mohawk responded, “They are the Truest Owners being the persons who labour on the 

Lands, and therefore are esteemed in that light.” So since Mohawk women had not agreed to the 

deed, Johnson concluded it was invalid, a perspective he developed thanks to his intimate 

connection with Molly and Mohawk society. Cayenquiragoa then explained the importance of 

these lands in terms that British administrators would understand, “I have already observed to 

you that I am determined to hold fast by the Covenant Chain, and am also determined to do the 

same by our Land, which we are resolved for ever to hold fast by. We Love the Covenant Chain 

50 Johnson, Council with the Conajoharie Mohawk, 10 March 1763, Johnson Papers, IV: 53-54. 

 

 

45 

 

as we do our Lives, and we do the same by our Lands, which we are determined to dye (sic) bye, 

rather than give up.” By aligning their lands with the Covenant Chain, or the agreement that 

bound the Six Nations and the British in a sacred diplomatic alliance, Cayenquiragoa asserted the 

cultural value of these lands. No monetary value could come even close.51 

Klock had amassed his own cadre of Indians that supported his claim, though not one of 

them asserted any actual authority in Mohawk society. He did however, have the support of the 

landed wealthy elite of Albany, others who also stood to benefit from his speculation. For this 

reason, the Albany justices of the peace ruled against charges that Klock fraudulently obtained 

his deeds to Mohawk lands through intoxicating and manipulating Indians into signing. About a 

month after the council took place, Johnson sent a letter to fellow colonial official, Goldsbrow 

Banyar in which he explained the situation. Johnson described the Indians that Klock assembled 

for his defense as “Esteemed Vagabonds” who were looked down upon by the “whole Castle” of 

Conajoharie. Johnson further stated his belief that “affadavits of the whole Conajoharee Castle 

may be imediately (sic) obtained if such is allowed in evidence to prove the contrary of what I 

am informed these few have sworn & falsely their Testimony.” Johnson emphasized the 

importance of the political source of Mohawk authority to his colonial contemporaries. Klock 

simply sought to use a few select amenable Indians to represent the will of an entire Indigenous 

community, a tactic that became heavily relied upon by government officials in the decades that 

followed.52  

 

51 Johnson, Council with the Conajoharie Mohawk, 10 March 1763, Johnson Papers, IV: 56-57; For a 
better understanding of the Covenant Chain and British-Haudenosaunee diplomacy, see Francis Jennings, The 
Ambiguous Iroquois Empire: The Covenant Chain of Indian Tribes with English Colonies from its Beginnings to the 
Lancaster Treaty of 1744 (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1984); Timothy D. Willig, Restoring the Chain of 
Friendship: British Policy and the Indians of the Great Lakes, 1783-1815 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 
2008); Timothy J. Shannon, Iroquois Diplomacy on the Early American Frontier (New York: Viking Penguin, 
2008); John Parmenter, The Edge of the Woods: Iroquoia, 1534-1701 (East Lansing: Michigan State University 
Press, 2010). 

52 Johnson to Banyar, 7 April 1763, Johnson Papers, IV: 80. 

 

46 

 

In a letter to the Attorney General John Tabor Kempe, Johnson expressed his opinion that 

“not one of the four persons whose names are inserted in the Indian Deed were either Sachems of 

Conajoharee, or persons of the least consequence at the time of obtaining the same.” This 

included “Aragheadicka of ye Mohawks” whom had since been elevated as the principal chief of 

Canajoharie. In this instance, Johnson described Aragheadicka, or Nickus Brant, as having 

“himself acknowledged several times in public meetings that he did not consider himself, neither 

was he of the least consequence as a Disposer of the Lands at that time.” Here, as well as in the 

council, Johnson emphasized the different types and levels of Indigenous authority among the 

Haudenosaunee. While Nickus was a sachem of Canajoharie, he did not possess the cultural 

authority to sell off lands at the time that the deeds were signed.53 

In the meantime, Johnson continued to engage in his own land speculation with the 

blessing of the Mohawk. In a letter to Secretary of the Board of Trade John Pownall, Johnson 

asked for help in convincing legislators in London to authorize his keeping “Two Tracts for 

which I have obtained the most Compleat (sic)Indian Deed of Gift ever granted by the Six 

Nations.” Johnson described the tracts of land as “containing by a rough computation about 40 or 

50 thousand acres of Land; and was given to me about two years ago by the Whole Mohawk 

Indians assembled in publick (sic) meeting, who requested I would accept of the same as a 

testimony of their Esteem for me and their desire to make me some return for my friendship to 

them whilst they had any Lands left to dispose of.” Johnson argued that the Mohawk wished to 

gift him the lands for free, but that because he understood Haudenosaunee custom, he realized 

the importance of reciprocation. He therefore “gave them the sum of 1200 Dollars or £480 

Currency in Specie together with a handsome present for their familys (sic), after which I took 

53 Johnson to Banyar, 7 April 1763, Johnson Papers, IV: 80. 

 

 

47 

 

the necessary Steps towds. obtaining a patent for the same.” Johnson’s letter also explained the 

resistance he received from the government, stating, he “must admit certain persons as sharers 

with me therin, on which the affair should be settled immediately.” However, because “His 

Majestys (sic) Instructions to the Governor arrived, forbidding any further grants to be made 

without the Kings Special License and approbation,” Johnson depended on the help of his 

political friends in London.54  

Being an astute politician, Johnson also realized the advantage of proceeding through 

state avenues to obtain his deeds. Simultaneously, he relied on his political connections to openly 

oppose other speculators like Klock in the courts. To do so, he enjoyed support from attorney 

general Kempe, who routinely informed Johnson of the status of various cases, such as Klock 

versus the Canajoharie. In fact, Kempe asked Johnson to appear at the trial to support the 

Mohawk witnesses in delivering their testimonies. Joseph Brant’s mentor proved to be the 

shrewdest speculator in western New York, and these experiences instilled in young Brant an 

understanding of the British legal system, especially in landed matters. In fact, Brant would later 

use this understanding to circumvent traditional Iroquoian cultural authority in his own land 

speculation. By obtaining lands through means recognized as legal by the British, Brant would 

be able to ensure his Mohawk community kept hold of a land base when other Indigenous groups 

were losing their lands and thus their diplomatic leverage at the turn of the nineteenth century.55 

The escalating tensions between Johnson and Klock evinced those between the 

Canajoharie Mohawk and other land speculators at the time. After returning to Canajoharie 

Joseph Brant quickly joined in the fray. In a letter to Johnson penned in November of 1763, the 

surveyor John Duncan complained that “my affair became very tedious, as my friend Klock did 

 

54 Johnson to Pownall, 18 April 1763, Johnson Papers, IV: 88-91. 
55 Kempe to Johnson, 2 May 1763, Johnson Papers, IV: 107-09. 

 

48 

 

not come till near sun-set that evening, nor did he send the compass, which prevented my fixing 

the line that night.” Sent to survey for Klock, Duncan was delayed first by a lack of consent from 

Nickus, and again when “Joseph Brant & some other young ones ran & prevented these 

proceedings, & I expected nothing but chain & compass both would have gone to wreck.” The 

Mohawk refused to allow an accurate survey until they received the money Klock promised 

them. Joseph, in a show of ambition and early influence, began intimidating surveyors and other 

instruments of settler encroachment to protect Mohawk lands and establish himself as the one for 

Europeans to deal with in these landed matters. In doing so, he began to circumvent the 

traditional authority of Iroquoian women, though he most likely acted with his sister’s blessing.56 

These tensions intensified when Pontiac’s War broke out, throwing everything into 

disarray. The escalation of Indian threats in the West afforded both Johnson and the Brants the 

opportunity to enhance their own influence and authority. In a letter to Johnson concerning 

Indian hostilities, General Amherst was confident that Johnson’s presence at a conference with 

the Six Nations “will be of the Utmost Consequence; and I Send Orders to Colonel Bradstreet to 

Furnish you with such a Quantity of Provisions as you may think Necessary, upon this 

Occasion.” Johnson was the key diplomatic link with the Haudenosaunee who supplied him with 

the support of a British colonial system that otherwise saw Indians as merely an obstacle to 

imperial designs. Amherst included to Johnson a veiled threat, stating that should the 

Haudenosaunee join in the bloodshed against the British, they “would Bring about the Total 

Extirpation of those Indian Nations.” In essence, Amherst described the Haudenosaunee as 

Johnson’s dependents and thus his responsibility. The Mohawk and Johnson were poised to 

either rise or fall depending on the outcome of Pontiac’s War. So long as the Haudenosaunee 

56 Johnson, William Johnson Papers, Vol 4, 233-34. 

 

 

49 

 

remained loyal to the British and continued to serve as a positive influence over and a check 

against other Indigenous groups, they stood to benefit. However, if they exhibited any signs of 

hostility or obstinacy, Amherst felt justified in their complete destruction.57  

 

Figure 2.3: German Flats Conference Site58 

Meanwhile, Johnson and the Mohawk saw Pontiac’s War as an opportunity to double 

down on their disputes with Klock and the other land speculators at Canajoharie. When the 

Seneca declared themselves Pontiac’s allies, Amherst implored the Mohawk to assert their 

influence over their Haudenosaunee brethren. Johnson intervened by holding a conference at 

 

57 Amherst to Johnson, 9 July 1763, Johnson Papers, IV: 166-68. 
58 Map of Mohawk Valley from Francis Whiting Halsey, The Old New York Frontier: Its Wars with 

Indians and Tories, Its Missionary Schools, Pioneers, and Land Titles, 1614-1800 (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 
1901), 1.  

 

50 

 

German Flats, along the Mohawk River, halfway between Canajoharie and Fort Stanwix. See 

Figure 2.3. In a letter to Cadwallader Colden, New York’s Governor, Johnson assured him, “that 

the Indians of the five Nations who attended the Conference Expressed their resolutions in the 

warmest terms for continuing peaceable and well disposed towards us.” Johnson also insisted 

that “they then assured me of their intentions to bring the Senecas to reason, or otherwise to 

Quarrell with them.”59 

Johnson then warned Colden that the Mohawk threatened to end their alliance with the 

British should they not receive restitution from their land disputes with Klock and the other 

Albany speculators. Johnson relayed the threat that, “the Senecas held one end of the chain of 

Friendship and the Mohocks the other, that one end was already gone & that the other must 

follow unless the English did the Mohocks justice concerning their lands, but particularly the 

disputed tract at Conajoharee which they insisted on having restored to the Indians.” Johnson 

chastised Colden, telling him that, “You have certainly heard that nothing was done in the late 

Trial at Common law. A patent being in that Court a Sufficient title however fraudulently 

obtained.” The Mohawk were enraged at this, and at “the insinuations of Klock (who had acted 

with such artifice that he was not convicted of making them drunk).”  They were “now divided 

into parties” and would either continue to serve as Britain’s strongest Indigenous allies, or else 

prove a “great Terror and risque (sic) of all the White Inhabitants.” For Johnson, Pontiac’s War 

provided the perfect opportunity for him to secure justice for the Mohawk, thereby increasing his 

own influence and status with both the Haudenosaunee and the British administration. For 

Johnson, since the Common Law failed to secure justice for the Mohawk, the best alternative to 

59 Johnson to Colden, 25 July 1763, Johnson Papers, IV: 175-78. 

 

 

51 

 

ensure “the Safety of his Majestys Subjects…requires his [Klock’s] Coming under the 

cognizance of the Military as an Enemy and disturber of his Majestys Service.”60  

Meanwhile, Johnson’s own ongoing land speculation provided Joseph Brant with a clear 

understanding of European land values while his sister’s affairs at Johnson Hall provided him a 

greater appreciation of the genteel lifestyle that he later adopted. Johnson’s household contained 

both indentured servants and black slaves, all of whom answered to Molly. Johnson Hall, much 

like the Brant household in Molly’s youth, constantly entertained a large number of diverse 

guests. Molly hosted “governors, judges, English nobility and their attendants, and sometimes 

families.” Judging from the large number of thank-you notes and gifts, Molly clearly excelled as 

a hostess. Joseph did not live at Johnson Hall but continued to profit from Johnson’s patronage. 

Johnson’s report to the Lords of Trade in 1763 described Molly and Joseph as deserving of 

special treatment because through their “connection and residence, they would prove of much 

use.”61 

Under Johnson’s tutelage, Joseph and Molly acquired an astute understanding of western 

conceptions of land use and property value, which they creatively adapted into a weapon to stave 

off settler encroachments. While Molly managed Johnson Hall in her husband’s absence, Joseph 

repeatedly defended Mohawk lands from land speculators, both in courts and through direct 

action. In January of 1765, Johnson recorded an incident in his “Journal of Indian Affairs” in 

which Joseph Brant and another Canajoharie Mohawk named Hance “came to Sir Wm. and 

complained that [the British land speculator] Cobus Maybee…called some Indians to their house, 

gave them as much Rum as made them beastly drunk, and then threw three of the drunkenest 

 

60 Johnson to Colden, 25 July 1763, Johnson Papers, IV: 175-78. 
61 “Governors, judges…” in Feister & Pulis, “Molly Brant,” 301; “connection and residence…” in Johnson, 

“Report to Lords of Trade,” John Romeyn Brodhead, Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of 
New York, edited by F.B .O’Callaghan (Albany: Weed, Parsons, 1853), 580. 

 

52 

 

(sic) of them into a Sled…and carried them to Jelles Funda’s house in order to bring them to 

Albany to sign a Deed for the Land they live on.” Brant caught up with Maybee, confronted him 

(most likely threatening violence), and then sent the drunk Indians home. Johnson reported “all 

the Canjahores were greatly incensed, and are determined to drive him [Maybee] off their land 

by force, as the Governor had done nothing in it.” With Johnson’s support, Brant continued to 

seek legal restitution from these land speculators while also utilizing his traditional status as a 

Mohawk warrior to intimidate them.62 

Nearly a year after confronting Maybee, Joseph Brant attended a diplomatic council at 

Johnson Hall on Christmas Eve of 1765, to discuss their land grievances and to request a 

blacksmith and farming tools for Canajoharie. The delegation included such noted Mohawk as 

Tekarihoga, the head sachem of the Mohawk, as well as King Hendrick’s son, Brant’s stepfather 

Nickus, and several other sachems. Undoubtedly, it was Johnson’s patronage, as well as Brant’s 

understanding of white dealings and culture that earned him a seat at this distinguished table, 

though his stepfather also probably figured prominently into the equation. The following July, 

Joseph accompanied Johnson when his entire diplomatic entourage finally negotiated a 

successful peace with Pontiac at Fort Ontario. When the council concluded, Brant remained at 

Fort Ontario to serve as an official interpreter for the Indian department. Several British officials 

had identified this as of the utmost importance during Pontiac’s War. Brant’s selection meant 

that he had Johnson’s complete confidence.63 

A year later, in 1767, when Brant returned to Canajoharie, he continued to record 

disputes with encroaching settlers and land speculators. Increasingly, Brant stepped into the role 

 

62 Johnson, “Journal of Indian Affairs,” 31 January 1765, Johnson Papers, XI: 553-56. 
63 For a descriptive account of the peace negotiations between Johnson and Pontiac, see Gregory Evans 
Dowd, War Under Heaven: Pontiac, The Indian Nations & The British Empire (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins 
University Press, 2002), 250-54;  Kelsay, Joseph Brant, 111-113. 

 

53 

 

as an intermediary, representing the Mohawk, and he routinely employed his connections with 

Johnson and the Indian department to thwart the advances of settler encroachment and their drive 

to legally secure Mohawk lands. This came two years after Brant married his first wife and 

secured for himself sufficient land to establish a European style farm, on lands reserved 

specifically for Brant’s nuclear family, which he tilled using plough agriculture. In this venture, 

Brant broke from his Iroquoian culture and illustrated his growing understanding of Western 

values of land usage and private property that would direct his actions long into the future. In 

1769, in A Tour of Four Great Rivers: The Hudson, Mohawk, Susquehanna, and Delaware, 

travel author Richard Smith recounted meeting Joseph Brant while in the vicinity of Canajoharie. 

Smith described Joseph as “a considerable Farmer possessing Horses and Cattle and 100 acres of 

rich Land at Canejoharie.” Smith also recalled that Joseph told him “the Mohawks have lately 

followed Husbandry more than formerly, and that some Hemloc Swamps when cleared will 

produce good Timothy Grass.” Clearly, Joseph’s land ventures and those of his Canajoharie 

community were becoming increasingly invested in European style farming as opposed to the 

traditional longhouse structure. Like his older sister, Joseph Brant also became an increasingly 

public figure. He hosted a number of visitors in his more modest house, including many 

“missionaries and schoolmasters sent out by his old preceptor, the Reverend Eleazar Wheelock.” 

Although Brant emulated William Johnson’s behavior, he continually advocated for his Mohawk 

community.64 

While both Brant siblings rose in the ranks of Haudenosaunee society following Pontiac’s 

War, their mentor, William Johnson, was entrusted with pacifying Indian-settler violence on the 

 

64 Richard Smith, A Tour of Four Great Rivers: The Hudson, Mohawk, Susquehanna, and Delaware in 

1769, edited by Francis W. Hasley (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1906), 200; After the Revolution, Joseph 
Brant, then a captain in the British military, reported that he lost 80 acres of land to the Americans, which he owned 
“in fee simple, just as any white man owned land,” Kelsay, Joseph Brant, 115-17, 670n. 

 

54 

 

frontier. To carry this out, Johnson established a clearly delineated boundary that allowed for 

limited westward expansion for settlers and land speculators, while simultaneously protecting the 

lands and hunting grounds of the Ohio River valley. The lands west of the Appalachia had 

experienced an increasing number of intercultural murders, thefts, and sexual violence, despite 

the illegality of settlement west of the Proclamation Line of 1763. While Johnson attempted to 

hold white criminals accountable for their crimes against Indigenous peoples, he openly 

admitted, “from the present disposition of our People we can expect little Justice for the 

Indians.” Instead, Johnson came to believe that this violence could be stemmed only by the 

separation of Indigenous communities and settler colonists. Johnson envisioned himself and the 

Brants as cultural mediators, who would insure amicable relations with Indigenous nations.65  

Johnson officially met with over thirty-one hundred Indigenous delegates at Fort Stanwix 

on October 24, 1768. The vast majority of the Indigenous people in attendance were 

Haudenosaunee. Of the twenty-six named Indian chiefs present, Aroghiadecka (Nickus Brant) 

figured prominently, and though Joseph’s name does not appear in the records of the 

proceedings, it is likely he was among them as well. While during the day, councils met in 

ceremonious diplomacy, in the evenings Johnson conducted the bulk of the actual negotiations 

through private meetings with the most influential chiefs, a practice that became commonplace in 

the half century of treaty negotiations that followed both under British and later U.S. tenure. 

Johnson’s private negotiations allowed him to secure sizeable grants of personal land cessions, 

while also appearing to act in the best interest of the Haudenosaunee.66  

 

65 Johnson quoted in White, Middle Ground, 346. 
66 “Proceedings of Sir William Johnson with the Indians at Fort Stanwix to settle a Boundary Line,” 24 

October 1768, Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York, 112-13. 

 

55 

 

  

Figure 2.4: Boundary Line from Treaty of Fort Stanwix, 176867 

After a week and a half of negotiations, Johnson and the Haudenosaunee agreed upon a 

line that began just to the west of Fort Stanwix and ran south down the Unadilla River and 

continued straight south to the western-most bend of the Delaware River. From there the 

boundary broke northwest to the Ohio River, which it proceeded to follow southwest to its 

confluence with the Kanawha River to its headwaters (located in present-day West Virginia), 

then south to Spanish East Florida. See Figure 2.4. Under the terms of this treaty, the 

Haudenosaunee effectively ceded little in the way of their homelands. However, the cessions 

widened as the line went south, surrendering vast territories outside of Haudenosaunee control. 

The lands surrendered were important hunting grounds for all of the Ohio Indians, but especially 

the Shawnee, who were conspicuously absent from these cessions. This treaty opened up for the 

British territory that would eventually become parts of western Pennsylvania, Maryland, 

 

67 “Map of the frontiers of the Northern Colonies: With the Boundary Line Established Between and the 
Indians at the Treaty Held by S. Will Johnson at Ft. Stanwix in Novr. 1768,” by Guy Johnson, Pennsylvania State 
University, Special Collections. 

 

56 

 

Virginia, and northeast Tennessee, and the future states of Kentucky (1792) and West Virginia 

(1863).68 

 

Johnson went on to secure for himself large parcels of land west of the Fort Stanwix line. One 

of his land deeds for 80,000 acres was granted to him in May of 1769. The original grant, dated 

December 27th, 1760, bore the signatures of “Brant alias Araghijvadeeka and divers others 

Native Indians calling themselves Sole and absolute proprietors of Conajohare.” This deed listed 

over twenty-five recipients in addition to Johnson, most likely all his business partners who had a 

hand in making such an enormous transaction possible. Once the Fort Stanwix agreement 

became legally binding, so too was Johnson’s deed. Thanks to the Treaty of Fort Stanwix, 

Johnson secured a near monopoly on speculation in Iroquoia, and he did so with the blessing of 

the Haudenosaunee.69 

While Johnson spent the early part of the 1770s dividing his attention between preventing 

Haudenosaunee involvement in the frontier violence that engulfed the Ohio Valley and his own 

land speculation, Joseph Brant remained focused on the protection of his Mohawk community. 

He tended to his farm and continued to work as an interpreter for Johnson and the Indian 

Department, but in 1771, he also began work with the Anglican Reverend, John Stuart on 

translating the “Indian Prayer Book” into the Mohawk language. This represented yet another 

aspect of Brant’s adaptation as he used both his Western education and his Christianity to help 

sew the seeds of Mohawk survivance in the future. Brant illustrated an early understanding of the 

importance of print culture and narrative construction. As Chapter Five argues, this is something 

 

68 Taylor, Divided Ground, 40-45; White, Middle Ground, 351-53; Rob Harper, Unsettling the West: 

Violence and State Building in the Ohio Valley (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), 31-32; Susan 
Sleeper-Smith, Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest: Indian Women of the Ohio River Valley, 690-1792 
(Williamsburg, Virginia and Chapel Hill, North Carolina: The Omohundro Institute of Early American History and 
Culture and the University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 211-12. 

69 Johnson, William Johnson Papers, Vol 6, 772-73. 

 

57 

 

that he would make great use of in the last decades of his life. Meanwhile, as tensions between 

settlers and Indians continued to escalate, hatred of the Iroquois divided other Native 

communities. Most were incensed by the cession of their lands at the Treaty of Fort Stanwix 

wherein Johnson negotiated primarily with the Haudenosaunee for the cession of lands in the 

Ohio valley, most of which were not theirs to cede. A decade later the memory of these cessions 

would haunt the Shawnee as Brant attempted to organize a pan-Indian confederacy to negotiate 

with the nascent United States.70  

In May of 1774, the on-going battle between the Canajoharie community and George 

Klock reached a breaking point. Brant took matters into his own hands when he led a group of 

warriors to Klock’s house to oppose the speculator’s dubious claim to lands overlapping his own. 

Brant reportedly bludgeoned Klock in the head with the butt of his pistol and threatened to 

“Destroy all what I [Klock] have and all and everything my Children has and Children’s 

Children after them so long as there was one to be found.” Brant and the Canajoharie had spent a 

frustrating decade fighting Klock in the courts, but to no avail. So Brant violently coerced Klock 

into signing a document releasing his claim. Almost immediately afterward, Klock renewed his 

claims and prosecuted Brant for assault. The following two years were rife with formal 

complaints from both Brant and Johnson to Governor Tyron about Klock’s illicit 

encroachments.71  

Brant began to glimpse the ongoing challenge that Indigenous communities would face in 

attempts to defend their land base and he angrily threatened the governor with retaliation should 

the intrusions continue. He warned, “we are sensible that we are at present but a small number, 

but nevertheless our connections are powerful, and our alliances many, & should any of these 

 

70 Strachan, “Captain Brant,” 153; Harper, Unsettling the West, 31-33. 
71 Taylor, Divided Ground, 69; Kelsay, Joseph Brant, 140-45. 

 

58 

 

perceive that we who have been so remarkable for our fidelity and attachment to you, are ill used 

and defrauded, it may alarm them, and be productive of dangerous consequences.” Throughout 

his dealings with land speculators like Klock, Brant relied on both his connections to British 

officials and his influence with the Mohawk. Understanding British administrators’ belief that 

the British Empire’s Indigenous alliances were held in delicate balance by the cooperation of the 

Mohawk, Brant threatened the security of those alliances. Brant increasingly came to confront 

the logic and dangers posed by settler colonialism, which sought to displace Indigenous 

inhabitants and reassign their homelands to incoming settler colonists. Throughout these legal 

proceedings, Brant illustrated his understanding of the importance of legal title to lands. 

Adapting to British legal tradition, Brant frequently used petitions and his connections to British 

colonial authorities to fight for a place for his people throughout his life.72 

Molly’s husband Johnson died on the eve of the Revolutionary War, which left an 

unbridgeable diplomatic gulf between the British Empire and its Indigenous allies. Though 

Johnson had groomed his eldest son John Johnson (from his first union to Catherine Weisenberg) 

to replace him as Superintendent of Indian Affairs for the northern colonies, his son commanded 

neither the respect nor influence of his father. Consequently, before his death, William Johnson 

nominated his son-in-law Guy Johnson as his official successor. With Guy Johnson’s 

appointment, Molly Brant returned to Canajoharie and remained an influential figure in the 

region. Neither Johnson’s son or son-in-law could harness the support of the Mohawk without 

Molly, something they both frequently complained of. Following the death of his second wife, 

Joseph began serving as a crucial aid and interpreter for Guy Johnson. Joseph Brant’s earliest 

biographer, James Strachan, wrote in 1819 that following Johnson’s death, “the great natural 

72 “We are sensible…” from Council, July 28, 1772, New York Colonial Documents, 7:728, quoted in 

Kelsay, Joseph Brant, 123.  

 

 

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address and understanding of Mary, Capt. Brant’s sister, with the knowledge of business which 

she had acquired during Sir William’s life, placed her and her brother in a prominent situation.” 

The influence of the Brants, in the wake of Johnson’s death, continued to serve as the crucial 

diplomatic link between the British and their traditional Indian allies.73 

When the Revolutionary War broke out, it took on a completely different character in the 

West than it did in the thirteen colonies. Initially, there was a surprising lack of violence in the 

Ohio Valley. As imperial governments increasingly lost control over their colonists, land-hungry 

settlers no longer received support from their governments, and instead both Indians and 

colonists were forced to creatively build new relations with one another. While colonists 

organized a continental congress to discuss the logistics of rebelling against the British Empire, 

the Brants concerned themselves with capitalizing on the imperial crisis to secure the best 

possible outcome for the Haudenosaunee. Once war was officially declared, Joseph, along with 

Johnson’s legitimate successors, Guy Johnson and Daniel Claus, attempted to rid the Mohawk 

Valley of the illicit settler colonials who had flooded in since the Treaty of Fort Stanwix. Sir Guy 

Carleton, the military governor of British Canada opposed their efforts. Carleton had long 

competed with Johnson for command over Indian affairs in the northern colonies, so Johnson’s 

death provided him an opportunity for a power play. Carleton promptly replaced both Guy 

Johnson and Daniel Claus. In an attempt to circumvent Carleton’s wartime authority, Johnson 

and Claus voyaged to London to plead with the Boards of Trade. To bolster their position, 

Joseph Brant and fellow Mohawk, John Hill or Oteronyente accompanied them. However, for 

 

73 Joseph was married to his first wife, an Oneida woman named Neggen Aoghyatonghsera in 1765. They 

had two children, Isaac and Christina, who ended up marrying his good friend Henry Aaron Hill. Neegen died of 
consumption in 1771, and according to Haudenosaunee tradition, Brant took her sister Susanna as his second wife. 
She died very shortly after, and they had no children. See “Joseph Brant,” entry in Dictionary of Canadian 
Biography, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/thayendanegea_5E.html; Strachan, “Captain Brant,” 155. 

 

60 

 

Brant and Hill this trip provided yet another opportunity to secure imperial protection for 

Mohawk lands.74 

To British audiences in London, Johnson and Claus argued that they were William 

Johnson’s natural heirs, and that they alone could rally the Haudenosaunee behind the British 

cause during this war. Meanwhile, Brant used the occasion to assert the rights of the Mohawk as 

Britain’s most crucial colonial allies. In his speech to Lord George Germain, the recently 

appointed imperial secretary of state, Brant contended that the Mohawk always faithfully 

supported the British Empire and the King. Brant complained that, “they have been very badly 

treated by his people in that country, the City of Albany laying an unjust claim to the lands on 

which our Lower Castle is built, as one Klock and others do to those of Conijoharrie, our Upper 

Village.” Brant maintained the Mohawk were willing to share their lands with the British settlers, 

as the Treaty of Fort Stanwix surely proved, but that these newcomers continued, “to cheat us in 

this manner of the small spots we have left for our women and children to live on. We are tired 

out in making complaints & getting no redress.” Brant won the support of Germain and other 

imperial lords. They favored an aggressive approach to the North American war, which 

depended on Britain’s Indigenous allies, and the lords opposed Carleton’s strategy of curtailing 

the use of Indian warriors, which would minimize the threat to British settler populations in the 

West.75 

Brant’s visit achieved a measure of celebrity among London’s high society. He secured 

an audience with the King, and he was invited to the houses and parties of several British 

aristocrats. He returned with numerous gifts, including “silk shirts, an engraved rifle and pistol, 

 

74 Harper, Unsettling the West, 68; Taylor, Divided Ground, 86-88. 
75 Brant Speech, 14 March 1776, in O’Callaghan, ed., Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the 

State of New York: VIII, 670-71; Taylor, Divided Ground, 87-88. 

 

61 

 

and a silver watch,” all of which served as visible markers of Brant’s growing status as an 

important Indigenous diplomat in the Great Lakes region. Brant also secured a lifetime advocate 

in Lord Germain. When they returned to North America in July of 1776, Brant, and his 

associates began reasserting themselves as prominent public figures in the region.76 

Brant solidified his large following among the eastern villages of the Six Nations and 

British Loyalists alike but lacked comparable influence among the western bands of the 

Haudenosaunee. The western chiefs, especially the Seneca, remained much more traditional in 

their beliefs and actions, believing that matters such as warfare needed to be determined by a 

council of chiefs appointed by the several different clan matrons. While Joseph did have the 

support of his sister Molly and mother Margaret, both clan matrons, many viewed him for what 

he was, a non-traditional leader who lacked the cultural pedigree of actual sachems. Brant was 

aggressive, and he was an assimilationist who supported adaptation and cultural hybridity. 

Sayenqueraghta, one of the principal sachems of the Seneca, particularly took offense to Brant’s 

ambition, and refused to heed the words and leadership of this Mohawk upstart. 

Despite his lack of support from several Haudenosaunee leaders, Brant was highly 

successful in creating an irregular force that came to be known as “Brant’s Volunteers.” This 

force included Mohawk and Loyalist settlers who scorned the strict formality of the British 

militia, and fought a highly individualistic style of frontier warfare. They fought in their own 

backyards, and at stake was the land on which they built their homes. In the summer of 1777, 

Brant received approval to lead his volunteers against settlers in the Mohawk Valley. Their target 

was General Philip Schuyler’s newly constructed rebel fort on the site of the old Fort Stanwix.  

Here, Schuyler attempted to convince several Six Nations’ chiefs to support the Revolutionary 

76 Quote from Taylor, Divided Ground, 89. 

 

 

62 

 

cause. Schuyler promised that in return, the United States would honor the Fort Stanwix 

boundary line and protect Haudenosaunee lands when the war ended. This resulted in a split 

within the Six Nations confederacy. Brant’s forces included Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, and 

Mohawk warriors, while several Oneida and Tuscarora sided with the rebels.77 

In August of 1777, Brigadier General Barry St. Leger laid siege to Fort Schuyler. His 

forces included about 700 British soldiers and Loyalists as well as an even larger contingent of 

800 Haudenosaunee warriors. The colonists dispatched General Nicholas Herkimer and 700 

soldiers and militia to relieve the siege. After learning the news, Molly Brant sent a secret 

dispatch to her brother warning of the American advance. Joseph Brant and John Butler led a 

combined force of 400 Indians and Butler’s Rangers that ambushed Herkimer just southeast of 

the fort, near the Oneida village of Oriskany. The casualties included 450 colonial rebels and 

Oneida, killed or wounded, while the British and their Iroquois allies suffered just 100. This 

grueling civil war among the Haudenosaunee would last throughout the Revolution and laid 

waste to much of Iroquoia.78 

Following the Battle of Oriskany, warriors on both sides continually raided and sacked 

each other’s villages throughout the region in a constant cycle of violent retribution. Many 

Haudenosaunee fled north into Canada for refuge, and Molly harbored numerous loyalist 

refugees until the Patriots pillaged her estate and threatened her life. At a Haudenosaunee 

Council meeting in 1777, when Seneca sachem Sayenqueraghta openly regretted allying with the 

British and expressed a willingness to consider neutrality, Molly publicly scolded him, invoking 

the memory of William Johnson, and then reminded him of his promises to uphold the Covenant 

 

77 Taylor, Divided Ground, 89-92. 
78 “Battle of Oriskany,” RevolutionaryWar.US, https://revolutionarywar.us/year-1777/battle-of-oriskany/ 

(accessed 13 June 2019); Taylor, Divided Ground, 91-92. 

 

63 

 

Chain. In the face of Molly’s cultural authority, Sayenqueraghta, backed down in embarrassment 

and continued to fight alongside the British. Such displays of influence and social power were 

not lost on British administrators, whose policy relied directly on Molly’s full support.79  

Throughout the Revolutionary War, Molly’s influence almost single-handedly kept the 

better part of the Six Nations confederacy allied with the British. One British observer, Captain 

Malcom Fraser remarked that because of Molly, “the Chiefs were careful to keep their people 

sober and satisfied…their uncommon good behavior is in a great Measure to be ascribed to Miss 

Molly Brants (sic) Influence over them, which is far superior to that of all their Chiefs put 

together…as she checkd (sic) the demands of others both for presents & provisions.” The year 

before, Daniel Claus shared a similar sentiment stating, “one word from her is more taken Notice 

of by the five Nations than a thousand from any white Man without Exception.” At this time, 

Molly’s mother Margaret was still living, but she was elderly and appeared little in public, 

further boosting Molly’s own authority as clan matron.80 

Because of their allegiance to the British, the Brants and the Haudenosaunee found 

themselves painted by Americans as bloodthirsty and cruel savages. In the aftermath of 

Oriskany, George Washington relied on this trope to justify total war against the Haudenosaunee. 

Washington’s relentless targeting of Iroquois villages and crops led the Haudenosaunee to label 

him “The Town Destroyer.” In the 1779 Campaign into Iroquois country, Washington ordered 

Sullivan’s forces “to carry the war into the Heart of the Country of the six nations; to cut off their 

settlements, destroy their next Year’s crops, and do them every other mischief of which time and 

circumstances will permit…it will be essential…to ruin their crops now in the ground and 

 

79 Green, Molly Brant, Catherine Brant, 240. 
80 Brooks, Common Pot, 120; Fraser and Claus quoted in Lois M. Feister and Bonnie Pulis, “Molly Brant: 
Her Domestic and Political Roles in Eighteenth-Century New York,” Northeastern Indian Lives, 1632-1816, edited 
by Robert S. Grumen (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), 309, 313. 

 

64 

 

prevent them planting more.” The militias, largely drawn from Kentucky and the Virginia 

backcountry, were comprised of settlers who willingly engaged in bloody tactics, enflamed by 

exaggerated tales of Brant’s savagery, and emboldened by a desire to possess the rich lands that 

the Haudenosaunee called home.81 

Throughout the war, the Brants and the Haudenosaunee came to realize the best and 

perhaps only pathway for preserving their homelands was with British victory. When Sir 

Frederick Haldimand replaced Carleton as commander and governor of Canada in 1777, he 

bolstered the British alliance with the Six Nations. In 1779, Haldimand commissioned Joseph 

Brant a captain in the royal army, and provided increased support and supplies for Brant’s 

volunteers. Haldimand also publicly announced British support for Molly. He declared, 

“whatever may be done for her is Due to the Memory of Sir William Johnson, to Her Services, 

and will be a handsome Mark of attention to Joseph.”82 

That year, amidst constant warfare, Joseph Brant remarried for the second time, his first 

two wives having died in the early 1770s. His new wife, Catharine Croghan (Adonwentishon), 

was the daughter of highly respected Indian agent George Croghan. She was the head woman of 

the Mohawk’s turtle clan and the niece of Tekarihoga, one of the principal chiefs of the Mohawk. 

Like his sister, Joseph Brant strategically married to enhance his own authority and influence, 

but he did so according to Iroquoian cultural custom. This union increased the number of Brant’s 

traditionalist allies because Catharine was staunchly Mohawk. During the war, Brant secured a 

farm and a house along the Niagara River, which he evolved into a manor, similar to Johnson 

Hall. He staffed the farm and household with black slaves, whom he captured during various 

 

81 Quoted in Brooks, Common Pot, 117.  
82 Haldimand to Germain, September, 1779, quoted in Feister and Pulis, “Molly Brant,” 311. 

 

65 

 

raids along the Ohio frontier. As the war went on, Brant’s prestige and social authority increased, 

and he continued to model his lifestyle and behavior on his former patron William Johnson.83 

Haldimand understood that the outcome of the war rested in great part on the support of 

the Haudenosaunee. Haldimand’s correspondence is filled with requests that his officers 

accommodate both Molly and Joseph Brant. However, those officers balked at the resources and 

authority allocated to the Brants. Meanwhile, other Haudenosaunee leaders jealously coveted the 

influence and prestige bestowed upon the Brants by Haldimand. Many of the Six Nations leaders 

refused to acknowledge Joseph’s authority. Colonel Guy Johnson in particular complained that 

Molly Brant took full advantage of the British military. He argued, “Molly used to go to the 

Stores & take out everything she pleas'd & give to her particulars. She is certainly you know 

pretty large minded . . . I fear that any Expense or Attention will fall short of her Desires tho' I 

wish to gratify them & many other things are said that I cannot now Explain." Molly utilized the 

wealth and resources of the British to boost her own status, as she continued to disburse gifts 

throughout Iroquoia in much the same manner as when she was Johnson’s “country” wife.84 

The Haudenosaunee and British military pressured the American forces in the West 

through their vicious frontier raids until 1778, when Washington responded by engaging in total 

warfare as he attempted to capture and raze Iroquois homelands. Washington’s forces burnt 

villages, destroyed crops, and targeted women and children. Washington’s army also failed to 

discern between allies, enemies, and neutral Indigenous groups. As the Patriots drove the 

Iroquois from their homes, burned their villages and crops, and laid claim to the region, they 

took note of all they destroyed. General John Sullivan recalled the decimation of over 40 

Haudenosaunee villages and over 160,000 bushels of corn. Colonel Peter Gansevoort 

 

83 Taylor, Divided Ground, 95; Green, “Molly Brant, Catharine Brant,” 242-43. 
84 Johnson to Claus, November, 1779, in Feister and Pullis, “Molly Brant,” 312. 

 

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commented, “it is remarked that the Indians live much better than most of the Mohawk River 

farmers, their Houses very well furnished with all necessary Household utensils, great plenty of 

Grain, several Horses, cows and wagons.” In true settler colonial fashion, the Patriot officers 

viewed the region as terra nullius, land to be acquired through conquest, and resources to be 

exploited by an advance of settler society.85 

The War officially concluded with Cornwalis’ surrender at Yorktown, Virginia in 

October of 1781. At first, Brant refused to accept peace when his forces had not surrendered. He 

rightly worried that the British surrender would undermine their promises to the Haudenosaunee. 

Haldimand personally reassured the Six Nations, while he simultaneously suspected the British 

of betraying their Indigenous allies, and he was “are alarmed at the appearance of an 

accommodation so far short of what our Language, from the beginning has taught them to 

expect, deprived of their Lands & driven out of their Country, they reproached us with their 

ruin.”86 

Brant and Haldimand feared, the Treaty of Paris, signed on September 3rd, 1783, did not 

include the Haudenosaunee or any other Indigenous people in North America. Brant and his 

Indigenous allies had placed their faith in the British Empire to maintain its protective policies 

over Indigenous lands. While British administrators in Canada, such as Haldimand, argued for 

the importance of supporting their Haudenosaunee allies, officials in London ignored the 

requests and instead, considered the larger geopolitical picture. British negotiators agreed to a 

border that relinquished all of New York, the Ohio River Valley, and the Lower Great Lakes to 

 

85 Gansevoort quoted in Taylor, Divided Ground, 98. 
86 Haldimand to Carleton, 18 September 1782, in “Haldimand Papers”, Michigan Pioneer and Historical 

Society, Collections, XX (1892), 57-58. 

 

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the United States. The British essentially abandoned their Indigenous allies to the settler colonial 

state of their enemies. 

Just before the 1783 Treaty of Paris was signed, Brant ambitiously began to organize a 

pan-Indian confederacy that included thirty-five separate Indigenous nations. In a council held at 

Sandusky, Brant used his understanding of European land usage and private property to win the 

support of the Great Lakes and Ohio valley Indians. With the support of officials in the British 

Indian Department, he sought to win over the diverse and numerous villages in the Great Lakes 

and throughout the Ohio valley. Brant envisioned a confederacy that could resist settler colonial 

encroachment. He insisted that the British could not relinquish lands they did not control, and 

that all lands to the west of the Fort Stanwix line remained the property of their original 

Indigenous people. The British did not own these lands; therefore they could not be ceded in the 

Treaty of Paris.  

Haldimand agreed with Brant. He remarked that the Six Nations “have as enlightened 

Ideas of the nature & Obligations of Treaties as the most Civilized Nations have, and know that 

no infringement of the Treaty of 1768…can be binding upon them without their Express 

Concurrence & Consent.” If the Treaty of Fort Stanwix established a legal recognition of a 

permanent Indian country, Brant argued, how then could Britain simply hand that country over to 

another nation? At Sandusky, Brant asserted that the United States could not legally broker 

treaties with Indigenous groups without obtaining the consent of the confederacy’s entire 

membership. Brant argued that a Pan Indian confederacy was the most effective tool to resist 

settler colonialism. If the western Indian nations were united, then they would wield greater 

negotiating power in their diplomatic dealings with the young United States.87 

87 Haldimand to Lord North, 27 November 1783, quoted in Taylor, Divided Ground, 115. 

 

 

68 

 

The confederacy Brant envisioned was a political union based on the model of the Six 

Nations League of the Iroquois. If the Americans were forced to deal with a confederated union 

of Indigenous peoples, it would be impossible to force individual Indigenous nations to cede 

their lands. Brant pushed for a united confederacy in which, “We the Six Nations with this belt 

bind your Hearts and minds with ours, that there may be never hereafter a separation between us, 

let there be Peace or War, it shall never disunite us, for our Interests are alike, nor should 

anything ever be done but by the voice of the whole as we make but one with you.” Brant was 

convinced of the effectiveness of this strategy. After all, the extremely powerful William 

Johnson was forced to bend many a time to the will of the confederated Haudenosaunee, why 

shouldn’t the Americans be forced to face an equally strong united front of Indigenous 

peoples?88  

In the years immediately following the war, British officials were well aware of the 

diplomatic capabilities of the Brants. They feared that if the Brants were not properly appeased, 

the Americans could potentially win their allegiance. Since Haldimand and other British 

administrators still regarded the Mohawk as the key to influencing the Haudenosaunee and by 

extension the rest of the Great Lakes and Ohio Indians, they focused on the Brants as a top 

priority. Haldimand hoped to contain the Brants within the Canadian border to keep them 

insulated from the schemes of American diplomats. To appease the Brants, Haldimand ordered 

the construction of two houses, one for Joseph and another for Molly at Kingston on the 

northeast end of Lake Ontario, well away from the U.S. border. Haldimand simultaneously 

negotiated land cessions with the Mississauga in order to provide a new homeland for the 

displaced Mohawk refugees. Haldimand clearly acted out of fear that the Mohawk might 

88 Kelsay, Joseph Brant, 346-47;  

 

 

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“abandon us, and return to their former settlements, which the Americans already hold out to 

them in order to detach them from us.” Though the Americans had torched Iroquoia in the war, 

they continued to seek reconciliation with the Haudenosaunee, and especially with Brant. 

American officials, like the British, recognized the Brants’ diplomatic importance.89  

 

Figure 2.5: Upper Canada at the time of the War of 181290 

Despite British attempts to convince the Brants to remain at Kingston, Joseph chose 

instead the Grand River on the Niagara peninsula as the ideal location for his dislocated 

Mohawk. Haldimand immediately ordered Butler to secure the title to those lands from the 

Mississauga. This land grant to the Mohawk ran six miles on both sides of the Grand River, 

totaling 570,000 acres of land. See Figure 2.5. From its 1785 inception, Brant’s Grand River 

settlement attracted members of all the Six Nations, not just the Mohawk. Brant also welcomed 

89 MacLean to Haldimand, 9 May 1783, quoted in Taylor, Divided Ground, 120; Haldimand to Lord 

 

Sydney, 16 March 1785, in E. A. Cruikshank, ed., Records of Niagara, 1784-87 (Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario: 
Niagara Historical Society, 1854), 55. 

90 Jas. Wyld, A Map of Upper Canada describing all the settlements, townships, etc. with the countries 

adjacent from Quebec to Lake Huron, University of Toronto Libraries,  
https://maps.library.utoronto.ca/datapub/digital/G_3520_1835_W95.jpg (2) (accessed 4 March 2020). 

 

70 

 

members of non-Haudenosaunee groups, as well as white settlers who could teach the Indians 

western farming practices that would promote the security and perseverance of his people. Brant 

again replicated his previous substantial households, continuing to model his new home on 

Johnson Hall and Johnstown, the settlement that surrounded William Johnson’s homestead. By 

securing ownership over their lands, and farming according to European standards, Brant 

believed the Mohawk could thrive in a world that was becoming increasingly white.91 

While violence continued to rage in the Ohio valley from 1782 to 1786, U.S. 

administrators sought to utilize Joseph Brant’s political influence. New York governor George 

Clinton communicated to his agent Peter Ryckman, “To Captain Brandt you will hint that our 

People in general are pleased with his Generosity to the Prisoners he took during the War, and 

that he may become a great Man if he conducts himself in such a Manner as will give the 

Commissioners occasion to believe that he means to be a sincere Friend.” Simultaneously, 

Clinton understood Brant’s shrewdness, so Ryckman received additional instructions that, “If 

you find that any Jealousy of, or envy to Brant privails (sic), you will try to discover who are 

most jealous or envious of him, and promote it as much as you prudently can.” In September of 

1784, Brant led the Haudenosaunee delegation at Fort Stanwix, they were to negotiate first with 

Clinton and the New York State delegates, and then with commissioners from the American 

Confederacy. Brant told the New York commissioners that, “we are sent in order to make peace, 

and that we are not authorized, to stipulate any particular cession of Lands.”92  

 

91 “Haldimand’s Proclamation of October 25, 1784,” Valley of the Six Nations, 50-51; Mathews to Stuart, 

30 October 1784, Valley of the Six Nations, 51; Haldimand to De Peyster, November 1784, The Valley of the Six 
Nations: A Collection of Documents on the Indian Lands of the Grand River, edited by Charles M. Johnson 
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1964), 51-52; Haldimand, “Means Suggested as the Most Probable to Retain 
the Six Nations and Western Indians in the King’s Interest,” 1784, Valley of the Six Nations, 52-53. 

92 “we are sent to make peace…” quoted in Kelsay, Joseph Brant, 359; “To Captain Brandt…” quoted in 

Taylor, Divided Ground, 153. 

 

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Brant and the Haudenosaunee waited for the arrival of the American delegates, but after 

several weeks with no sign of their arrival, Brant was called away to England. He planned to 

secure redress for the loss of Haudenosaunee lands during the Revolutionary War. In his 

absence, when the American commissioners finally arrived, they pressured the remaining 

Haudenosaunee representatives to agree to the cession of all Haudenosaunee territory in the Ohio 

valley, something they were in no way authorized to do. To pressure the Iroquois, the American 

commissioners held the chief Haudenosaunee delegates, including Brant’s good friend, Captain 

Aaron Hill hostage until “all the prisoners, white and black, which were taken… in the late war, 

from among the people of the United States, …[to] be delivered up.” The Americans clearly 

favored an approach of intimidation to the British tactic of mutual respect.93 

This episode deeply enraged Brant, who argued that the Indians who signed the treaty 

were not authorized to do so. Any hope that American diplomats had about winning over the 

Haudenosaunee began to rapidly fade. While in London, Brant secured generous pensions for 

himself and his sister, as well as financial compensation for the Mohawk to the sum of £15,000 

for the tribe, and £1,112 for Joseph and £1,206 for Molly. However, despite his strenuous efforts, 

Brant failed to secure British political backing for the confederacy, the prize he truly sought. 

After returning to Canada, Brant freely voiced his discontent. Without a political advocate like 

William Johnson or Frederick Haldimand in the British colonial administration, Brant resorted to 

threatening the British to gain their support. While this secured continuing compensation for 

himself and his people, it fostered a measure of animosity and distrust among British officials. 

Most feared that Brant would lead his Mohawk into an alliance with the Americans.94 

93 “Treaty of Fort Stanwix,” 22 October 1784, Ohio History Central, 

http://www.ohiohistorycentral.org/w/Treaty_of_Fort_Stanwix_(1784)_(Transcript). 

 

94 Taylor, Divided Ground, 254-55. 

 

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In 1786, Brant’s United Indian Confederacy met again, this time at Brownstown, near 

Detroit. Under Brant’s guidance, the confederacy composed a message to the United States to air 

their grievances and warn the Americans of the combined might of their union. The council 

opened with a speech, perhaps given by Brant, in which he chided the Western Indians for not 

attending the Treaty of Fort Stanwix, the source of their present problems with the United States. 

The Ohio Indians were asked to look upon the eastern end of the continent and “consider the 

reason why it is not Still Inhabited by our own Colour.” The blame rested with the lack of a 

united Indigenous front. In Brant’s opinion, only unanimity of Indigenous interest could boldly 

stand against the pressures of settler colonialism. Brant sent this speech and a personal letter to 

Secretary of War, Henry Knox.95 

Very little remains of the actual proceedings at Brownstown, although many references 

exist in subsequent documents. When Sir John Johnson wrote to Brant in March of the following 

year, he referred to the Brownstown council, applauding Brant’s efforts, “I am happy to find 

things turned out as you wished at your several meetings in the Indian country near Detroit, and I 

hope it may have the effect you wish in preventing the Americans from incroaching (sic) on your 

lands.” Johnson went on to caution Brant that he hoped he and his followers would “conduct 

yourselves with prudence and moderation, having always an eye to the friendship that has so 

long subsisted between you and the King’s subjects, upon whom alone you can and ought to 

depend.” Johnson alluded to the fact that no matter what transpired with the United Indian 

Nations confederacy and its dealings with the United States, Brant and his Mohawk had a home 

 

95 Speech to the Council at Brownstown, December, 1786, quoted in Kelsay, Joseph Brant, 403; Sleeper-
Smith, Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest, 216-17; Harper, Unsettling the West, 160-63; though the 
original letter sent by Brant to Knox cannot be located, a transcription of Knox’s response to Brant, including a 
receipt of Brant’s original letter can be found in Stone, Joseph Brant, II: 267. 

 

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in Canada, and that he should be mindful of his diplomatic relations north of the international 

border as well.96 

Brant believed the confederacy needed to establish a universal standard for diplomacy 

between the United Indian Nations and the United States, with Indigenous peoples asserting their 

rights as a sovereign nation. Brant argued for a measure of transparency and standardization in 

treaty-making and overall diplomacy between Indians of the region and the United States. More 

importantly, Brant expressed a willingness to cede certain western lands in the Ohio River valley 

so long as the unceded lands would become the firm property of their Indigenous owners. Indian 

lands were to be equivalent with white land ownership. As a hedge against the American tactic 

of divide and conquer, the United Indian Nations insisted that the United States deal with the 

entire confederacy when discussing land cessions. Brant believed that, “a part of the country 

belongs to the Six Nations… [b]ut I am of the opinion that the country belongs to the 

confederated Indians in common.” To support the idea of a commonly held land base Brant 

invoked the traditional “dish with one spoon” analogy of the Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy. 

This “dish with one spoon” began “Upwards of one hundred years ago [when] a moon of 

wampum was placed in this country with four roads leading to the center for the convenience of 

the Indians from different quarters to come and settle or hunt here. A dish with one spoon was 

likewise put here with the moon of wampum.” For Brant the Ohio River valley lands were 

shared among all the people that the creator placed there. By invoking this reference, Brant 

attempted to link all the Indigenous nations in this region to his cause by providing the cultural 

underpinning for his confederation.97 

 

96 Johnson’s letter to Brant, 22 March 1787, is transcribed in Stone, Joseph Brant, II: 267-69. 
97 Brant quoted in Brooks, Common Pot, 124; “Speech of the United Indian Nations, at their Confederate 

Council, held near the mouth of the Detroit river, the 28th November and 18th December, 1786,” American State 

 

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Enraged by a rash of recent murders and raids by Kentucky settlers, and extremely 

frustrated with the lack of diplomatic respect that occurred at Fort Stanwix, the newly established 

confederacy scolded the Continental Congress. They sent a petition referencing the recent Treaty 

of Paris, in which “we, the Indians, were disappointed, finding ourselves not included in that 

peace…we thought that its conclusion would have promoted a friendship between the United 

States and Indians.” Their petition questioned the Americans’ peaceful intentions. The 

confederacy argued, if the United States truly sought peace, they would accept the outlined terms 

for future negotiations. First, they demanded that, “all treaties carried on with the United 

States…should be with the general voice of the whole confederacy, and carried on in the most 

open manner.” This was especially the case when treaties were to deal with land cessions. To 

that end, the confederacy added a second term, that “any cession of our lands should be made in 

the most public manner, and by the united voice of the confederacy; holding all partial treaties as 

void and of no effect.” This meant that all previous treaties negotiated under dubious 

circumstances and without the consent of the entire confederation would be nullified. Lastly, the 

confederacy called for a new treaty to establish legally binding terms for true peace in the region. 

In the meantime, the United States must “prevent your surveyors and other people from coming 

upon our side the Ohio river.” Clearly, the north shore of the Ohio River was to remain Indian 

Country.98  

If the U.S. was sincerely dedicated to peace, and willing to abide by these terms, then the 

confederacy would consider forgiving recent “accidents that have happened in our villages, even 

when in council, where several innocent chiefs were killed when absolutely engaged in 

 

Papers: Class II, Indian Affairs, Volume I, ed. Walter Lowrie and Matthew St. Clair Clarke (Washington: Gales and 
Seaton, 1832), 8-9. 

98 “Speech of the United Indian Nations,” American State Papers…Indian Affairs, I, 8-9. 

 

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promoting a peace with you, the thirteen United States.” The message closed with a warning, that 

the confederacy would, “with our united force, be obliged to defend those rights and privileges 

which have been transmitted to us by our ancestors.” With this petition, Brant’s influence in the 

Ohio River valley region reached its pinnacle. However, American settlers continued to 

encroach, and when Brant suggested moving the boundary with the United States to the 

Muskingum River to accommodate established American settlement, he alienated many of the 

Indigenous communities in that region. The confederacy realigned under Miami and Shawnee 

leadership, turning away from peaceful negotiations following the victory over Harmar’s forces 

in 1791 and toward a strategy of armed resistance.99 

In 1791, Washington’s commissioner to the Iroquois Indians, Timothy Pickering sought 

to enlist an Indigenous mediator to represent the United States to the confederacy. He initially 

reached out to Joseph Brant in hopes that the former leader of the confederacy was willing to 

capitalize on his diplomatic prestige. However, Brant flatly denied the Americans.  Meanwhile, 

Brant turned his attention back to his community in Upper Canada.  It was there that the 

Mohican emissary for the United States Hendrick Aupaumut first encountered the Brants. 

Aupaumut, a veteran of the war on the American side, offered his services to Timothy Pickering 

as a mediator to the confederacy of Indians in the Ohio valley. Pickering hoped that the western 

Indians would accept the peaceful terms of the United States if delivered by a fellow Indian. At 

Niagara, a crossroads on Aupaumut’s way to the Ohio Valley, Joseph Brant intimidated and 

inhibited Aupaumut and his company from proceeding further west, and continually warned 

other Indians “not to talk or walk with these Yankees.”100 

 

99 “Speech of the United Indian Nations,” American State Papers…Indian Affairs, I, 8-9. 
100Alan Taylor, “Captain Hendrick Aupaumut: The Dilemmas of an Intercultural Broker,” Ethnohistory, 

Vol 43, 3 (Summer, 1996), 446-47; Susan Sleeper-Smith,  Indigenous Prosperity and American, 308-09; Lisa 
Brooks, The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota 

 

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Meanwhile, Joseph’s sister Molly, still the most influential Indigenous person in the 

Great Lakes region, scorned Aupaumut for travelling through Indigenous lands without any 

women in his delegation. Molly chided him by stating, “Here is another thing looks much 

strange – if these Indians were upon good business, they would certainly follow the customs of 

all nations – they would have some women with them, but now they have none.” Aupaumut, 

representing the United States, had strayed from the Indigenous custom of travelling in the 

company of women to signal peaceful intentions. On the other hand, Molly illustrated the 

continuity of Indigenous culture by continuing to assert her own traditional female authority. The 

Brants remained firmly Iroquoian even while they adapted to the changing world around them. 

In Upper Canada, the Brants and the Haudenosaunee maintained culturally consistent as they 

continued to shape the geopolitical circumstances of the region. Though Molly died shortly after 

in 1796, her influence lasted through her children and the Grand River community in general.101 

In Canada, Joseph Brant continued to push the Mohawk to adopt Euro/American 

conceptions of land ownership and usage. He believed that legitimate acknowledgment of 

Indigenous land ownership, complete with legal title to their lands, would secure Indigenous 

communities a future in this changing world. Brant believed the key was to think as the 

newcomers did, to adapt to plow agriculture, and to strategically cede some lands in order to 

secure title and a control over the remainder. In Brant’s opinion, the adaptation of a certain 

amount of cultural tradition, changing from a female agrarian world to that of male agrarianism, 

 

Press, 2008), 108; Aupaumut, Report, July-October I79I; Timothy Pickering Papers, Vol. 59, Item 8, Massachusetts 
Historical Society; Hendrick Aupaumut, Narrative of an Embassy to the Western Indians, From the Original 
Manuscript of Hendrick Aupaumut, with Prefatory Remarks by Dr. B.H. Coates (Philadelphia: Memoirs of the 
Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1827), 112-13.   

101 Aupaumut, Narrative, 112-113; Pickering to Knox, 10 August 1791, Pickering Papers, Volume 60, Item 

114, MHS; Brooks, Common Pot, 120-21. 

 

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might ensure their ability to survive as a nation. This distinction proved crucial, as the 

Haudenosaunee became new neighbors to the Mississauga peoples of Upper Canada. 

Initially, the Mississauga Indians who ceded the lands that became Brant’s Grand River 

settlement ranged freely across the expanse of territory that later became Upper Canada. Their 

territory stretched from the St. Lawrence River in the East to Lake Huron in the West and 

encompassed the lands north of Lakes Erie and Ontario. First occupied by the Huron, Erie, and 

Neutral peoples, the Haudenosaunee laid claim to it after a long and bloody invasion in the mid-

seventeenth century. In the last decade of that century, the Anishinaabe forced the 

Haudenosaunee to sue for peace, relinquishing their rights to these lands in the Peace of 

Montreal in 1701. Following the Great Peace, the Mississauga, who were descended from the 

Northern Ojibwe, took control over the entire territory.102 

Though the Haudenosaunee and Mississauga harbored a century’s worth of animosity 

toward one another, the Revolutionary War provided a chance for reconciliation. This region was 

long characterized by distrust and cultural differences, Joseph Brant provided the diplomatic glue 

that established common ground for the Haudenosaunee, Mississauga, and the British. Brant 

came to serve as the crucial intercultural intermediary between the Mississauga and the British 

Indian Department, as he had once done for the Haudenosaunee before the war. Once settled on 

the Grand River, Brant considered himself a neighbor and ally to the Mississauga. He even used 

his influence and understanding of British diplomacy and property rights to slow the amount of 

cessions agreed to by the Mississauga, which British administrators interpreted as undermining. 

 

102 See Gilles Havard, The Great Peace of Montreal of 1701: French-Native Diplomacy in the Seventeenth 
Century (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001); White, Middle Ground; Taylor, Divided Ground, 128-
30. 

 

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In May of 1784, when Mississauga chief Pokquan welcomed the new refugee 

Haudenosaunee, he spoke of them as one people, “We are Indians, and consider ourselves and 

the Six Nations to be one and the same people, and agreeable to a former, and mutual agreement, 

we are bound to help each other.” Pokquan identified Joseph as “Brother Captain Brant,” and 

expressed the Mississauga’s happiness at having the Haudenosaunee settlement on the Grand 

River. Pokquan simultaneously warned the refugees to keep tight control over their young 

warriors, “We hope you will keep your young men in good Order, as we shall be in one 

Neighbourhood, and to live in friendship with each other as Brethren ought to do.” It was clear 

that the Mississauga hoped to benefit from Brant’s diplomatic abilities and from his clout with 

the British colonial administration.103 

A succession of dubious land surrenders in 1781, 1783, 1784, 1787, and 1788 opened 

Upper Canada to waves of incoming settlers (mostly British Loyalists and Revolutionary War 

veterans) who constantly harassed and abused the Mississauga. These cessions became legally 

binding when the Mississauga signed the “Between the Lakes Treaty” in 1792. Throughout the 

1790s, when the implications of these land surrenders became clear, the Mississauga voiced their 

discontent to both Haudenosaunee and British officials. Brant served as the intermediary 

between the Mississauga and the British. 

Then, in August of 1796, an aging Wabakinine, the well-respected head chief of the 

Mississauga Indians of Upper Canada, traveled with his wife and sister to the town of York 

(present-day Toronto) to sell some salmon to British settlers. At night, Wabakinine’s wife woke 

him as Charles McEwan, a member of the British Rangers was attempting to abduct his sister. 

Wabakinine and his wife both intervened, and McEwan responded by assaulting them both to the 

103 Pokquan speech, 22 May 1784, in Johnson, ed., Valley of the Six Nations, 47. 

 

 

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point where he caved in Wabakinine’s skull with a large stone. Wabakinine’s murder sent 

shockwaves throughout Upper Canada. Realizing the potential for large-scale retaliation, acting 

Lieutenant Governor, Peter Russell acted quickly. He ordered McEwan tried for murder, but he 

was acquitted for “want of evidence.” Owing to their lack of understanding of British law, the 

Mississauga present at the attack did not attend the trial, and other testimonies proved rather 

insufficient. In the ensuing months, the Mississauga rallied around cries of rebellion. They 

initially threatened warfare and violence, especially after the trial, but they were somewhat 

mollified when Russell awarded presents to cover the dead. In any case, Russell’s responses 

revealed his terror at the notion of an Indian uprising. In a letter to his superior, Lieutenant 

Governor John Graves Simcoe, Russell stated, “I cannot, however, shake off my apprehensions 

that some unfortunate family may yet, notwithstanding fall a sacrifice to their resentment, for 

Wabukanyn had many relations among the Chippewas and Lake Indians, and was greatly 

beloved by them.”104 

In the wake of Wabakinine’s murder, Brant was chosen by the Mississauga to replace 

him as a chief. In this capacity Brant continued to serve as their spokesman to the British, 

because “he alone knows the value of the land.” In fact, upon hearing news of Wabakinine’s 

murder, the incensed Mississauga initially called for open war with the British, and refused to 

relent until Brant intervened. Meanwhile, British officials finally realized the implications of 

Brant’s land strategies, and disagreement ensued over Mohawk land ownership and rights.105 

Brant saw no reason why the government should treat Indigenous communities any 

differently in landed issues than white land speculators, especially if those communities 

 

104 Leo Johnson, “The Mississauga-Lake Ontario Land Surrender of 1805,” Ontario History 83, no 3 
(1990), 235-36; Peter Russell to J. G. Simcoe, 28 September 1796, in Russell Correspondence, vol. 1, 49-50. 

105 Powell to Askin, 7 May 1798, The Valley of the Six Nations, 103. 

 

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approached land use and property value in western terms. Brant viewed settler colonialism for 

what it was, an overwhelming desire by members at all levels of settler society to acquire land, 

generally through Indigenous dispossession, to capitalize on the resources those lands contained. 

Brant put a halt to the repeated Mississauga land cessions, and he asserted his influence to shape 

the future form and direction the province would take. Inspired by William Johnson’s 

mentorship, Brant attempted to maintain a measure of influence over the surrounding settler 

society to ensure that his Mohawk community was best poised to survive and thrive. 

Unfortunately, regardless of Brant’s gentility, education, civility, and usefulness to the 

British Empire, his Mohawk identity gave his detractors the ammunition they needed to question 

his credibility. Brant especially offended British settler society when he offered to lease 

Haudenosaunee lands to white settlers. Brant operated according to the concepts of Western 

property ownership and land usage, but he did so to ensure the perseverance of his people. His 

actions undermined the prevailing narrative about the inevitability of Indian demise and 

disappearance. As long as Brant’s Mohawk community adapted and survived, it hindered the 

overall progress of settler colonialism in Upper Canada. 

At the same time, by granting/selling lands to non-Indigenous settlers, Brant alienated the 

more traditionalist orientation of some Haudenosaunee leaders, and simultaneously irritated the 

British administrators who sought to monopolize the distribution and regulation of lands and 

leases in Canada. Brant antagonized the Haudenosaunee opposition when he pushed for an 

adaptation of British law to stem the tide of revenge killings that were spreading throughout the 

Grand River settlement. Captains Aaron and Isaac Hill, two principal Mohawk leaders and 

former allies, opposed Brant’s assimilationist form of governance. They made an attempt on his 

life after Brant had a Mohawk murderer arrested and “applied to the Whites for advice, and 

 

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wished that an Example might be made.” While Brant had decades of experience in using the 

British legal system to defend Mohawk land rights, now when he sought to use that system to 

further legitimize Indigenous rights, his detractors saw it as a threat to traditional Haudenosaunee 

culture.106 

The assassination attempt failed, and the disaffected Mohawk simply fled Grand River 

for the more traditionalist Haudenosaunee settlement at Tyendinaga, just west of the settlement 

of Kingston at the northern end of Lake Ontario. Later in life, when Brant looked back at this 

incident, he understood the divide that existed between the written legal codes of settler societies 

and the traditionalist, unwritten approach to punishment. He recalled, “My wishing to have Some 

Laws and regulations Established amongst us was one of Aaron & Isaac’s Grievances, thinking 

that I wanted to introduce too much of the Custom of the Whites.” Brant firmly believed that 

such adaptation was the key to Indigenous survivance in the Great Lakes region. For Brant, there 

was no returning to the past when Iroquoia was devoid of European influence. In his mind, the 

only way to survive was to adapt to the changing circumstances of the present.107 

By 1790, Brant, now in his fifties, began grooming a handful of successors, several of 

which were his children. Like his old mentor, William Johnson, Brant used his own patronage to 

secure important positions and land deeds for those whom he most trusted and owed. Few others 

received as much patronage and favors as John Norton, who was born in Scotland of a Scottish 

mother and Cherokee father. The English captured him as a boy when his village was destroyed. 

When he arrived in Niagara as a British soldier in 1785, he deserted to become a schoolmaster in 

Deserontyon’s Mohawk settlement (the rival to Brant’s Grand River community) at the Bay of 

Quinte. After three years, Norton moved to Detroit to become a fur trader in the employ of John 

 

106 Joseph Brant to Joseph Chew, 27 October 1791, quoted in Taylor, Divided Ground, 124. 
107 Joseph Brant to Joseph Chew, 27 October 1791, quoted in Taylor, Divided Ground, 124. 

 

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Askin. Then after the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794, Norton returned to British Canada where 

he served as an interpreter for the British at Niagara. Norton met and quickly befriended Brant. A 

couple of years later, Norton quit the British Indian Department to become an interpreter for the 

Haudenosaunee. Brant eventually adopted him into his Mohawk community and gave him the 

rank, Teyoninhokarawen, or war chief. Norton, then following in Brant’s footsteps, pushed 

against British administrators, attempting to sustain Haudenosaunee property rights and 

autonomy. Brant even went so far as to send Norton directly to London to plead the Mohawk 

case to the Privy Council. However, William Claus, Deputy Superintendent General of the 

Indian Department, sent dispatches that questioned Norton’s credibility in representing the 

Haudenosaunee. Claus enlisted members of the anti-Brant faction to undermine Haudenosaunee 

land rights and maintain British colonial hegemony in Upper Canada.108 

When Joseph Brand died in 1807, Norton, along with Brant’s son John, continued to push 

for Haudenosaunee land rights. The Mohawk were able to maintain their traditional influence 

because when tensions between the United States and the British Empire erupted, Norton led the 

Haudenosaunee into battle alongside the British in the War of 1812. Though not as influential as 

Tecumseh, the Haudenosaunee maintained their importance to the empire. Following the war, 

the U.S.-Canada border solidified and Indigenous peoples on both sides lost much of their 

diplomatic strength with the lessening of international tensions in the Great Lakes. The outcome 

of the war enabled Norton and the Haudenosaunee at Grand River to sustain their influence over 

British Indian affairs for years into the future. Norton and the Haudenosaunee continued to press 

for Indigenous autonomy and land rights while also pushing for increased adaptation to western 

 

108 For quick bio, see John Norton entry in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, 

http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/norton_john_6E.html; Timothy D. Willig includes an entire chapter on John Norton, 
which begins with a section on Brant grooming his successor in Restoring the Chain of Friendship: British Policy 
and the Indians of the Great Lakes, 1783-1815 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 161-90. 

 

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ways as a means of cultural survivance. Joseph Brant’s legacy would live on through his 

carefully chosen successors, following a tradition initially established by Johnson in the mid-

eighteenth century. The pathway of creative adaptation that Brant chose would distinguish him 

from the approach taken by most other Indigenous communities on either side of the border, as 

we shall see in the next chapter. 

 
 
 

 

 

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CHAPTER TWO: 

 

RHETORIC AND RESISTANCE IN THE AGE OF INDIAN REMOVAL: 

LEWIS CASS, SIR FRANCIS BOND HEAD, AND THE INDIGENOUS COMMUNITIES 

WHO THWARTED THEM 

In September of 1836, Upper Canada’s newly appointed Lieutenant Governor, Sir 

Francis Bond Head visited a Mississauga village on the Credit River. According to Peter Jones 

(Kahkewaquonaby), a Mississauga chief and Methodist minister, Bond Head “said that the 

Credit village was the cleanest, neatest, and the most civilized of all the Indian settlements he 

had visited…and expressed great satisfaction at what he had witnessed.” This was tremendous 

praise indeed. For twenty years, the British Indian Department in Upper Canada had dedicated 

itself to a civilizing policy that focused on uplifting Indigenous peoples and adapting them to 

western social and cultural standards in order to best make way for the spread of British settler 

populations. Jones’ Mississauga had excelled above all other Indigenous groups in Upper 

Canada, and the approbation of the colony’s highest official directly reflected the efforts that 

Jones had personally put in over the previous two decades. Bond Head’s approval of the Credit 

Mississauga’s “civilization” progress echoed the consensus of other British officials, 

administrators, traders, and missionaries throughout the 1820s and 1830s as well. However, 

despite such clear evidence of effective acculturation, Bond Head shortly after took it upon 

himself to halt the civilization policies that had characterized British Indian affairs since the 

conclusion of the War of 1812. He instead opted for a policy of removal akin to what President 

Jackson had implemented in the United States. In order to justify his actions, Bond Head relied 

 

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on Romanticized rhetoric of Indians as disappearing in the wake of encroaching European settler 

society.109 

A month later, on the other side of the U.S.-Canada border, representatives of the United 

States government held a council with various Potawatomi leaders at Logansport, Indiana to 

discuss annuity payments and Indian relocation. While many of the leaders supported Indian 

removal policies as a means of maintaining traditional Indigenous autonomy and culture, a cadre 

of adaptive Potawatomi from Southeast Michigan, referred to as the “St. Joseph” or “Catholic 

Indians,” not only opposed these policies, they “threatened to Kill the [pro-removal] Chiefs if 

they sold the land.” This band, known later as the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi, maintained a 

very similar position to Peter Jones’s Mississauga. They had spent the last thirty years converting 

to Christianity and adapting to Euro/American ways of life in order to maintain their culture and 

land base. Regardless of their apparent progress towards American standards of civilization, 

Lewis Cass, Jackson’s Secretary of War, rhetorically dismissed these Potawatomi as he enacted 

the United States’ removal policies. Cass described all Indians as a monolithic vanishing people 

utterly incapable of adapting to western civilization. In this calculus, there was no room for the 

Pokagon band or other “civilized” Indians on lands that could be inhabited by white settler 

colonists.110 

By the 1830s, few administrators were as experienced in dealing with North America’s 

Indigenous peoples as Lewis Cass. Serving as governor of Michigan Territory for eighteen years 

following the War of 1812, Cass was responsible for maintaining diplomatic relations with the 

109 Peter Jones, Life and Journals of Kah-ke-wa-quo-na-by (Rev. Peter Jones), Wesleyan Missionary 

(Toronto: Anson Green at the Wesleyan Printing Establishment, 1860), 379. 

 

110 Ben Secunda provides an excellent discussion of the council held at Logansport on 18 October 1836 in 

his dissertation, “In the Shadow of the Eagle’s Wings: The Effects of Removal on the Unremoved Potawatomi” 
(PhD diss., Notre Dame University, 2008), 445-46; quote is from Abel Pepper in a letter to U. S. Secretary of War, 
28 October 1836, Box 30, Folder 152, photocopy of Letters from National Archives Record Group (NARG) 75. The 
Files of Donald J. Berthrong. Western Historical Collections. University of Oklahoma. Norman, Oklahoma. 

 

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territory’s Native inhabitants. Cass oversaw the negotiation of numerous treaties that resulted in 

the cession of vast tracts of land throughout the Great Lakes region and the Ohio River valley. 

Later, as Secretary of War, Cass altered the United States’ approach to Indian diplomacy by 

implementing President Jackson’s official policy of removal, which granted Indians new lands 

west of the Mississippi River during treaty negotiations with the expectation they would relocate 

before incoming American settlers. 

In contrast, before his appointment as Lieutenant Governor, Sir Francis Bond Head had 

no experience in dealing with Indians of the Great Lakes. His interactions with Indigenous 

peoples mostly occurred during his time as a mining supervisor in South America. However, in 

the late 1830s, Bond Head implemented his own version of an Indian removal policy. While 

Cass primarily expressed concern for the advancement of settler populations in the Great Lakes, 

Bond Head saw those settler populations as inherently corrupt and destructive to his 

romanticized notion of a pure Indigenous people. He envisioned removal as a way to protect 

Canada’s First Nations from the corrupting influences and vice of encroaching fur traders and 

settler colonists. Bond Head negotiated land cessions with various Ojibwe leaders for numerous 

islands along the Manitoulin chain in Lake Huron to serve as a preserve for the Amerindian 

peoples who would be displaced by territory cessions on the mainland of Upper Canada. Despite 

the fact that the Indians Bond Head negotiated with ceded millions of acres of arable land in 

exchange for a string of barren rocky islands, he still claimed throughout his life, like Cass did, 

that his intentions were to protect Indigenous peoples. 

In United States history, the Cherokee Trail of Tears continues to serve as the most 

visible example of Indian removal. However, as a policy, Indian removal owes much of its 

development and conceptualization to Indian-white relations in the Great Lakes and Ohio River 

 

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Valley in the two decades leading up to the passage of the Indian Removal Act of 1830. John 

Bowes argues that analyses of Indian removal that focus too heavily on the Indian Removal Act 

and the 1830s tend to tell an incomplete story. Instead, the Indian Removal Act was the 

culmination of decades of experiences between U.S. officials and various Indigenous groups, 

mostly in the Northwest, between Iroquoia in Upstate New York and the western Great Lakes. 

Removal was a messy and contingent process in which room existed for “adaptive resistance,” 

wherein Indigenous individuals and communities utilized diverse strategies to survive. As 

Leopold Pokagon’s experience illustrates, “treaties could be instruments of gain as much as they 

were instruments of loss,” and in some cases, they provided the foundation of survivance into the 

present.111 

Jeffrey Ostler maintains, “the United States policy of Indian removal is associated with 

Andrew Jackson and his signing of the Indian Removal Act in 1830. But a singular focus on 

Jackson obscures the fact that he did not invent the idea of removal.” Removal as a policy was 

expressed as early as 1783 when George Washington in 1783 speculated an army of settler 

soldiers could force Indians to cede their lands and “remove into the illimitable regions of the 

West.” Jefferson’s presidency, especially after the Louisiana Purchase, was rife with discussions 

of the potential of removing Indians west of the Mississippi, especially when he attempted to 

convince a Cherokee delegation to “settle on lands beyond the Mississippi” in 1808. Americans 

are well aware of the story that followed. The Cherokee, along with the other members of the 

Five Civilized Tribes of the Chickasaw, Creek, Choctaws, and Seminoles, divided over the issue 

of accepting lands west of the Mississippi from the American government. While certain factions 

 

111 Bowes, Land Too Good for Indians, 7, 13; I borrow the term “adaptive resistance” from Ben Secunda, 

who uses it to explain the ways in which the Pokagon Band continued to adapt to Western expectations and 
standards in order to retain their land base in southwest Michigan, “In the Shadow of the Eagle’s Wings.” 

 

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thought it best not to arouse the anger of the federal and state governments of the United States, 

the majority of these Southeastern Indigenous groups resisted removal. In the two decades 

preceding the passage of the Indian Removal Act in 1830, federal and state officials applied 

increasing pressure to tribal representatives. But ultimately, these tribes determined to remain on 

their homelands, and they continued to adapt to American standards of “civilization” in much the 

same manner of Brants’ Mohawk at the end of the previous century. They did this because they 

believed as long as they could prove to the United States government they were successfully 

adapting, they would be allowed to keep their lands.112 

By 1839, sixteen thousand Cherokee were forced to remove west from their homelands in 

Georgia and Alabama to Oklahoma. Almost half of those forced to march died either on the 

journey or shortly after arriving. Removed Muskogees and Seminoles experienced a similar rate 

of death, while Chickasaws and Choctaws lost about fifteen percent of their population along the 

march. At the same time, Potawatomi from Northern Indiana and Illinois had been similarly 

forced to remove after signing a number of treaties ceding all of their lands in those two states to 

the federal government. On what became known as the Trail of Death, of the 850 Potawatomi 

forced to remove, over forty died of typhoid fever, other diseases, and the overall stress of 

removal. The violence of removal went far beyond mere death rates, as one Potawatomi was 

quoted as saying, “They had been taken from homes affording them plenty, and brought to a 

desert—a wilderness, and were now to be scattered and left as the husbandmen scatters his 

seed.” The Potawatomi, like the removed Southern tribes, were now left to learn to subsist in 

112 Jeffrey Ostler, Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution 

to Bleeding Kansas (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2019), 191-96. 

 

 

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lands they were completely unfamiliar with, and to which they had no personal or cultural 

connection.113 

Before their policies climaxed in these violent outcomes, both Cass and Bond Head 

worked diligently to shape the narrative of Indian removal to serve their own purposes. In order 

to implement their policies, both Cass and Bond Head carefully employed a rhetoric of frontier 

nationalism to win over popular and political support. While they both relied on the myth of the 

vanishing Indian to bolster their logic, they articulated and enacted their policies in distinct ways. 

Cass argued that despite the best attempts to civilize Indians, they could never fully adapt to 

American society in a manner that would sustain them. He insisted the westward progress of 

settler society inherently changed the landscape and depleted the game, and Indians unable to 

adapt were doomed to disappear. On the other hand, Bond Head romanticized Indians. He 

believed they represented everything that was pure and wholesome in the natural world, and thus 

served as the foil to the corruption and degradation of industrialized Europe. He saw the 

expansion of settler society across North America not as a great achievement like Cass, but 

rather as something to be lamented. In each case, as these administrators implemented their 

policies, they also attempted to control the narrative of their actions. They both treated Indians as 

silent actors without agency who had no choice but to accept whatever western governments 

dictated.  

Following the legacy of Joseph and Molly Brant’s vibrant Mohawk community, many 

Indigenous groups proved to be anything but silent actors. They employed strategies of adaptive 

resistance to foil the best-laid plans of imperial administrators and sometimes thwarted removal 

 

113 Ostler, Surviving Genocide, 247-87; Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the 

United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014), 112-13; Bowes, Land Too Good for Indians, 170-72; quote by Pe-pish-
kay, transcribed by William Polke in “Journal of an Emigrating Party of Pottawattomie Indians, 1838,” Indiana 
Magazine of History 21, no. 4 (December, 1925), 334. 

 

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or dispossession altogether. In the Upper Canadian cases of both Peter Jones’ Mississauga of the 

New Credit and John Norton’s Mohawk of the Grand River, the avoidance of removal depended 

on utilizing these strategies first evolved by the Brant siblings in the closing decades of the 

eighteenth century. Such strategies mostly revolved around an understanding of European 

conceptions of land usage, private property and western ideas of civilization. As Indians in 

Upper Canada adapted to British culture, a market economy, English literacy and formal 

education, and Christianity, they defied the logic of dispossession. Similarly, in southwestern 

Michigan, the St. Joseph band of Potawatomi led by Leopold Pokagon expressed an 

understanding and ability to creatively adapt to American cultural standards of civilization in 

order to defy the myths of Indian inferiority and disappearance that Cass so adamantly 

articulated.114 

This chapter explores the lives, actions, and writings of four men who sought to use 

public opinion to shape the direction of Indian-white relations in the Great Lakes during the era 

of Indian removal. On one side, Leopold Pokagon and Peter Jones steered their Indigenous 

communities toward strategies of adaptive resistance to ensure they maintained a land-base to 

serve as protection from removal and extermination. On the other side, Cass and Bond Head 

sought to convince their nations that all Indians were doomed to disappear in the wake of 

expanding white civilization anyway, and thus removal was a humane response. Cass and Bond 

Head each developed and evolved the rhetorical trope of frontier nationalism to convince the 

public that their actions were justified, and to emphasize the importance of the Great Lakes 

region to their respective nations. Both Pokagon and Jones led their communities to adopt 

western plough farming and livestock practices, as well as Christianity, English literacy, and 

114 Another good example of this adaptive resistance is the case of Black Hoof 

 

 

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other forms of formal Euro/American education to disprove colonial arguments that all Indians 

were vanishing. As statesmen, Cass and Bond Head administered various policies that benefitted 

their nations’ settler colonial aims. In their writings, both men whitewashed the violence of 

settler colonialism by relying on the public’s romanticized notions of Indians, especially as they 

were expected to disappear in the wake of settler expansion. As frontier administrators these men 

represented the autonomous and idiosyncratic nature of regional politics, as they often acted in 

response to their local settler colonial circumstances more than in accordance with the national or 

imperial directives of Washington and London. Meanwhile, even as Cass and Bond Head 

attempted to create an accepted narrative of erasure, the Pokagon Potawatomi in southwest 

Michigan and the Mississauga of the New Credit in Upper Canada both developed strategies of 

survivance similar to those evolved by the Brants in the final decades of the previous century. In 

this manner, both bands were able to avoid removal despite incredible pressure by settler 

societies. 

While settler colonialism as a model describes the ways in which Indigenous peoples 

were dispossessed in order for settler societies to claim their lands and resources, this process 

played out ideologically as well as physically. Veracini illustrates the ideological underpinning 

of settler colonialism as Indigenous populations were vanished in settler narratives before they 

were physically dispossessed. For this to work, Veracini argues, Indigenous people “can be 

represented as ‘virtuous’ and dignified, or ‘debased’ and savage (or both; indeed, each definition 

necessitates it dialectical counterpoint),” but in either case, it is imperative for settler colonialists 

to shape a narrative that asserts the incompatibility of Indigenous peoples in a modernizing 

world. Because settler colonialism is the logic of settler societies dispossessing Indigenous 

peoples of their lands, it “insists on the law-making corporate capacity of the local community, 

 

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on its self-constituting ability, on its competence to control the local population economy, and on 

a subordination to the colonising metropole that is premised on a conditional type of loyalty.” 

This local-based sovereignty played out in the Great Lakes on both sides of the border.115 

An examination of frontier nationalism as articulated by on-the-ground officials like Cass 

and Bond Head reveals the ways settler colonists influenced federal Indian policy in both the 

United States and Canada. The key to the success of local administrators like Cass and Bond 

Head was their ability to frame their removal policies in a manner that satisfied the settler greed 

for Indian lands. These administrators sold their policies to American and Canadian publics that 

were still in the early processes of creating national identities. Both Cass and Bond Head were 

influenced by the circumstances surrounding them, and their actions reflected the will of their 

people. However, both men also sought to bend that will toward their own ideological leanings. 

Cass and Bond Head represented settler colonialism on the ground at the fringes of their 

respective nations. They also both came to power at a pivotal moment in Great Lakes history, 

when the border hardened and the political leverage that Indigenous peoples once maintained as 

a buffer state between the United States and Canada was rapidly dwindling. When Peter Jones 

wrote his History of the Ojibway Indians, he illustrated the full extent of his understanding of 

settler colonial ambition and power by engaging with Western print culture to convincingly 

argue that Indians can and did survive in the midst of settler expansion.116 

Cass was a career politician who represented the interests of the settlers whose greed for 

Indian land facilitated his own rise to power in frontier politics. Along the way he learned the 

115 Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 

 

24, 72. 

116 Victoria Jane Freeman, “’Toronto has no History!:’ Indigeneity, Settler Colonialism, and Historical 

Memory in Canada’s Largest City,” Dissertation, University of Toronto, 2010, 21; John Clarke, Land Power, and 
Economics on the Frontier of Upper Canada (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001), 
xxxi. 

 

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value of selling himself to a national audience by emphasizing the exceptionality of the frontier 

experience. Bond Head, on the other hand, was far from a career politician. He administrated 

Upper Canada as an outsider. The settler populations that he briefly governed were comprised of 

land speculators and nefarious traders seeking to capitalize on their dealings with Canada’s First 

Nations. However, he argued that he did not directly represent the interests of those settlers. 

Rather, he insisted he governed from a sense of what he believed was morally right. When it 

came to Indigenous diplomacy and affairs, his conception of morality was informed by literary 

romanticism. Throughout his life Bond Head was much more successful as a literary figure than 

an administrator. Had it not been for the civil unrest that marked the Rebellions of 1837 and 

1838, his policies might have endured. As it was, when he resigned his position as Lieutenant 

Governor, Bond Head’s policies disappeared from Upper Canada along with his presence. His 

successors then shifted back to the long lineage of Indian assimilation tactics that had marked the 

region’s previous political trajectory, effectively ending Upper Canada’s removal era.117   

In the United States, Cass’s legacy was much longer lasting. As Jackson’s Secretary of 

War, Cass oversaw treaties that effectively abolished Indian title to any and all lands in the States 

of Indiana, Illinois, and Ohio, as well as large parts of Michigan and Wisconsin. In both cases, 

these administrators owed much of their political success to their abilities to construct and shape 

the narrative that informed public opinion. Cass especially was so successful at this, that public 

memory is only just recently correcting itself. Indigenous peoples did not disappear from the 

region, despite the fact that no official reservations exist in the states of Ohio, Indiana, or Illinois. 

 

117 The Rebellions of 1837 and 1838 took place in Upper and Lower Canada when in both colonies rebels 

fought against the British government for more democratic representation and an elimination of the gentry-
controlled status quo. See the volume edited by Murray F.  Greenwood, and Barry Wright, Rebellion and invasion in 
the Canadas, 1837-1839, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990); See also Sir Francis Bond Head, A 
Narrative (London: John Murray, 1839). 

 

 

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In Ontario (previously Upper Canada), both the Mississauga and the Haudenosaunee continue to 

thrive on their reserves along the Grand River. The fact that these Indigenous peoples were 

effectively neglected in the narratives of early Toronto and its surrounding settlements after 1830 

is similarly a result not of actual historical situations, but an attempt by administrators and other 

settler colonial interests to erase Indians as they constructed an origin story that best suited their 

agendas. 

By the mid to late-1830s, when Cass instituted Jackson’s Removal policies, he had 

served his entire career, and lived the majority of his life in the tense environment of Great Lakes 

settler-Indian interactions. Bond Head was a foreigner to Upper Canada, and a novice to the rich 

history of political interactions that shaped the region. As administrators, both men responded to 

local circumstances on the ground according to the logic of the rhetoric they espoused, whether it 

followed the national or imperial directives from the metropole or not. These two men then 

engaged in that rhetoric when informing the public of their actions, adding to and shaping 

national narratives of frontier nationalism and disappearing Indians. While the careers of these 

two men traveled largely in different directions, they both illustrate the ways in which 

policymaking in the mid-nineteenth century Great Lakes frontier was highly responsive to the 

circumstances of settler colonialism on the ground, that is the desire for Indian lands and 

resources by encroaching settler society. In order to achieve success as a frontier administrator, 

one needed to address these local concerns, and then sell them to one’s respective national 

audience. 

When British and American negotiators agreed to terms to end the War of 1812 in 

December of 1814, they established a boundary line between the United States and British 

Canada, partially drawn through the waters of the Great Lakes. The British agreed to allow the 

 

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United States to militarize in the Great Lakes with both warships and forts. They also agreed to 

abandon their own strongholds on the American side. Like the Treaty of Paris that ended the 

Revolutionary War, the terms agreed to in Ghent did not acknowledge the rights of Great Lakes 

Indigenous groups. Rather, despite the fact that their Indigenous allies were responsible for most 

of their victories throughout the Great Lakes theater, the British abandoned them when they 

resolved to relinquish their hoped-for Indian buffer zone between Canada and the United States. 

This meant no recovery of Indigenous lands in Northwest Ohio. A significant reduction in 

geopolitical tension after the war’s end meant a correlative drop in Indigenous diplomatic power. 

For both sides, Indians increasingly became more of a burden than an asset. They came to be 

seen as an obstruction to expanding settler societies and administrations. In their capacity as 

colonial/territorial officials, Bond Head and Cass helped create the administrative apparatus that 

fostered the interests of settler colonialism and violently dispossessed Great Lakes Indians of 

their lands. 

Raised in frontier Ohio during the Northwest Indian Wars, Cass rose to prominence 

during the decade between Ohio’s statehood and the War of 1812. After serving as a circuit 

lawyer, he built a reputation as a staunch Democratic Republican and was elected to the Ohio 

House of Representatives. When William Henry Harrison, Indiana’s territorial governor, 

defeated Tecumseh’s pan-Indian confederacy at Tippecanoe in 1811, Cass was commissioned 

Brigadier General of the Ohio militia. At this time, fears about an Indian uprising and a 

reinvigorated British-Indian alliance spread through the settler colonist population in the Ohio 

River valley. When war officially broke out between the United States and Britain, Cass served 

as a colonel in the regular army under General Hull. He fought in several major battles and 

 

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following Hull’s bungled surrender of Detroit to the British, Cass vociferously decried Hull’s 

ineptitude and earned a promotion to brigadier general. 

In this new capacity, Cass served under William Henry Harrison, a man with whom he 

maintained a lifelong friendship. Later, during the crucial Battle of the Thames, Cass served as 

Harrison’s aid-de-camp. After this pivotal victory in which Tecumseh was killed, Harrison 

promoted Cass to commander of all forces in Michigan and Upper Canada. A week later, 

President Madison appointed Cass Governor of Michigan Territory on October 29, 1813.118 

Tasked with maintaining order amidst constant border raids by both British and Indian 

assailants, Cass understood the importance of diplomacy with the region’s Indigenous 

inhabitants. In a letter to the Secretary of War in July of 1814, Cass stated, “I am no enthusiastic 

believer in Indian friendship and professions, but I have no doubt but important advantages will 

result from their assistance and co-operation.” Cass made this statement after having struggled 

for a year against a particularly aggressive band of Ojibwe, the Saginaw Chippewa. Throughout 

the war, Saginaw Chippewa chief Kishkawko proved especially troublesome for Cass and the 

United States as he rallied other Anishinaabeg from around the Great Lakes to join the British 

cause. Many accounts name Kishkawko one of the leading agitators in the Battle of Frenchtown 

and the resulting “massacre” at the River Raisin. When Cass took over as Michigan’s territorial 

governor, Kishkawko frequently led raids against the homesteads surrounding Detroit on his way 

to Amherstburg to receive presents from the British. To defend those settlements, Cass mobilized 

 

118 Robert W. Unger, “Lewis Cass: Indian Superintendent of the Michigan Terriotry, 1813-1831. A Survey 

of Public Opinion as Reported by the Newspapers of the Old Northwest Territory,” PhD Dissertation, Ball State 
University, 1967), 41, 46. 

 

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as many Detroit residents in the militia as he could, but he also relied heavily on his own Indian 

allies.119 

Unlike the Haudenosaunee, who were connected as a confederacy of five and later six 

separate Iroquoian nations, the Great Lakes Indians that Cass dealt with were mostly of 

Algonquian, more specifically, Anishinaabe cultural heritage. The Anishinaabeg, comprised of 

the Ojibwe, the Odawa, the Potawatomi, and the Mississauga. As opposed to Iroquoian 

matrilineal society, in Anishinaabe societies, land stewardship and authority pass through 

paternal lines. Anishinaabe government is arranged via a clan system, however, this is a different 

system than the Iroquois, as the Anishinaabeg divide into kinship villages governed by semi-

autonomous local leaders or wkama. While the Iroquois structured their entire society around the 

longhouse, which served as the physical buildings for sedentary castles that generally remained 

stationary for twelve years, Anishinaabe villages were much more mobile, with nuclear families 

each occupying separate wigwams that moved according to a seasonal round based mostly on 

hunting and fishing. While Iroquois were known as agriculturally advanced, the Anishinaabeg 

used farming more as a supplemental source of food.120  

In this patrilineal system existed immediate family units, household groups, and villages. 

However, all of these family units were connected to larger extended kinship groups based on the 

marriage of a man to one or more women outside of the village. As James Clifton argues, “These 

 

119 Cass to Secretary of War, 25 July 1814, Clarence Edwin Carter, The Territorial Papers of the United 

States, X (Washington D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1934), 467; George B. Catlin, The Story of 
Detroit (Detroit: The Detroit News, 1923), 201-3. 

120 For more on Anishinaabe culture and societal structure, see Heidi Bohaker, “’Nindoodemag’: the 

Significance of Algonquian Kinship Networks in the Eastern Great Lakes Region, 1600-1701,” The William and 
Mary Quarterly, Third Series, 63, no. 1 (Jan., 2006), 23-52; Bohaker, “Reading Anishinaabe Identities: Meaning and 
Metaphor in Nindoodem Pictographs,” Ethnohistory 57, no. 1 (Winter 2010), 11-33; Jill Doerfler, Those Who 
Belong: Identity, Family, Blood, and Citizenship Among the White Earth Anishinaabeg (East Lansing: Michigan 
State University Press, 2015); Michael McDonnell, Masters of Empire: Great Lakes Indians and the Making of 
America New York: Hill and Wang, 2015); Michael Witgen, An Infinity of Nations: How the Native New World 
Shaped Early North America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). 

 

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extended kin groups—the phratries, clans, and lineages, were essentially corporate in nature,” 

each with its own distinctive identity, cultural practices, and specific formal responsibilities that 

linked it in a larger world of other clans. Each of these clans was a separate corporate unit in the 

broader Potawatomi society. While the Revolutionary War split the Haudenosaunee 

Confederacy, the various Anishinaabe communities fought in the War of 1812 on both sides 

depending on who they felt reciprocally bonded to at the time. Initially, most Anishinaabeg sided 

with the charismatic Tecumseh and his dream of halting settler encroachment in the Great Lakes. 

However, like many other Indigenous groups, their support waned after Tecumseh fell in the 

Battle of the Thames.121 

Cass saw Detroit as a crucial hub of Indigenous interaction and travel, especially given its 

proximity to Ft. Malden, “the principal depot of British presents and…the principal residence of 

British agents.” As such, Cass implored his superiors in Washington to provide him funds to 

employ Indian interpreters and to give presents to allied Indian warriors. In the summer of 1814, 

Cass clearly articulated his opinions concerning diplomacy with Indians of the Great Lakes. He 

contended, “However we may despise them, it is the part of true wisdom to consult their 

prejudices, to draw physical strength from their intellectual weakness, and to attach them to us 

through the medium of their affections and interest, or to compel them to join us by a display of 

our strength.” Assessing the relative weakened state of the United States’ military power in the 

region at this point in the war, Cass favored buying Indigenous allegiance. Washington 

administrators heard Cass’s pleas and authorized him to “appoint agent & interpreters & 

distribute presents” at his discretion.122  

121 James Clifton, The Pokagons, 1683-1983: Catholic Potawatomi Indians of the St. Joseph River Valley 

(Lanham: University Press of America, 1984), 9. 

 

122 Cass to Secretary of War, 25 July 1814, Carter, Territorial Papers of the United States, X, 467-8; Cass 

to Secretary of War, 3 September 1814, Carter, Territorial Papers, X, 476. 

 

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Cass spent the rest of the war appealing to Great Lakes Indians by disbursing presents. 

This tactic proved mostly effective as the British struggled to win battles in the western theater 

after their epic loss at the Battle of the Thames and the death of Tecumseh. The war had taken its 

toll on the region as a whole, and Indians and whites alike felt the burden of food shortages and 

loss of resources. General Duncan MacArthur then negotiated an armistice with many of the 

region’s Indigenous groups, particularly the Potawatomi of Michigan, Indiana, and Illinois. This 

allowed Cass to directly compete with British Agents in Canada for the backing of Great Lakes 

Indians. After the United States military largely vacated Michigan Territory at the end of 1813, 

Cass used government funds to enlist a corps of Indigenous warriors to protect the settlements 

around Detroit and to mount counter raids across the Canadian border.  

Throughout the remainder of the war, contemporary newspapers reported on the 

widespread approbation Cass earned from the territory’s settler population. Cass led numerous 

campaigns over the Canadian border to destroy British crops and push the hostile Indians back 

even further. Because the regular army and militia were not at Cass’s disposal for this 

expedition, he put to use his allied Indian forces. Numerous Indigenous groups along the 

American side of the U.S.-Canadian border sought reconciliation with the United States after the 

death of Tecumseh. These various Indians swore fidelity directly to Cass, the United States’ most 

direct representative in the region. Cass and Harrison both presided over a treaty between the 

United States and most of the Great Lakes Indians at Greenville on July 22nd of 1814. In this 

treaty, chiefs of all the presiding tribes agreed “to give their aid to the United States in 

prosecuting the war against Great Britain, and such of the Indian tribes as still continue hostile; 

and to make no peace with either without the consent of the United States.” Emboldened by this 

treaty and enabled by budgetary allowances to disburse presents to Indigenous allies, Cass 

 

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recruited a force of Indigenous warriors that contemporary newspapers referred to as “Governor 

Cass’s Pet Indians.” This group most likely comprised Huron, Miami, and Potawatomi Indians 

who signed treaties to end hostilities with the U.S. following Tecumseh’s death.123 

Throughout the rest of the war, and in the decades that followed, Cass continued to foster 

connections to the region’s Indigenous diverse populations as they became increasingly reliant 

upon the United States for provisions and trade relations. In a letter to Secretary of War John 

Armstrong in May of 1814, Cass inquired about his role in Indian administration. He specifically 

asked if the superintendence of Indian affairs would fall on him. He also asked, “whether the 

government intend to feed and clothe them,” and “how am I to procure funds for the payment of 

interpreters…and the different incidental expenses which are daily arising.” When he didn’t 

receive an immediate response, Cass pressed the matter, sending Armstrong numerous other 

inquiries. Armstrong eventually confirmed Cass’s authority to treat with Indians, and Indian 

affairs occupied much of his time through his twenty-year tenure as territorial governor.124  

From this key position as diplomat and administrator to the region’s Indigenous peoples, 

Cass also widely interacted with newspapers where he showed great concern for the public 

conceptions of Indigenous ways and culture. After all, as a Democrat, Cass subscribed to 

Jefferson’s notion that, “the basis of our governments being the opinion of the people…were it 

left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers 

without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” Cass, like his party’s 

founder, saw newspapers as both the indicator of and chief influence on public opinion.125  

 

123 James A. Clifton, The Prairie People: Continuity and Change in Potawatomi Indian Culture, 1665-1965 

(Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1998), 210-13; R. David Edmunds, The Potawatomis, Keepers of the Fire 
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1978), 198-202; “Treaty with the Wyandot, Etc., 1814,” Charles Kappler, 
ed., Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties, Vol II (Treaties): 105; Unger, “Lewis Cass,” 55-57. 

124 Cass to Armstrong, 2 May 1814, Cass Papers, Burton Historical Collection. 
125 Thomas Jefferson to Edward Carrington, Paris, 16 January 1787, Thomas Jefferson Writings (New 

York: Library of America, 1984), 880. 

 

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Unlike Cass, Sir Francis Bond Head did not earn his acclaim through military 

achievements. Although, he did begin his career as a lieutenant in the Royal Engineers after he 

graduated from the Royal Military Academy in 1811. He then served as an engineer during the 

Napoleonic Wars before retiring in 1825 to manage a British mining company in South America. 

The following year, this company failed, and after returning to England, Bond Head put pen to 

paper and published the notes from his trip. The year after, he published a report detailing the 

failing of that mining association in order to both defend his own name and to bring to the 

public’s attention the defunct manner in which British mining companies (as an extension of the 

British industrial machine) did not respectfully or sustainably approach the larger issue of British 

imperialism in general.126 

  Bond Head leveraged the popularity he earned by his published writings to become a well-

known travel writer who wrote in the genre of the period, portraying the natural world and 

Indigenous peoples through a romanticized lens. His extensive travels inspired him to write 

Rough Notes Taken During Some Rapid Journeys Across the Pampas and Among the Andes, 

which focused specifically on the Pampas Indians. In this writing, he described the fertility of the 

lands and the poverty and sufferings of the Indians who lived there. Bond Head believed that no 

matter their physical or moral condition, “still they are the human beings placed there by the 

Almighty; the country belonged to them, and they are therefore entitled to the regard of every 

man who has religion enough to believe that God has made nothing in vain, or whose mind is 

just enough to respect the persons and the rights of his fellow-creatures.”127  

126 See “Sir Francis Bond Head,” entry in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, 

http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/head_francis_bond_10E.html. 

 

 
127 Sir Francis Bond Head, Rough Notes Taken During Some Rapid Journeys Across the Pampas and 

Among the Andes (London: John Murray, Albermarle Street, 1826), 63. 

 

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For Bond Head, the spread of European civilization led to the lamentable destruction of 

the natural world, which invariably included Indigenous people. Bond Head described the ways 

in which the Spanish, when they encountered Indigenous peoples throughout the Americas, 

“exterminated a large proportion of this unfortunate race; the rest they treated as beasts of 

burden, and during their short intervals of repose, the priests were ordered to explain to them that 

their vast country belonged to the Pope at Rome!” When such treatment resulted in incredible 

death rates, Bond Head maintained, the world was content to believe that Indigenous peoples of 

the Americas were “imbecile both in body and mind.” Thus, the greed of Europeans, which 

resulted in this wholesale destruction of peoples and cultures, came to be justified on a moral 

basis, and “it at length became a statement which historians have now recorded.” Bond Head 

exhibited an understanding of the power to control the narrative. He dedicated the rest of his life 

to narrative construction in a constant effort to help sway public opinion, and thus to affect 

public policy. For him, part of that narrative involved the romanticizing of Indigenous peoples in 

order to save them from the immorality of Europeans and Western Civilization. Thanks in part to 

these writings Bond Head received a commission as Upper Canada’s Lieutenant Governor.128 

While Cass and Bond Head were ascending to power, so too was Peter Jones, who drew 

his inspiration for adaptive resistance from family friend, Joseph Brant. Though Brant died in 

1807, he spent the years before his death firmly establishing his successors both within his own 

Mohawk community at the Grand River, and within the Mississauga where he also served as a 

chief. In the 1790s, Brant used his patronage to secure important positions and land deeds in 

Upper Canada for his friends and associates, notably Augustus Jones, a British surveyor who had 

befriended many of the Mohawk and Mississauga around the western edge of Lake Ontario. 

128 Bond Head, Rough Notes, 63. 

 

 

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Augustus Jones had two Indian wives, Sarah Tekarihogen, daughter of Mohawk chief Henry 

Tekarihogen, and Tuhbenahneequay, daughter of Mississauga chief Wahbanosay. Jones had 

children with each of these wives. His first son by Tuhbenahneequay he named Tyenteneged, 

after is friend and patron, Joseph Brant. Their second son, Peter or Kahkewaquonaby, born in 

1802, grew to become one of the most important chiefs of the Mississauga during the turbulent 

era of removal and dispossession.129 

  Peter Jones was raised Mississauga by his mother and her relatives until the region was 

ravaged during the War of 1812. By then, the Mississauga had effectively ceded the majority of 

their lands around Lake Ontario, and British settlers and war veterans quickly flooded in. 

Following the war, Jones’ father Augustus took in his two sons and moved them all on to the 

Grand River Mohawk reserve where he owned a considerable homestead thanks to Brant’s 

patronage. There Peter and his brother learned several Iroquoian cultural traditions, as well as 

western agricultural practices. Peter also attended a formal school where he became both fluent 

and literate in English and Iroquois. In his time at the Grand River reserve Peter witnessed the 

effectiveness of Brant’s strategies of adaptive resistance. In 1823, after he converted to 

Christianity at a Methodist camp meeting, Peter began his career as a minister. Because Jones’ 

Christianization and education seemed directly in line with the British Indian Department’s 

policies of Indigenous civilization and uplift, he began to receive ample support from Upper 

Canada’s colonial administration. 

 

In the summer of 1826, Jones and his Mississauga followers established a mission village at 

the mouth of the Credit River just west of Toronto. At a time when the Mississauga experienced 

tremendous poverty, famine, and population loss, Jones offered hope. Over the next four years, 

129 Donald Smith, Sacred Feathers: The Reverend Peter Jones (Kahkewaquonaby) and the Mississauga 

Indians (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), 1-5. 

 

 

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he earned the respect of his people through his missionary leadership and by his proven 

effectiveness in dealing with white administrators and other missionaries, and in 1829 he was 

appointed chief and primary spokesman in dealing with the British Indian Department. Similar to 

what Brant had accomplished among the Mohawk at Grand River, Jones encouraged his people 

to adopt western farming practices and education. Through Christianization and adaptation to 

British cultural standards, Jones earned for his people the esteem of the British Empire while 

allowing them to maintain a sense of their Indigenous cultural identity. 

In the decades following the War of 1812, Indian policies traveled in very different 

trajectories in British Canada than in the United States. In large measure, each nation’s policies 

reflected the geopolitical tensions that existed between the United States and the British Empire. 

As far back as the conclusion of the Revolutionary War, the British Empire needed to obtain 

lands in order to reward displaced loyalists with new lands in Canada. The British looked to 

tactics of Indian civilization and assimilation in order to best ensure harmony in the region and to 

appease moral reformers in England. The idea was to make Canada’s Indigenous peoples more 

like Britons through Christian conversion and education. Once accomplished, British officials 

believed these Indigenous peoples would no longer need their vast territories, as they would be 

sedentary and thus could subsist by farming small plots of land instead of relying on hunting 

wild game. In the meantime, the British Empire no longer needed its Indigenous allies for 

military protection, but the expanding settler population increasingly sought-after indigenous 

lands.130  

 

130 In 1985, the Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, David Crombie published a report 

by John F. Leslie titled, Commissions of Inquiry into Indian Affairs in the Canadas, 1828-1858.  This report 
analyzed six official inquiries by the British Canadian government into “Indian administration and social conditions 
between 1828 and 1858.”  The goal was to create “a corporate memory for the Indian department” to be utilized in 
strategies “for Indian civilization and advancement.”  Leslie asserts that these six inquiries resulted in the creation of 
an Indian policy “so enduring that, only recently, has the Federal government attempted to break from the long-
standing view of Native peoples and society established before Confederation,” John F. Leslie, Commissions of 

 

105 

 

When he took office in Upper Canada in 1836, Bond Head inherited control over an 

Indian department that had long been working to “civilize” the province’s Indigenous 

inhabitants. Bond Head’s predecessors, particularly Lieutenant Governor Sir Perigrine Maitland 

and Colonial Secretary Lord Henry Bathurst worked with intercultural brokers such as Mohawk 

leader John Norton and Mississauga chief Peter Jones to develop policies to civilize rather than 

remove Upper Canada’s Indigenous peoples. In 1825, Bathurst invested in a settlement for 

Jones’s Methodist Mississauga village along the Credit River where both Christianization and 

farming were heavily emphasized. Maitland viewed the Mississauga as backwards, pagan, and 

simple hunters. However, he believed they would be prime targets for Christianization and 

civilization when he stated, “their paganism is of a mildest character. They believe in a future 

state though debased with corporal association, and they retain among them the good principle of 

expiation for Sin, and knowledge of a superintending Providence.” Maitland approved the 

construction of twenty personal dwellings and a schoolhouse at the Mississauga’s former 

homeland on the mouth of the Credit River just twenty-five miles west of Toronto. Like Brant’s 

community on the Grand River a generation earlier, Jones’ Mississauga learned European-style 

agriculture and animal husbandry, they subdivided their lands into individual lots, and Methodist 

missionaries including Jones himself, actively proselytized to them.131 

On the American side of the border, the decades immediately following the War of 1812 

saw a tremendous rise in settler colonial encroachment and Indigenous dispossession. Between 

1815 and 1829 the United States government negotiated thirty-nine treaties with Indigenous 

 

Inquiry into Indian affairs in the Canadas, 1828-1858: Evolving a corporate memory for the Indian department 
(Ottawa: Treaties and Historical Research Centre Research Branch, Indian Affairs and Northern Development 
Canada, 1985), iii; see also Alan Taylor’s detailed work on the role of British Loyalists in Upper Canada in the War 
of 1812 in Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, & Indian Allies (New York: 
Random House, 2010). 

 
131 See note 22 in Leslie, Commissions of Inquiry, 13. 

 

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groups from the Great Lakes and Ohio Valley regions. Cass specifically oversaw nineteen of 

those treaties. Through it all, Cass continued to express his belief both in official correspondence 

and in public addresses disseminated through newspapers that Indigenous peoples were doomed 

to die off in the wake of the spread of settler society. He also boldly articulated such beliefs in 

his treaty negotiations, urging Indigenous groups to remove west of the Mississippi River long 

before the passing of Jackson’s Indian Removal Act. However, in all of his dealings, Cass was 

frequently confounded by a group of Potawatomi from the St. Joseph area of southwest 

Michigan.132 

  On the eve of the War of 1812, the disparate Potawatomi of Michigan, Indiana, and Illinois 

did not constitute a unified political body like the Haudenosaunee. Rather, these Potawatomi 

organized into many distinct bands or villages that cohered around kinship networks and shared 

cultural practices and language. As was so often the case in the frontier regions of North 

America in the nineteenth century, local interests and circumstances governed the behavior and 

perspectives of both Indigenous peoples and settler societies much more than larger-scale 

political alliances or directives. In the years between the Revolution and the War of 1812, the 

various Potawatomi groups of the Great Lakes largely allied with the British who continued to 

supply them with presents in the form of foodstuff, ammunition, cloth, and other necessities, but 

as individual bands, these Potawatomi were generally much more indebted to the local traders, 

diplomats, and missionaries who lived among them and contributed to their immediate welfare 

on a daily basis. 

 

In this era, Cass and his contemporaries increasingly looked to the fertile lands of northern 

Indiana, eastern Illinois, and southern Michigan for the next wave of land cession treaties. These 

132 Prucha, American Indian Treaties, 135. 

 

 

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were the lands inhabited by the many bands that made up the Potawatomi. At this time, the 

Potawatomi underwent considerable band realignments, first after 1795 with the end of the 

Northwest Indian Wars, and then again after the War of 1812. In both instances, the resumption 

of peacetime existence resulted in geographical relocations and geopolitical alterations. The 

Potawatomi bands located along nexuses of American traffic fell within the influence of U.S. 

“civilization” strategies. These disparate bands, though still united as a cultural group and locked 

together through bonds of kinship, divided sharply over their local circumstances. 

Geographically, the split can generally be drawn between the Potawatomi of St. Joseph and the 

Potawatomi of the Wabash River basin. The St. Joseph band of Potawatomi began to distinguish 

itself as the Woodland band, as opposed to the Prairie band of the Wabash.  

On October 23rd of 1826, Cass reported to his superiors on the treaties he concluded with 

the Potawatomi and the Miami of the Michigan-Indiana corridor. Cass contended, “It was 

impossible to procure the assent of the Pattawatamies or Miamies to a removal west of the 

Mississippi. They are not yet prepared for this important change in their situation. Time, the 

destruction of the game, and the approximation of our settlements, are necessary before this 

measure can be successfully proposed to them.” Cass firmly believed that the destruction of 

Indigenous traditional lifeways would result in destitution and a need for removal or else 

extinction. At least, this is what he articulated in both official correspondence and in his public 

addresses. He further commented, “It was then important that the Indians should be separated 

into bands, by the intervention of our settlements. As long as they can roam unmolested through 

the country, we may in vain expect either to reclaim them from the savage life they lead, or to 

induce them to seek a residence where their habits and pursuits will be less injurious to us.”133 

133 Cass to James Barbour, Secretary of War, 23 Oct 1826, American State Papers: Indian Affairs, II: 684. 

 

 

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To Secretary of War James Barbour, Cass illustrated his lack of understanding of the 

woodland Potawatomi’s tactics for avoiding removal. Cass discussed the “Michigan” road that 

the 1826 treaty sought to obtain land for. He stated, “We could not purchase any particular 

district near the centre of the Pattawatamie country; but that tribe freely consented to give us land 

for the road described in the treaty, and for the settlement along it.” As historian Ben Secunda 

argues, the Potawatomi of the St. Joseph region pursued a strategy of adaptive resistance to the 

United States’ conceptions of civilization in order to prove they were different from other Great 

Lakes Indigenous groups. By welcoming the road through their country and the settlements that 

accompanied it, the woodland Potawatomi sought to gain access to the means of prosperity in an 

increasingly western world. Adaptation to western agricultural practices, private property, formal 

education, and Christianity all served as evidence that these Potawatomi would not be subject to 

the fate that Cass so vehemently articulated all Indians were doomed to suffer.134 

These Woodland Potawatomi continued to vex Cass for the next decade. Responding to 

the confederacies of the late eighteenth century and the War of 1812, Cass and his 

contemporaries constantly sought to divide Indigenous groups according to their local interests in 

order to influence them to sign individual land cession treaties without the approval of the 

confederacy. However, this tactic backfired when Leopold Pokagon and his Woodland 

Potawatomi insisted on their individual identity as distinct from the other Potawatomi, and as 

deserving of protection from removal thanks to their progress in “civilization.” At the 

proceedings of the Treaty of Chicago in 1833, Pokagon rose to the council and stated, “Some of 

us are called ‘wood Indians’ altho [sic] we are Potawattamies, and others are called ‘Prarie 

Indians.’ You have, my fathers, asked us to sell our Land to our Great father. We do not know 

134 Cass to James Barbour, Secretary of War, 23 Oct 1826, American State Papers: Indian Affairs, II: 684. 

 

 

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what land you want.” Pokagon’s village at the time of the Chicago treaty enjoyed a strong 

reputation as being among the largest and most prosperous in the region. The key to the 

Woodland Potawatomi’s distinction and prosperity was their geographic location. Literally 

located at the crossroads of settler traffic (the intersections of the Chicago Road, which 

connected Detroit to Chicago, and the Michigan Road, which connected Indianapolis to Grand 

Rapids), the Woodlands Potawatomi enjoyed a constant influx of trade goods, as the road 

ensured a continual stream of settler traffic passed through their lands instead of onto their 

lands.135 

Under the leadership of Pokagon, the Woodland Potawatomi, like Brant’s Mohawk a 

generation before, employed strategies of adaptability that allowed them to capitalize on the 

changing environment of their homelands in order to survive and to resist displacement. These 

Woodland Potawatomi resisted American conceptions of “Tribal” organizations as they 

emphasized their own local authority and governmental autonomy. For Leopold and his 

community, the most important thing was remaining in their homelands. If they needed to adopt 

certain farming practices or religious affiliation, this was a small price to pay. The Woodland 

Potawatomi actively sought out the supplies and improvements that came with close proximity to 

settler society via the Michigan Road. They even initially welcomed Baptist missionary Isaac 

McCoy before they realized he favored removal. Then they incessantly appealed for Catholic 

priests to establish a mission among them as the Jesuits had a century before. They also engaged 

directly with the federal government’s “civilization policy, a plan that precipitated the removal 

policy, which threatened to forcibly separate the tribe from all of its holdings.” Like Brant’s 

Mohawks and Jones’ Mississauga, these Potawatomi were able to present themselves through 

135 Ben Secunda, “To Cede or Seed? Risk and Identity Among the Woodland Potawatomi During the 

Removal Period,” Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology, Vol 31, 1 (Spring 2006), 57-58.  

 

 

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cultural hybridity and acculturation that included both Catholic conversion and the maintaining 

of Potawatomi traditions.136 

While Pokagon’s Woodland Potawatomi were able to use the benefits of the Michigan 

Road to improve their lands and adapt to a more sedentary lifestyle, other Potawatomi who were 

more distant from the centers of civilization such as urban locations and crossroads were less 

inclined to embrace these strategies of adaptive resistance. For these more rural Potawatomi, the 

notion of trading their lands, which were constantly under threat of settler encroachment, seemed 

reasonable so long as they stood to gain something in return, such as a comparable territory in 

the West where they were less likely to deal with encroachment.137 

Cass focused on these amenable rural Potawatomi because they supported his public 

claims. Throughout both his tenure as Michigan’s territorial governor and as Jackson’s Secretary 

of War, Cass employed rhetoric that mythologized Indigenous peoples in order to win over 

popular and governmental support for his policies on Indian Affairs. Following the War of 1812, 

American treaty commissioners and policy makers throughout the Great Lakes region, often led 

by Cass, created a narrative of British abandonment and the need for Indigenous peoples to 

embrace American settlers. Although the U.S. Congress did not pass the Indian Removal Act 

until 1830, actual dislocation began at the local and territorial levels when treaties provided 

Indians new lands west of the Mississippi in return for ceding their lands in the Old Northwest.  

 

In the 1820s and 1830s, Cass tapped into this rhetoric to paint Indigenous peoples of the Great 

Lakes as not only savage and incapable of assimilating into American civilization, but also as 

truly dangerous to American life on the frontier and an obstacle to the spread of American 

society and institutions due to the fact they were constantly stirred to violence by the British. 

 

136 Secunda, “To Cede or Seed,” 59. 
137 Secunda, “To Cede or Seed,” 60. 

 

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These early narratives, penned by settlers, colonial administrators, and backers of frontier 

settlement initiatives overlooked the violence and destruction caused by the encroachments of 

settler society. The fact that such writers and speakers almost always had something to gain by 

the removal of Indians from the frontier belies the myth of Indian savagery spurred on by a 

manipulating British nemesis. 

In 1827, the year after negotiating with the Potawatomi for the Michigan Road, Cass 

published a polemic entitled, Remarks on the Policy and Practice of the United States and Great 

Britain that decried the British Empire’s handling of Indian affairs in North America. Offering 

sympathy for the First Nations in British Canada, Cass stated plainly, “their actual relations with 

the British government may be emphatically stated in a few words. They were useful, and were 

used, in war to fight, and in peace to trade.” Cass published widely, describing the ways in 

which the United States exhibited more integrity and fairness in its dealings with Indigenous 

peoples than did the British Empire. Later in the article, Cass made his purpose clear. British 

journals had been speaking ill of the United States’ treatment of Indigenous peoples both in 

policy and practice. Cass expressed revulsion at the manner in which these British authors 

criticized United States’ policy and its makers.138  

Throughout this and other publications, Cass illustrated a deep desire to control public 

opinion, especially in constructing a sense of frontier nationalism that argued for American 

superiority, mainly through its dealings with Indian nations and the obtaining of Indian lands. 

Cass argued, “imposing charges have gone forth to the world against us, and our relations with 

our aboriginal neighbors… The subject has been frequently discussed in the British journals, and 

always in a tone of reproof and severity.” Given his long tenure as Territorial Governor of 

138 Lewis Cass, Remarks on the Policy and Practice of the United States and Great Britain in their 

Treatment of the Indians (Boston: Frederick T. Gray, 1827), 7-8.  

 

 

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Michigan, in which he was tasked with Indian diplomacy and policy, Cass took particular 

offense to these journals’ remarks. He expressed an immediate desire to set public opinion right. 

He referred to these British commentators as slanderers. Most importantly, Cass insisted his 

belief that the only way to address these unfound criticisms was “through the same medium, the 

press, in which they have been conveyed.” Cass made it his mission to fight British criticisms in 

a public domain. He spent much of his career dedicated to the constructing of a narrative in 

which the United States owed part of its success as a nation to the affairs on the frontier, where 

local authorities like he, not the federal government per se, determined the course of events.139 

In 1830, Cass delivered an address in the proceedings leading up to the formation of the 

Board in New York City for the Emigration, Preservation, and Improvement of the Aborigines of 

America. Cass took this occasion to describe to the American public the general state of Indians 

in the United States. He began by arguing, “the destiny of the Indians… has long been a subject 

of deep solicitude to the American government and people. Time, while it adds to the 

embarrassments and distress of this part of our population, adds also to the interest which their 

condition excites, and to the difficulties attending a satisfactory solution of the question of their 

eventual disposal.” Implicit in this statement and strewn throughout the rest of his address was a 

sense of inevitability. According to Cass, Indians were vanishing, and all that was left was how 

best to treat them with dignity before they were gone.140 

While Cass lamentingly detailed the ways that the expansion of the United States had led 

to declension for Indigenous peoples east of the Mississippi, he also disclaimed, “it would be 

miserable affectation to regret the progress of civilization and improvement, the triumph of 

 

139 Cass, Remarks on the Policy and Practice, 25-27. 
140 Lewis Cass, Considerations on the Present State of the Indians, and their Removal to the West of the 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mississippi (New York: Arno Press, 1975)  
 

 
, 2. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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industry and art, by which the regions have been reclaimed, and over which freedom, religion, 

and science are extending their sway.” For Cass the greater good, which was the progress 

associated with the spread of civilization, outweighed the destruction of Indigenous peoples and 

their cultures.141 

Cass depicted Indians as a nomadic people who depended on hunting and he argued that 

as settlements advanced westward, the game that Indigenous peoples relied upon retreated 

further and further away. Cass also insisted that Indians never cultivated crops in a manner that 

could sustain them, owing mostly to the fact that in Indigenous communities, men refused to 

farm and left it completely in the hands of Indigenous women. He also maintained that since 

Indigenous peoples had no regard for the future seasons, they did not actively store excess crops 

to get them through the winter. Of course, Cass was nothing if not consistent. The same rhetoric 

he utilized to sway public opinion, he employed frequently in his direct dealings with Indigenous 

peoples, as evidenced in the proceedings to numerous treaties.142 

For Cass, the most important factor contributing to the Indians’ decline was the 

destructive effects of alcohol. “Ardent spirits,” Cass argued, “have been the bane of their 

improvement; one of the principal agents in their declension and degradation.” He lauded the 

government’s several attempts to prevent or at least limit the sale of alcohol to Indians, but he 

ultimately contended, the task proved too difficult. Rather, Cass maintained there was no 

explaining the reason for “the inordinate attachment displayed by the Indians to ardent spirits,” 

for him it simply was an indisputable fact. Cass maintained that of all the causes of Indian 

declension, alcoholism was something to be mourned; yet it remained an inevitability.143 

 

141 Cass, Considerations on the Present State, 4. 
142 Cass, Considerations on the Present State, 5. 
143 Cass, Considerations on the Present State, 6. 

 

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The idea of Indian declension in the 1830s also fueled the Canadian debate about Indian 

removal. When Bond Head was appointed Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada, the Colonial 

Secretary asked him to investigate the social and economic conditions of the Indians in his 

province followed by new proposals for future Indian policies. After Bond Head spent the 

summer of 1836 visiting numerous Indian villages in the province, he concluded this progress 

“was not only stagnant, but impossible.” This was of course after he praised Jones’s Mississauga 

settlement. He fully subscribed to the theory that Indians could not acculturate and were thus a 

doomed race amidst the rising tide of civilization. In fact, Bond Head dismissed the success so 

widely heralded by his predecessors concerning the Mississauga settlement at the Credit as a 

mere aberration that itself was doomed to fail amidst continual exposure to white society. This is 

likely attributed to various complaints raised by the Mississauga through their Methodist 

missionaries that, the irreligious settlers “of the lowest and most immoral class…violate the Holy 

Sabbath…(and) by their examples and persuasion tempt the Indians to do the same.” Like Cass, 

Bond Head refused to allow for a dissenting view of Indigenous advancement. He believed it 

was his mission to save this doomed race, and it would not happen via assimilation or uplift, but 

by segregation and cultural isolation.144 

Bond Head, like Cass in the United States, refuted the reported successes of 

Christianization and civilizing progress of Indians in Upper Canada. He believed the attempts to 

uplift the province’s Indians was not only a failure, but “that congregating them for the purpose 

of civilization has implanted many more vices than it has eradicated.” Bond Head argued that 

because of this, “the greatest kindness we can perform towards these intelligent, simple-minded 

people, is to remove and fortify them as much as possible from all communication with the 

144 Leslie, Commissions of Inquiry, 17 and 41 (see notes 21-22). 

 

 

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whites.” In Bond Head’s opinion, even in cases where apparent progress had been made, such as 

at the Credit River, the influences of vice in white society, primarily alcohol, and the greed, 

prejudice, and machinations of white settlers hungering for Indian lands would ultimately prove 

insurmountable for Upper Canada’s Indigenous peoples.145   

Bond Head first altered established Indigenous land policies and then began securing 

their lands as a means of financing Canada’s Indian Department. During his tour of the province, 

Bond Head secured purchases from various Indian groups including 23,000 islands from the 

Ojibwe and Odawa at Manitoulin Island, “a million and a half acres of the very richest land in 

Upper Canada” from the Saugeen Indians, two-thirds of a “hunting ground of rich land of six 

miles square” from the Huron in the neighborhood of Amherstburg, and “six miles square of 

black rich land, situated on the banks of the Thames river” from the Moravian Indians. Bond 

Head explained to Lord Glenelg that his plan was to use the rich lands ceded from the Indians to 

pay the expenses of the Indian department in Upper Canada.146 

Bond Head also revealed to his superiors his plans for removal of Upper Canada’s Indian 

populations to “Manitoulin, and other islands in Lake Huron; the locality being admirably 

adapted for supporting them, but not for white men.” Bond Head reasoned that lands rich in good 

soil and thus valuable to white men, were of little value to Indians beyond the game they 

contained, which he argued, would be diminished by the tide of settlers and farmers flocking into 

the region. Bond Head clearly insisted, “the greatest kindness we can do them is to induce them, 

as I have done, to retreat before what they may justly term the accursed progress of 

civilization.”147  

 

145 Bond Head, “Memorandum on the Aborigines of North America,” A Narrative, Appendix A, 4. 
146 Bond Head, “Memorandum on the Aborigines,” 4-5. 
147 Bond Head, “Memorandum on the Aborigines,” 5-6. 

 

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Like many nineteenth-century romantic writers, Bond Head saw white settler society in 

Upper Canada as corrupt, greedy, selfish, and destructive. On the other hand, he described the 

Indigenous peoples he met as naïve, innocent, and close to nature.  As such, Bond Head argued 

that Indians were not properly equipped to defend themselves from the manipulating schemes 

and vices of white society.  For such reasons, Bond Head contended, “that Her Majesty’s 

Government should continue to advise the few remaining Indians who are lingering in Upper 

Canada to retire upon the Manitoulin and other islands in Lake Huron, or elsewhere, towards the 

north-west.”148 

Though Bond Head was dismissive of dissenting opinions, they still existed, especially 

among the Mississauga. In his journal, Peter Jones criticized Bond Head’s removal policies. On 

Monday, July 24th of 1837, Jones visited the Narrows Mission followed by the Indian settlement 

at Coldwater during a missionary tour. Jones remarked of the Narrows, “I was sorry to perceive 

that these people have almost wholly neglected their planting. This is some of the fruits of His 

Excellency Sir F. B. Head’s administration of Indian affairs.” The following day, Jones 

described the “settlement of Indians appears to be quite broken up, and the fields are growing 

over with weeds and bushes. Another exhibition of our Governor’s measures with the Indians.” 

In his meeting with Lord Glenelg in August of 1838, Jones offered his opinion about 

resettlement to Manitoulin, “I told His Lordship that I had visited the Island; that, in my opinion, 

it was very unfit for an Indian settlement, as the Island was rocky, and the soil was very poor; 

that the Indians objected to their settling on that Island.” Jones also shared these opinions with 

other Methodists who encouraged him to contest Bond Head in London.149  

 

148 Bond Head, “Memorandum on the Aborigines,” 6. 
149 Jones, Life and Journals, 384, 385, 405; Donald B. Smith, Sacred Feathers: The Reverend Peter Jones 

(Kahkewaquonaby) and the Mississauga Indians (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987, 164-65. 

 

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While Bond Head successfully managed to relocate numerous Indigenous communities 

throughout Upper Canada to the new reserves on Manitoulin Island, Jones and his Mississauga 

fought back. Initially, various Ojibwe communities throughout Upper Canada spoke openly of a 

rebellion, but Jones like his predecessor Brant, was able to convince his followers to seek a more 

peaceful resolution through Britain’s legal channels. Jones sent a letter to his uncle and fellow 

Methodist minister John Sunday who was in England on a ministry tour at the time. Jones 

informed him of the situation and asked him to apply for aid among London’s religious and 

political circles. Sunday appealed to two leading figures among the newly formed Aborigines 

Protection Society, Thomas Hodgkin and the queen’s cousin Sir Augustus d’Este. In the ensuing 

months, after Indigenous tempers cooled, these powerful friends invited Jones to travel to 

England in order to petition the Queen directly on behalf of his Mississauga community. There, 

Jones came across Britain’s colonial secretary, Lord Glenelg, one of Brant’s former allies in his 

many land battles with British settlers and colonial administrators in Upper Canada. 

To Glenelg, Jones expressed his anxiety that without a proper title, administrators like 

Bond Head would be able to manipulate the Mississauga out of their lands. Glenelg, deeply 

impressed by Jones and the success of his Mississauga settlement told him, “Our forefathers the 

ancient Britons were once as barbarous as the North American Indians are; and as Christianity 

has made our nation what it is, surely it will do the same for the Indian tribes.” Glenelg 

appreciated the Mississauga’s progress, and he saw for them a hopeful future. With Glenelg’s 

help, Jones earned an official audience with Queen Victoria herself. Due to his oratory, and with 

Glenelg’s recommendation, the Queen granted the Mississauga title to their land deeds.150  

150 Smith, Sacred Feathers, 164-69. 

 

 

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Given the firm top-down authority structure of the British Empire, Bond Head could 

largely ignore the voices of contention around him. He instead sought his approval mostly from 

Lord Glenelg, his direct superior. However, Bond Head did manage to alienate many of his 

fellow colonial administrators, which helped contribute to the Rebellions of 1837 and 1838. It 

was only after he was recalled to England following this political turmoil that Bond Head put pen 

to paper to justify his actions for the British reading public. When it came to Indian Affairs, 

Bond Head saw little reason to seek public support until after the fact. Meanwhile in the United 

States, Cass faced an ever-present court of public opinion. Being a good Jeffersonian Democrat, 

Cass saw newspapers and the dissemination of public information as the great check on 

government. For Cass and his contemporaries, writing and speaking about his actions as they 

occurred helped him to legitimize his every move while also asserting a place of prominence for 

the Great Lakes in the forging of the American national identity. 

Cass proved extremely adept at selling himself to the public. He positioned himself as an 

educated man on the frontier engaging in ethnography and fact-finding for American posterity. 

In an Address Before the Association of the Alumni of Hamilton College, which he delivered in 

August of 1830, Cass exclaimed, “the physical and intellectual energies of man have never 

gained a prouder victory, than upon this continent.” Cass used this speech to describe the 

importance of a national public opinion, particularly the dissemination of newspaper journalism, 

in creating a sense of U.S. nationalism and providing a constant check on the government and 

institutions by a responsible and informed public body.151 

In prose that was echoed sixty years later by Frederick Jackson Turner, Cass emphasized 

the importance of lands and resources of the North American West as the defining characteristic 

151 Cass, “Address before…Hamilton College,” 5. 

 

 

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for American exceptionalism. Inherently connected to this landscape and process of expansion, 

Cass argued, was the conquest of Indians and the hardiness required for settlers on the frontier. 

Six years before Bond Head opted to remove Upper Canada’s Indigenous peoples, Cass tapped 

into the myth of the vanishing Indian by stating, “but now the feeble remnants of this primitive 

race are strangers in the land of their fathers. In their own language, they are travelling to the 

setting sun, leaving their inheritance to us and our children.” This sense of an inheritance proved 

so central to the identity of frontier nationalists, men like Cass who increasingly argued for the 

central role that settler colonists play in the transformation of Indian-dominated lands to nodes of 

Industry and transportation such as the city of Chicago.152 

Like Bond Head, Cass maintained that Indians had made no progress in their two 

hundred years of exposure to Europeans. He again argued, “their moral and their intellectual 

condition have been equally stationary. And in the whole circle of their existence, it would be 

difficult to point to a single advantage which they have derived from their acquaintance with the 

Europeans.” However, rather than blaming Euro-Americans for Indian degradation as Bond 

Head did, Cass maintained, “there must then be an inherent difficulty, arising from the 

institutions, character, and condition of the Indians themselves.” Cass truly celebrated settler 

society, and fervently maintained Indigenous peoples were nothing but a bar to the spread of 

civilization. If there was something keeping Indians from civilizing, it was surely their own 

fault.153   

Arguing directly against the attitudes and policies espoused by Canadian administrators, 

Cass dismissed Bond Head’s notion of the purity of Indians in the state of nature and instead 

insisted that, “on this subject the world has had enough of romantic description. It is time for the 

 

152 Cass, “Address before…Hamilton College,” 6. 
153 Cass, Considerations on the Present State, 12-13. 

 

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soberness of truth and reality.” For Cass, the myth of the noble savage or good Indian was more 

a desire of the white Romantic imagination than a reporting of the facts. Cass saw Indians as 

barbarous and backward, unable to adapt with the progress of white civilization, and as such, he 

believed the United States did not owe them its paternalism. Cass coldly stated, “it is difficult to 

conceive that any branch of the human family can be less provident in arrangement, less frugal in 

enjoyment, less industrious in acquiring, more implacable in their resentments, more 

ungovernable in their passions, with fewer principles to guide them, with fewer obligations to 

restrain them, and with less knowledge to improve and instruct them.”154 

While both Cass and Bond Head seem to overlap on many points, they were clearly 

arguing for different outcomes. Cass perceived Indigenous peoples as an obstruction to the 

expansion of the U.S., its settlers, and their institutions. As such, he opposed a large number of 

sympathizers and reformers who believed, hoped, and argued Indians could be civilized and 

acculturated into American citizens over time. To combat this, Cass continually asserted the 

inevitability of Indian demise, arguing the only humanitarian recourse was to get them as far 

away from white society as possible, and in doing so at least buy them a little time. Bond Head 

on the other hand was one of those sympathizers. He did, however, agree with Cass that Indians 

needed to be removed, but not because he wanted to open up the continent further for white 

expansion. Rather, Bond Head expressed legitimate concern for a people he depicted as noble 

and innocent, and completely undeserving of the violence they faced from incoming settler 

colonists. In either case, both leaders proved adept at using the boom of print culture to affect 

public opinion. They each employed thematic rhetoric they knew would invoke sympathy among 

their readers in order to justify their actions. Ultimately, the result of both of these instances of 

154 Cass, Considerations on the Present State, 13. 

 

 

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ideological reimagining of the state of Indians on the continent led to their further dispossession. 

Indians throughout the Great Lakes, while being marginalized in the settler colonial narratives, 

also faced the tremendous loss of life, health, rights, and liberty that resulted with removal, both 

forced and voluntary. The following chapter delves further into the narrative of frontier 

nationalism as mid-century Great Lakes novelists also sought to depict life in the region as 

critical to the growth of the United States and Canada. 

 
 
 

 

 

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CHAPTER THREE: 

 

FRONTIER NATIONALISM AND THE LITERARY LINEAGE OF TURNER’S FRONTIER 

THESIS 

 

 

 

Before the War of 1812, Chicago was little more than a small fort and an Indian trading 

post on the western edge of the territory that the United States claimed but could not yet control. 

Chicago’s first novelist and earliest historian, Juliette Magill Kinzie described the location on the 

eve of the war as “a remote outpost of the American frontier. It could hardly be called a 

settlement, as the only inhabitants without the garrison were the family of [John Kinzie], and the 

few Canadians…who were attached to the same establishment.” In this peripheral setting on 

August 15, 1812, Captain Nathan Heald, the commanding officer at Fort Dearborn, received 

word that the United States had declared war on Great Britain. A British and Indian contingent 

had taken Michilimackinac so Heald was ordered to abandon the fort and withdraw to Fort 

Wayne, a hundred and sixty miles to the east. Shortly after starting out, over five hundred allied 

warriors led by the region’s Potawatomi attacked Heald’s party of fifty-six troops, and twenty-

seven civilians. By the end of the short battle, fifty-two Americans lay dead, with the rest 

captured, and later ransomed at Detroit. Throughout the nineteenth century, this conflict became 

embedded in the national memory as the “Massacre of Fort Dearborn.”155 

Chicago’s population exploded when the U.S.-Canada border solidified following the 

War of 1812. The region’s settler society correspondingly contributed to the burgeoning print 

culture that played such a crucial role in the creation of an early American national identity. 

155 Mrs. John H Kinzie (Juliette Magill), Wau-bun: The Early Day in the Northwest, edited by Eleanor 

Kinzie Gordon (Chicago and New York: Rand, McNally & Company, 1901), 9. 

 

 

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Utilizing the rhetoric popularized by frontier administrators Lewis Cass and Sir Francis Bond 

Head, these settlers increasingly articulated a sense of frontier nationalism as they asserted their 

region’s importance to the growth of the nation. In the United States, a large part of this process 

depended on the creation of a national literature that could distinguish the United States from its 

European forebears. While early literary figures such as James Fennimore Cooper and Henry 

Wadsworth Longfellow contributed to this national identity by romanticizing Indians and 

frontier settlers alike, Great Lakes authors Juliette Kinzie and Major John Norton adapted this 

trope in their historical accounts of the Battle of Fort Dearborn to emphasize the exceptionalism 

of the frontier experience. 

This chapter explores the significance of the frontier in the minds of early nineteenth-

century Americans and to some degree Canadians as they wrestled with emerging notions of 

nationalism and created the genre of frontier literature following the War of 1812. As argued 

earlier, this dissertation uses the term “frontier” as early nineteenth-century thinkers would have 

understood it. In a questionnaire from 1801, Joseph Brant and his protégé John Norton used the 

term to describe the Seneca, or the western-most of the Haudenosaunee. Both Brant and Norton 

argued that the Iroquoian term for the Seneca, “Ronninhohond,” means “door of the house,” 

which Brant stated was “in consequence of their frontier situation,” and Norton reiterated, “they 

were the frontier nation to the Westward.” These Mohawk leaders saw the Ohio Valley as the 

western frontier, not because of its relation to the United States, but as it was a wilderness, home 

to less “civilized” Indigenous groups compared to the more advanced Six Nations 

Confederacy.156  

 

156 Questionnaire responses by Brant and Norton in Douglas W. Boyce, “A Glimpse of Iroquois Culture 

Through the Eyes of Joseph Brant and John Norton,” American Philosophical Society 117, no. 4 (15 August 1973), 
289, 292. 

 

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For mid-century Great Lakes writers Juliette Kinzie and Major John Norton, the frontier 

was similarly the territory on the fringes of civilization where social conventions were 

determined more by local conditions than by Western customs. These writers saw the frontier as 

a place where a knowledge of Indigenous cultural norms and language could mean the difference 

between life and death. Relying on the myth of the “good and bad Indian,” these authors fully 

acknowledged Indians could be either “civilized” or savage. The difference depended on 

adaptability. For Great Lakes writers, unlike the frontier administrators that preceded them, 

Indians were not merely destined to disappear. Rather, both Indians and whites could be equally 

noble or ignoble, and survival in the frontier depended on an understanding of the distinction. In 

fact, the most noble figures in Kinzie’s writings were those who could seamlessly bridge 

Indigenous and white peoples like her father-in-law John Kinzie and William Wells, the white 

man who was adopted by the Miami only to later become an Indian agent in the employ of the 

United States. This chapter argues that mid-century Great Lakes writers wove the rhetoric of 

frontier nationalism into their works as they evolved assertions of their region’s exceptionalism 

from its political roots into more of a social phenomenon.  

While end of the century historians like Frederick Jackson Turner described the frontier 

as “the outer edge of the wave—the meeting point between savagery and civilization,” writing a 

half-century before him, Kinzie and Richardson simply viewed it as Indian country. Kinzie 

frequently relied on the term throughout her writings to characterize the Great Lakes region in 

the years before Chicago’s incorporation in the mid-1830s. For her, the frontier was the territory 

beyond civilized settlement where Indians and pioneers interacted mostly beyond the reach or 

oversight of government administrators. Kinzie wrote that her father-in-law’s “enterprising and 

adventurous disposition led him… to live much on the frontier. He early entered into the Indian 

 

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trade…and afterwards pushed further west.” Furthermore, Kinzie described Chicago as “a 

wilderness, peopled by savages.” For Kinzie, this was a region in which social customs and 

political concerns were malleable and influenced as much by Indigenous culture and a rugged 

environment as by American or European social conventions. Fifty years later, Turner saw on the 

frontier a process of social leveling where Euro-Americans initially adapted to the “savage” 

ways of their Indigenous counterparts before the expansion of American institutions allowed 

civilization to triumph over the wilderness. Turner’s frontier was a place from which exceptional 

conditions led to a truly unique American society, but he did not see the frontier as a place that 

necessarily fostered exceptional men and women per se. However, for Kinzie and the other mid-

century writers of frontier literature, the social opportunities available for individuals who could 

adapt to the rugged wilderness conditions is precisely what made the frontier exceptional. For 

Kinzie and Richardson, this was particularly the case for frontier women and men who could rise 

to prominence through their adaptive abilities.157 

As the previous chapter illustrates, six decades before Turner posited his frontier thesis, 

colonial and territorial administrators such as Lewis Cass and Sir Francis Bond Head articulated 

their own notions about the frontier, describing it as exceptional, and proclaiming the regional 

importance of the Great Lakes to the growth of their respective nations. In the years following 

the War of 1812, these administrators justified Indian removal policies by relying on a 

mythologized rhetoric that romanticized Indians. Simultaneously, a uniquely American form of 

literature arose thanks to authors like James Fennimore Cooper and Henry Wadsworth 

Longfellow. Relying on tropes such as the “noble and ignoble savage” and the “Vanishing 

 

157 Kinzie, Wau-bun, 225; Juliette Augusta Magill Kinzie, Narrative of the Massacre at Chicago 

[Saturday], August 15, 1892 (Chicago: Ellis & Fergus, Book and Job Printers, 1844), Second edition (Chicago: 
Fergus Printing Company, 1914), 9. 

 

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Indian,” these authors reaffirmed the sentiments of Cass and Bond Head. Writers increasingly 

romanticized the notion of the “Vanishing Indian,” firmly embedding it in the consciousness of 

America’s reading public. By the middle of the century, “eyewitness authors” writing from the 

frontier reinforced this romanticized Indian. As two of the Great Lakes region’s more popular 

authors, Juliette Kinzie and Major John Richardson wrote from personal experience; they lived 

on the frontier they wrote about, lending greater authenticity to their mythologization.158 

This chapter places recent studies on American nationalism within the framework of 

settler colonial theory in an exploration of the rise of Chicago’s foundational myth. An analysis 

of the accounts penned by Kinzie and Richardson about the Battle of Fort Dearborn illustrates 

the transition of frontier nationalism from political tracts to popular literature and Chicago’s 

early historical narrative. In 1983, Benedict Anderson argued that a nation coheres when people 

“imagined political community.” Within such a socially constructed nation, people need not 

know one another to feel a sense of oneness through a shared political identity. For Anderson, 

and for the many scholars of nationalism that followed in his footsteps, this shared sense of 

imagined community depended on the rise of mass communication and a regularization of 

information, which came with the advent of the printing press. The process of a nation seeking to 

define itself from the bottom up also illustrates what Eric Hobsbawm describes as “invented 

traditions.” For Hobsbawm, when a major social or political transformation occurs, such as the 

American Revolution, society requires the creation of new social traditions to help “ensure or 

express social cohesion and identity and to structure social relations.” Again, in the early 

 

158 For close analyses of both Cooper and Longfellow, see Robert Berkhofer, The White Man’s Indian: 
Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York: Random House, 1978); and Philip J. 
Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); for an even deeper analysis of Cooper 
specifically, see Alan Taylor, William Cooper’s Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American 
Republic (New York: Random House, 1995). 

 

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nineteenth century, the printing press and America’s burgeoning print culture helped ensure the 

malleability and inclusivity of newly developed traditions of communal imagination. When 

Major John Richardson first published his novels, they appeared in serialized form in numerous 

newspapers and were reprinted in other newspapers throughout both the Great Lakes on both 

sides of the U.S.-Canada border, as well as across the Atlantic in London.159   

Recently, historians of the early American Republic have expounded on the work of 

Anderson and Hobsbawm in their assessments of American nationalism. Benjamin Park’s notion 

of a variety of nationalisms that emerged from the bottom up following the American Revolution 

ties in directly with the sense of frontier nationalism that evolved in the Chicago region 

following the War of 1812. As Park maintains, while government officials like Cass did attempt 

to tap into and manipulate the form and direction of American nationalism, “a ‘nation’ during 

this period could, at various times, describe a community, a state, a mindset, and of course, a 

federal body, [but] it was hardly ever systematic and was rarely consistent.” Instead, anyone with 

access to the public sphere could make assertions of nationalism, and it was up to the American 

public to embrace or deny such assertions. In Chicago, this occurred first through the literature of 

the frontier generation of settlers like Juliette Kinzie, and then in the formation of the region’s 

earliest historical narrative in the decades that followed.160 

 

159 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New 

York: Verso, 1983), 6; Eric Hobsbawm, “Mass-Producing Traditions: Europe, 1870-1914,” The Invention of 
Tradition, edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terrance Ranger (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 263; 
Gordon Wood, The American Revolution: A History (New York: Modern Library, 2003); Wood, The Radicalism of 
the American Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1991); Bernard Bailyn, Faces of Revolution: Personalities 
and Themes in the Struggle for American Independence (New York: Vintage Books, 1992). 

160 Benjamin E. Park, American Nationalisms: Imagining Union in the Age of Revolutions, 1783-1833 

(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 5; for other articulations of revisionist ideas on American 
nationalism building off of Anderson, Wood, and Bailyn, see David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: 
The Making of American Nationalism, 1776-1820 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1997); 
Simon P. Newman, Parades and Politics of the Street: Festive Culture in the Early American Republic 
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997); Joyce Appleby, Inheriting the Revolution: The First 
Generation of Americans (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000); for a look at 
nationalisms based on gender, see Rosemarie Zagarri, Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early 

 

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By the 1830s, Chicago had begun its transformation from an isolated fort in the midst of 

an Indigenous-controlled landscape, to a frontier metropolis, which served as a gateway to the 

West. White settler colonists flooded into northern Illinois following the suppression of the Sauk 

during the 1832 Black Hawk War. This migration exploded even more the following year when 

Indians ceded the remainder of their lands in Illinois at the Treaty of Chicago. In attempts to 

claim ownership over the northern Illinois region, the first generation of these settler colonists 

constructed an official origin narrative that glorified their own involvement in bringing 

civilization to the Great Lakes region. Their success was dependent on convincing the public that 

the region’s Indigenous inhabitants had indeed vanished and that a vacant frontier was now open 

to settlement. Thus the same mythologizing rhetoric utilized by colonial and territorial 

administrators such as Cass and Bond Head to justify Indian removal became ingrained in public 

memory by these “frontier historians.” Like Cass and Bond Head, popular regional authors used 

their writing to assert claims that both the young United States and the burgeoning colony of 

Upper Canada depended on their frontier societies to fuel national growth. These authors 

embedded in the public memory notions of frontier exceptionalism, which they insisted was the 

key to the future success of their respective nations.161  

The previous two chapters analyzed Indigenous-white encounters and diplomacy in the 

eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Great Lakes through a settler colonial lens. This chapter 

engages with the discussion of language and narrative construction that emerged as a tool of 

 

American Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); Mary Kelley, Learning to Stand and 
Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America’s Republic (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina 
Press, 2006); Sam Haselby, The Origins of American Religious Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 
2015). 

161 According to William Cronon, boosters and capitalists on the eastern seaboard sought to sell the notion 

of Chicago as a future metropolis by referring to it as “the gateway between East and West.” Cronon argues 
Chicago’s geographic location at the mouth of the Chicago River on Lake Michigan made it the ideal location to tap 
into the resource-rich hinterlands of the rest of the Midwest, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West 
(New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1991), 92. 

 

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settler societies, which influenced public opinion and governmental policy. While Cass and Bond 

Head realized their regional political ambitions and justified their administrative actions through 

their writing, by the middle of the nineteenth century, regional authors such as Kinzie and 

Richardson relied on that same rhetoric to entertain audiences and to extol their own frontier 

experiences. In a 2019 issue of The William and Mary Quarterly, Jeffrey Ostler and Nancy 

Shoemaker addressed the applicability of settler colonial theory as a framework for 

understanding early American history. Ostler argued that, “As settlers killed, removed, 

assimilated, and marginalized Native peoples to wrest the land from them, settlers justified their 

actions with racial logics and romanticized histories that separated Natives from their lands, both 

actually and figuratively, to privilege settler possession.” This chapter utilizes Ostler’s logic to 

illustrate the ways that the “regional frontier literature” of the Great Lakes romanticized and 

vanquished Indians from the landscape in order to facilitate settler land acquisition. Kinzie and 

Richardson both focused on particular historical events, in which they valorized frontier 

characters by emphasizing the same traits that Turner later argued were both the cause and result 

of American exceptionalism.162  

In order for settler societies to legitimize their pioneering roots, they needed to disavow 

the foundational violence associated with settler colonialism. This was generally accomplished 

through the manipulation of historical narratives and memory, which according to Lorenzo 

Veracini, resulted in “derogatory images implying an enhanced degree of mobility [that] are 

consistently and recurrently projected onto indigenous people and their lifestyles.” For the 

writers of regional frontier literature, this played out through a simultaneous erasure of 

Indigenous peoples from the present or future by describing their demise in the past. As Veracini 

162 Jeffrey Ostler and Nancy Shoemaker, “Settler Colonialism in Early American History: Introduction,” 

The William and Mary Quarterly, 76, no. 3 (July, 2019), 363. 

 

 

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argues, these narratives are crucial to the success of settler colonial conquest as they are “a 

fundamental part of everyday life, and their construction constitutes an act that allows nations, 

communities, and individuals to make sense of the world.” Frontier writers such as Kinzie and 

Richardson romanticized the relationships between Great Lakes Indians and the pioneer 

generation of settlers by painting a picture where good Indian allies sided with their settler 

colonist neighbors over their own Indian relations, and voluntarily relinquished control over their 

homelands before choosing to move west to advance the interests of white society. For Kinzie 

and Richardson, the Battle of Fort Dearborn provided the quintessential subject to express these 

notions of frontier nationalism.163 

For over a century, this conflict has been remembered as the Massacre of Fort Dearborn. 

Writers, historians, and policy makers have argued that the death of innocent women and 

children was a radical departure from what Euro-Americans believed was their own more 

humane style of warfare. By commemorating this conflict as a massacre, these writers dismissed 

the lengthy history of violence and the brutal tactics of total warfare that the United States had 

long used to force peoples from their homelands. During the American Revolution, the 

Haudenosaunee decried General George Washington as the “Town Destroyer” when he ordered 

the total destruction of Iroquois villages, leaving women and children to starve during the winter 

months. By the late eighteenth century, violence further intensified in the Ohio River valley 

when, as president, Washington ordered the fiery annihilation of Indian villages and the 

kidnapping and imprisonment of Indigenous women and children. Despite this lengthy history of 

violence, Americans chose to label the initial skirmish that took place at Fort Dearborn during 

the War of 1812 a massacre, rather than a battle. Following an official declaration of war, 

163 The following chapter goes into much more detail about the legacy of these narratives as regional 

historians took up the pen and constructed official histories that marginalized Great Lakes Indians. 

 

 

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British-allied Indians attacked U.S. troops at Fort Dearborn. However, this highly mythologized 

“massacre” subsequently became a justification for the genocidal war that American settlers and 

administrators waged against Chicago’s Indigenous populations over the two decades that 

followed.164 

By the middle of the nineteenth century, the tale of the Massacre of Fort Dearborn 

assumed a foundational role in Chicago’s origin story. In 1844, Juliette Magill Kinzie, daughter-

in-law of acclaimed Chicago fur trader John Kinzie, wrote and published A Narrative of the 

Massacre at Chicago, in which she detailed the events leading up to and surrounding the Battle 

of Fort Dearborn. A decade later, she expanded that account by including it in her 

autobiographical regional history of the southwestern Great Lakes entitled, Wau-Bun: The 

“Early Day” in the Northwest. Kinzie relied on oral histories, collected from her father-in-law’s 

family and associates, which ironically included greater detail about Indigenous people and their 

cultures than most of her contemporaries. Kinzie’s writings then shaped what later became the 

early historical narrative of Chicago, northern Illinois, and by extension, the broader region of 

the Great Lakes.165  

Major John Richardson was a Canadian writer and a contemporary of Juliette Kinzie. A 

British veteran of the War of 1812, Richardson published widely in the genres of fiction and 

history. Like Kinzie, Richardson relied heavily upon the oral histories of his family, headed by 

another famous fur trader, John Askin. Richardson’s writing focused mostly on Canadian 

 

164 George Washington earned this nickname when he ordered his officers to wage war against the 
Haudenosaunee of the Mohawk Valley by targeting their crops, villages, and families. See Lisa Brooks, The 
Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 
117; Susan Sleeper-Smith, Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest: Indian Women of the Ohio River Valley, 
1690-1792 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 245. 

165 Kinzie, Narrative of the Massacre at Chicago; Kinzie Wau-Bun; see also Constance R. Buckley, 

“Searching for Fort Dearborn: Perception, Commemoration, and Celebration of an Urban Creation Memory” (PhD 
diss., Loyola University, 2005). 

 

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national identity, but in 1850 he turned his attention to the Battle of Fort Dearborn. The 

following year, Richardson published his novel, Hardscrabble; or, The Fall of Chicago in a 

serialized form, which he then followed with its sequel, Wau-nan-gee; or, The Massacre at 

Chicago: A Romance of the American Revolution. In both novels, Richardson, like Kinzie, 

utilized accounts of the battle’s survivors, which he encountered firsthand when he was stationed 

at Detroit during the war. The fact that Richardson’s stories were printed and reprinted in 

newspapers from Toronto to New York and in England illustrates the receptive audience that 

these tales of frontier violence had throughout the Anglo world. Like Kinzie, Richardson took 

this opportunity to assert the exceptional characteristics of life and valor on the Canadian and 

American frontier. Ironically, though Richardson dedicated much of his writing to the expression 

of a national Canadian identity, his writings were much more popular on the American side of 

the border where such expressions were merely received as frontier exceptionalism, a notion that 

superseded national borders.166 

Juliette Magill was born in Connecticut to a wealthy family in 1806. From corresponding 

with her uncle, Alexander Wolcott, Juliette learned all about life on the frontier. Wolcott was the 

Indian Agent stationed at Chicago in the 1820s and a close friend of Juliette’s future father-in-

law, John Kinzie. Throughout their correspondence, Juliette reminded her uncle of the civilized 

 

166 “John Richardson,” entry in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, 

http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/richardson_john_1796_1852_8E.html; Carl F. Klinck, “Introduction to the abridged 
edition,” John Richardson, Wacousta: or The Prophecy (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart Limited, 1967); David R. 
Beasley, The Canadian Don Quixote: The Life and Works of Major John Richardson, Canada’s First Novelist (Erin, 
ON: The Porcupine’s Quill, 1977); for more on the publishing of Richardson’s works, see Douglas Cronk, who 
argues, “Richardson advocated a national literature many years before Confederation, but had little success himself 
when trying to publish his own work in Canada. The Americans, however, were quick to see the value of 
Richardson’s work, publishing it without hesitation and, of course, without Richardson’s knowledge or sanction,” in 
Cronk, “The Americanization of Wacousta,” Recovering Canada’s First Novelist (Erin, ON: Porcupine’s Quill, Inc., 
1984), 33-34; While most of Richardson’s works, particularly his most popular Wacousta enjoyed several reprints, 
the two works focused on in this chapter, Hardscrabble and its sequel, Wau-nan-gee were both originally printed in 
New York and Philadelphia before being printed in Canada or England. For publication data, see David R. Beasley, 
The Canadian Don Quixote: the Life and Works of Major John Richardson, Canada’s First Novelist (Erin, Ontario: 
The Porcupine’s Quill, Inc., 1977), 198-202. 

 

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world he had left behind while Wolcott kindled in his niece’s imagination a yearning to travel to 

the wilderness and transcend the social confines of the East. That means came through marriage. 

After Wolcott introduced Juliette to Kinzie’s son, John Harris during a visit to Connecticut, the 

two quickly married in 1829, and shortly thereafter moved to Fort Winnebago in Wisconsin 

where John served as both the U.S. Indian agent and as Lewis Cass’s territorial secretary.167 

 

Figure 4.1: Juliette Kinzie168 

  

Juliette’s arrival in Wisconsin coincided with the escalation of tensions and the outbreak 

of violence that came to be known as the Black Hawk War. In her book, Wau-Bun, when Juliette 

167 Alexander Wolcott to Juliette Magill, Chicago, 6 November 1820, in Kathe Crowley Conn, Juliette 

 

Kinzie: Frontier Storyteller (Madison: Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2015), 13-14. 

168 Photo of Juliette Kinzie, printed in The Outing Magazine (New York: The Outing Publishing Company, 
1909), https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/10/Juliette-Augusta-Magill-Kinzie.jpg (accessed 5 May 
2020). 

 

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described this conflict, she was shocked by the violence but expressed empathy for the Sauk. 

While her husband counseled the Winnebago not to join Black Hawk and his followers, Juliette 

displayed sympathy for the Sauk cause. “They did not love the Americans—why should they? 

By them they had been gradually dispossessed of the broad and beautiful domains of their 

forefathers, and hunted from place to place.” Juliette openly criticized the United States’ 

treatment of the Sauk, “The only equivalent they had received in exchange had been a few 

thousands annually in silver and presents, together with the pernicious example, the debasing 

influence, and the positive ill treatment of too many of the new settlers upon their lands.” While 

sympathizing with the plight of men like Black Hawk, who unwillingly ceded his people’s 

homelands, Kinzie also illustrated the insensitivity of settler colonialism as she exaggerated 

Black Hawk’s defensive measures as overly aggressive and characterized them as much more 

violent than they actually were.169 

Shortly after the conclusion of the Black Hawk War, the couple moved to Chicago where 

Juliette became enmeshed in the Kinzie family. Largely based on the family’s recollections, she 

published two narratives to wide public acclaim. Wau-bun, published in both Chicago and New 

York, received favorable reviews. The May 25, 1856 edition of The New York Herald 

“recommended it strongly to the favor or our readers,” stating that it “deserves to rank with the 

best sketches of the sort that have as yet been published.” Kinzie’s writings became the 

foundation for later Chicago histories, and they offer interesting perspectives on gender, kinship, 

and white-Indigenous intercultural relations. Juliette even provided detailed descriptions of the 

various wives of well-known Indian leaders in the Chicago region, rescuing them from oblivion 

in the American historical record. In 1868, acclaimed historian Lyman Draper, the secretary for 

169 Kinzie, Wau-Bun, 312. 

 

 

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the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, met repeatedly with Kinzie because he so valued her 

historical knowledge and first-hand perspective of the kinship networks and relations of famous 

Indian chiefs of northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin. All of this illustrates the wide public 

reception and acceptance of Kinzie’s articulation of frontier nationalism.170   

In the preface to her 1844 Narrative of the Massacre at Chicago, Kinzie expressed her 

desire to preserve the history passed down orally from her husband’s family, particularly her 

sister-in-law, Margaret Helm. By focusing the narrative on her sister-in-law, Kinzie contrasted 

frontier women to their eastern counterparts, highlighting their exceptional abilities and 

comparative social freedoms. In 1812, at the time of the Fort Dearborn conflict, Margaret Helm 

was married to Lieutenant Linai Helm, the second officer in command of Fort Dearborn. 

Margaret was herself a product of the frontier violence and settler colonial tensions that 

characterized the Ohio River valley. During a raid, the Seneca had captured her mother, Eleanor 

McKillip at the age of 9, and she lived for four years in the household of Iroquois leader 

Cornplanter. Margaret’s biological father was a U.S. army captain under Anthony Wayne, and 

was killed in the campaign leading up to the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794. Four years later, 

Eleanor McKillip remarried, this time to John Kinzie. In 1804, Margaret moved with her mother 

and stepfather from Detroit to Chicago where they quickly emerged as prominent traders. 

Throughout Juliette’s Narrative, she described Margaret as possessing a frontier acumen that few 

Americans could fathom. In positioning Margaret as her central figure, Kinzie’s writing 

described a frontier where women were far less inhibited by social constraints than in the more 

 

170 Kinzie’s popularity as an author is discussed in detail by Conn, Juliette Kinzie: Frontier Storyteller; Ann 

Durkin Keating, The World of Juliette Kinzie: Chicago Before the Fire (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 
2019), 97-101; New York Herald, May 25, 1856. 

 

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populous regions to the east. This theme of independent frontier women remained prevalent in 

Juliette’s writings throughout her entire life.171 

Major John Richardson was himself a product of the complex Great Lakes kinship 

networks that were at the heart of Kinzie’s work. He was born in 1796 in the Niagara corridor, 

not far from Joseph Brant’s Mohawk settlement on the Grand River. While Richardson’s father 

served the British army as a surgeon in Upper Canada, he lived with his maternal grandfather, 

John Askin and his wife Marie Archange Barth. Richardson’s biological grandmother was most 

likely John Askin’s Odawa slave, whom he freed in 1766. However, little is known of her, and 

she disappears from the records completely by the time Askin married Marie Archange in 1772. 

Richardson never made any mention of his own Native heritage despite the fact he wrote so 

much about Indigenous people in his literature. He grew up hearing first-hand stories of frontier 

life from his step-grandmother Marie Archange. She had lived through Pontiac’s Siege of 

Detroit, which served as the basis for Richardson’s best-known work, Wacousta. Richardson also 

lived in a frontier world where strong independent women frequently handled business normally 

reserved for men in the more settled regions of North America. Marie Archange undoubtedly left 

a strong impression in Richardson’s mind as his tales abound with strong female protagonists 

who tend to stretch the social constraints of the era.172  

 

171 Kinzie, Narrative of the Massacre at Chicago, 7. 
172 Beasley, Canadian Don Quixote, 9-10; Carl F. Klinck, “Introduction,” Major John Richardson, 

Wacousta or the Prophecy (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart Limited, 1967), vi-vii; David R. Beasley, “John 
Richardson,” entry in Dictionary of Canadian Biography 
http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/richardson_john_1796_1852_8E.html. 

 

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Figure 4.2: Major John Richardson173 

  

Richardson’s childhood and adolescence were also marked by interactions with other 

well-known frontier leaders, such as Tecumseh, Isaac Brock, and Joseph Brant’s successor, the 

Mohawk chief John Norton. In 1811, Richardson’s mother died of tuberculosis, and he fell into a 

deep depression. The following year, when war broke out with the United States, he enlisted as a 

fifteen-year-old with the British army. Because the war took his mind off his mother’s death, 

Richardson later recalled his “joy at the change which had been wrought in my position, I felt 

disposed to bless the Americans for the bold step that they had taken” in declaring war. 

 

173 Frederick William Lock, “Portrait of Major John Richardson,” published in Richardson’s War of 1812, 
with Notes and a Life of the Author by Alexander Clark Casselman (Toronto: Coles Publishing Company Limited, 
1902), 
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d6/Major_John_Richardson_by_Frederick_William_Lock_%28
artist%29.jpg (accessed 16 April 2020). 

 

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Richardson fought in several battles and was captured on October 5, 1813 at the Battle of the 

Thames after Tecumseh was killed. He spent the remainder of the war as a prisoner. After the 

war, when he was released, Richardson continued to serve as an officer in the British Army. In 

1815 he sailed as an ensign to Europe where he would have fought in the Napoleonic campaigns 

had the Battle of Waterloo not ended that war.174  

That year, while marooned in London on half pay, Richardson was reunited with Major 

John Norton who was then writing his memoirs about the war. Norton remembered Richardson 

as a youth from Upper Canada, and he asked the young man to write a description of his military 

service and captivity. Richardson eagerly complied, and he accompanied it with a request for a 

recommendation of his service in hopes of returning to full pay. A few months later Richardson’s 

pay doubled, perhaps owing to Norton’s patronage. Many scholars have argued that Norton 

served as a model for the titular character in Wacousta. Norton’s mixed-ancestry and his Brant-

like ability to seamlessly bridge Indigenous and Euro/American cultures were central to 

Richardson’s writing as exemplified in the chief antagonist of Wacousta. No doubt the writing of 

Norton’s manuscript also inspired Richardson to embark on his own writing career.175 

Richardson’s initial writings focused on life along the Canadian frontier. He found 

tremendous success with Wacousta, which was first published in London as a three-volume 

collection in 1833. Wacousta was immediately republished in Philadelphia and in the Columbus 

Journal and Gazette. Following two London reprints, it was then published in New York in 

1851. Richardson’s work enjoyed several favorable reviews in both British and Canadian 

174 Major John Richardson, Eight Years in Canada: Embracing a Review of the Administrations of Lords 

Durham and Sydenham, Sir Charles Bagot and Lord Metcalfe (Montreal: H.H. Cunningham, 1847), 87. 

 

175 Beasley, Canadian Don Quixote, 37; for an in-depth analysis of John Norton’s life and his journal, see 

the newly released edition, John Norton (Teyoninhokarawen), A Mohawk Memoir from the War of 1812, introduced, 
annotated, and edited by Carl Benn. 

 

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newspapers, as well as in the United States. The Detroit Free Press described Richardson’s semi-

autobiographical The Canadian Brothers as, “an enviable eminence in that interesting and useful 

sphere of literature which embraces the blended charms of history and fiction.” The Canadian 

Brothers relied on the frontier as a source of both the author’s own personal identity and as the 

foundational notion for Canada’s burgeoning sense of nationalism. Richardson declared, “I too 

am a Canadian, but so far from endeavoring to repudiate my country, I feel pride in having 

received my being in a land where every thing attests the sublimity and magnificence of nature.” 

While popular throughout the British Empire, Norton’s work actually found more reception in 

the United States, illustrating the popularity of his own articulations of frontier nationalism.176  

Often cited as Canada’s first novelist, Richardson’s literature generally revolves around 

issues of Indigeneity, intercultural diplomacy, Indigenous dispossession, and the construction of 

public memory and national identity. Social theorist Oana Godeanu-Kenworthy analyzed The 

Canadian Brothers through a settler colonial lens to argue that early Canadian literature 

illustrates a complex system of layers of “transatlantic, hemispheric, and regional hermispheric 

networks of power, oppression, and privilege.” By using Richardson’s literature to triangulate 

“between indigenous formations and European identities” in North America, Godeanu-

Kenworthy shows how Richardson “contrasts the imperial British discourse of racial tolerance 

and British military alliances with the Natives in the War of 1812 with the brutality of American 

policies towards the Natives, in order to demonstrate American difference from the Canadian 

colonies.” However, Godeanu-Kenworthy also argues that Richardson wrote critically of 

176 For a complete list of Richardson’s publication history see Beasley, Canadian Don Quixote, 198-202; 
“Something New and Interesting,” Detroit Free Press, 6 August 1839, 2; Richardson, The Canadian Brothers, 29. 

 

 

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European imperialism and settler societies in a way that “exposes the arbitrariness and 

constructedness of the political boundaries dividing the continent.”177 

In 1848, after spending a decade in Europe, Richardson returned to Upper Canada where 

he traveled to several Indigenous communities, particularly those on Walpole Island. Like Bond 

Head before him, Richardson was a Canadian Romanticist who sought out the “authentic 

Indians” that he remembered from his youth. By this, he was looking for Indians who had not yet 

adapted to Western standards. While visiting Walpole Island, Richardson also took the 

opportunity to visit the scenes of his childhood in the Windsor-Detroit corridor. There, he read 

two differing accounts depicting the Battle of Fort Dearborn, Kinzie’s Narrative of the Massacre 

and “The Account of the Massacre” written by battle-survivor, Lieutenant Helm for Detroit 

Judge Augustus Woodward. Richardson, inspired by these works, planned a trilogy that 

romanticized Northern Illinois in the War of 1812 by focusing on the Battle of Fort Dearborn. 

While he successfully published the first two volumes as Hardscrabble in 1851 and Wau-nan-

gee in 1852, he died later that year in New York, impoverished and in relative obscurity before 

he could finish the third installment.178 

Both Richardson’s and Kinzie’s accounts of the Battle of Fort Dearborn paint a picture of 

fantastic violence and heroic figures, women and men who epitomized the exceptionalism of 

their frontier circumstances. For Kinzie and Richardson, these heroes were the intercultural 

brokers who understood and operated in the liminal space between the “civilized” world of 

Euro/Americans and the “savage” wilderness of the Great Lakes. Few characters proved more 

heroic in Kinzie’s tale than her future father-in-law John Kinzie. His resolute calmness under 

177 Oana Godeanu-Kenworthy, “Fictions of Race: American Indian Policies in Nineteenth-Century British 

North American Fiction,” Journal of American Studies, 52 (2018), 95; Richardson, Eight Years in Canada, 87. 

 

178 Beasley, Canadian Don Quixote, 168-71. 

 

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pressure and his connections with important Indians almost single-handedly accounted for the 

battle’s few survivors. In contrast, Juliette described Nathan Heald, the fort’s commander, as 

unprepared and ill-suited to deal with the precarious situation. As a professional soldier, Heald 

meticulously followed orders and conducted warfare according to western standards. But on the 

frontier, diplomacy depended on an understanding of Indigenous customs, on using surprise 

tactics, and on knowledge of the local geography to successfully ward off Indian attacks. Heald’s 

military background was nowhere near as valuable as John Kinzie’s cultural connections and 

knowledge of Indian warfare. 

A Narrative of the Massacre begins with the arrival of Potawatomi chief Winnemeg at 

Fort Dearborn a week before the battle. Winnemeg, a friend of John Kinzie’s, carried dispatches 

from the American commander at Detroit, General Hull, informing Heald that the U.S. had 

declared war on Britain, along with orders to “evacuate the fort, if practicable, and, in that event, 

to distribute all the United States’ property contained in the fort, and in the United States’ factory 

or agency, among the Indians in the neighborhood.” According to Juliette’s account, Winnemeg 

advised Heald to act against his orders and remain in the fort where they were well-protected and 

provisioned for six months. Winnemeg realized the danger they faced from hostile Indians 

should they leave the fort’s protection. Winnemeg further advised Heald that if they were 

determined to retreat, they should abandon the fort while the Indians were dividing the spoils. 

John Kinzie and the fort’s officers all agreed with Winnemeg’s advice, but Heald chose instead 

to assemble the area’s “Indians, distribute the property among them, and then ask of them an 

escort to Fort Wayne, with the promise of a considerable reward upon their safe arrival.”179 

179 Kinzie, Wau-Bun, 166-68. 

 

 

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From Juliette’s perspective, the “massacre” occurred because the Indians felt betrayed by 

Heald. When Heald finally held a council with the local Indians, he promised to provide them 

with “not only the goods lodged in the United States’ factory, but also the ammunition and 

provisions, with which the garrison was well supplied” in return for safely conducting them to 

Detroit. Shortly after the council ended, Heald changed his mind. Surmising that the Potawatomi 

would likely fight alongside the British, Heald decided it was better “to destroy all the 

ammunition except what should be necessary for the use of his own troops.” According to 

Juliette, had Heald heeded her father-in-law’s counsel, no one would have died. Instead, Heald’s 

deception directly provoked the attack that followed.180 

In Juliette’s telling, it was John Kinzie who prevented the mass killing of the fort’s 

civilians. Juliette wrote that on the morning of the battle, “Mr. Kinzie received a message from 

To-pee-nee-bee [Topinabee], a chief of the St. Joseph’s band [and future thorn in the side of 

Lewis Cass], informing him that mischief was intended by the Pottowattamies who had engaged 

to escort the detachment.” Topinabee also allegedly arranged for Kinzie and his family to travel 

safely by boat instead of accompanying the troops on foot. However, Kinzie nobly declined this 

offer, “as he believed that his presence might operate as a restraint upon the fury of the savages, 

so warmly were the greater part of them attached to himself and his family.” For Juliette, her 

father-in-law clearly embodied the frontier characteristics that set Great Lakes settlers, 

administrators, and traders apart from their Eastern counterparts. According to Juliette, it was 

only the affection for their white friends, the Kinzies, that held back the full tide of Indian 

violence toward the retreating Americans.181 

 

180 Kinzie, Wau-Bun, 170-72. 
181 Kinzie, Narrative of the Massacre, 28. 

 

143 

 

Richardson also glorified John Kinzie in Wau-nan-gee, but he placed greater emphasis on 

the valor of two other frontier figures, Rebekah Heald (Captain Heald’s wife) and her uncle 

William Wells, the epitome of the hero in Great Lakes frontier literature. When Wells was still a 

child, his family moved west into Kentucky during the American Revolution, one of the earliest 

to do so. The frontier violence that accompanied settler encroachment into Indian country played 

a pivotal role in Wells’s upbringing. In 1784, he was kidnapped as a child by a group of Miami 

and adopted into the family of famed Miami chief, Little Turtle. When his biological family later 

attempted to ransom his return, Wells chose instead to remain with the Miami, with whom he 

fought against encroaching American settlers and soldiers. In the Northwest Indian Wars of the 

1780s and 1790s, Wells’s Miami village on the Wabash was destroyed, and the U.S. military 

captured and imprisoned his second Miami wife and child. While fighting alongside the Miami 

in Little Turtle’s pan-Indian confederacy, Wells was unexpectedly reunited his fraternal brother, 

Samuel (Rebekah’s father). Wells later chose to defect and serve the United States as an 

interpreter and scout in return for the ransom of his Miami wife and child, which he also claimed 

was due to his affection for his brother. However, Wells made this decision after learning that the 

British intended to end all aid to Little Turtle’s confederacy in future battles with the Americans. 

This move Wells lived the remainder of his life in the service of both the United States and the 

Miami, though he was never fully trusted by U.S. Administrators.182 

 

182 For a thorough biography of William Wells including an exhaustive bibliography of sources, see 

William Heath, William Wells and the Struggle for the Old Northwest (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 
2015); For Well’s relationship with the Miami, see Harvey Lewis Carter, The Life and Times of Little Turtle: The 
First Sagamore Chief of the Wabash (Urbana: The University of Illinois Press, 1987); see also Richard White, The 
Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (New York: Cambridge 
University Press, 1991), 500-01; Colin G. Calloway, The Victory with No Name: The Native American Defeat of the 
First American Army (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); Susan Sleeper-Smith, Indigenous Prosperity and 
American Conquest: Indian Women of the Ohio River Valley, 1690-1792 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina 
Press, 2018), 267, 288-294. 

 

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In Richardson’s novel, Wells and his niece Rebekah both embodied frontier knowledge 

and fortitude. While in Kinzie’s Wau-bun, Captain Heald alone made the decision to destroy the 

arms, ammunition, and alcohol rather than deliver it to the Indians as he had promised, in Wau-

nan-gee, Richardson included a scene in which Kinzie confronted Heald and warned him that 

such destruction and deception would certainly enrage the Indians. In this scene, Rebekah 

overheard the argument and then masterminded the plan to deliver only a single cask of powder 

and a single barrel of alcohol to the Indians so they could destroy the rest. She argued they 

should simply lie to the Indians about how much their stores contained. Rebekah asserted, they 

that if they at least gave the Indians this little bit, they would “express disappointment, even 

indignation; but that is a very secondary consideration, when we consider the importance of 

withholding the gift.” She argued that one cask of powder divided among all the Indians would 

“not amount to much,” but it would at least avoid a sense of complete betrayal. When Heald 

asked his wife what was to stop the Indians from finding the truth of their deception should they 

force their way into the fort, she advised Winnemeg to call a council to distract the Indians while 

they destroyed the rest by emptying them into the well. Rebekah’s quick thinking and boldness 

stood at stark contrast to her husband’s seeming ineptitude. Like Kinzie, Richardson created 

“fictive strong women” to feed the narrative of frontier nationalism.183 

Wells arrived shortly after the execution of Rebekah’s plan, but just in time to save 

Headley from the immediate wrath of Pee-to-tum, Richardson’s Chippewa antagonist and leader 

of the enraged Potawatomi. Upon receiving only a single cask each of alcohol and ammunition, 

Pee-to-tum suspected Heald’s deception and confronted him. But just as he and Heald were on 

the brink of bloodshed, Wells and his party of Miami warriors arrived and diffused the situation. 

183 Richardson, Wau-nan-gee, 67-68. 

 

 

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After Pee-to-tum and the Potawatomi left the scene, Wells lamented to Heald, “is what I hear 

then true—and have I only arrived in time to be too late?” Wells, like Kinzie, Winnemeg, and 

Helm expressed his opinion that it would have been much safer to hold up in the fort. However, 

since the ammunition had been destroyed, and the well tainted, no alternative was left but to 

attempt a retreat. Wells believed they would surely all die during the retreat, but he was 

determined to go out with a fight.184  

That night, Wells and the two Healds made peace with their fate just before the 

impending battle. Wells, his niece, and her husband Captain Heald sat down for a final fanciful 

meal before they faced their certain doom the next morning. After the three agreed on their plans, 

Rebekah began preparing the meal “with a playfulness extraordinary for the occasion, but which 

was induced solely by a design to set the minds of her friends at ease, by impressing them with a 

belief that her unconcern was greater than it really was.” She asked her uncle to gather the rest of 

their friends from the garrison, stating, “we shall dine at five, becoming fashionable as we stand 

on the brink of the grave.” In true Romantic literary fashion, Richardson painted a picture of 

valor and strength despite the grimmest of circumstances. Relying on the trope of frontier 

exceptionalism, Richardson focused on the heroic posture and strength in those characters that 

were most representative of the frontier environment; for Richardson, it was Rebekah Heald and 

her uncle William Wells.185 

In the moments directly preceding the battle, Richardson further glorified Rebekah’s 

character. An ensign from the fort, ordered to accompany Mrs. Helm and her at the rear of the 

column, commented on her stunning presence. The ensign looked at the two pistols stuck 

 

184 Richardson, Wau-nan-gee, 79-83. 
185 Major John Richardson, Wau-nan-gee; or, The Massacre at Chicago: A Romance of the American 

Revolution (New York: H. Long and Brother, 1852), 84. 

 

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through her belt and remarked, “I would advise no Pottowatomie to approach too near you to-

day.” Heald then responded, “I think I may safely second your recommendation…or they may 

find that my life has not been passed in the backwoods, without some little practical knowledge 

of the use of arms.” Shortly after, when the gunfire commenced, Captain Heald recommended to 

his wife and Mrs. Helm that they had best find cover. Richardson’s heroine responded calmly by 

stating, “to a soldier’s wife the field of battle were preferable on a day like this.” In Richardson’s 

account of the battle, Rebekah proved extremely adept at firing her weapons, despite the chaos 

and tension of battle. When Wells realized his niece was being targeted by a group of 

Potawatomi, he rode full speed to her rescue, and he “used the tomahawk with such effect 

without the enemy being able to guard themselves against the rapidity of his movements, that he 

soon cleared a passage to her, cleft the skull of a Pottawatomie who had reached her side, and 

was in the very act of removing her riding hat to scalp her alive.” In their bravery, prowess, and 

seeming nonchalance, these two, uncle and niece both personified the exceptional characteristics 

that epitomized life on the frontier.186 

The frontier nationalism employed earlier by administrators like Cass and later by 

Turner, found its most eloquent expression in the literature of Kinzie and Richardson in the 

middle of the nineteenth century. Kinzie and Richardson told tales of hardy fortitude and 

strength of character among frontier settlers who were acclimated to the violence and intrigue of 

Indian country. Kinzie adorns Chicago’s early history as both an actor and as its first chronicler. 

The city was officially incorporated in 1837. In the decades that followed, Kinzie’s perspective 

was particularly sought after by early historians, such as Joseph N. Balestier who referred to her 

accounts both in a speech and a pamphlet on the history of Chicago, which he delivered to the 

186 Richardson, Wau-nan-gee, 94-96. 

 

 

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Chicago Lyceum in 1840, four years before Kinzie’s first publication. Kinzie’s knowledge and 

writings have helped to solidify the experience of frontier settlers as a defining aspect of the 

American national identity. As the next chapter explores, the Chicago region’s earliest 

antiquarian historians used Kinzie’s romanticized family reminiscences as the foundation of 

Chicago’s origin story. Throughout the two centuries that followed Kinzie’s first publication, her 

frontier heroes and heroines maintained a prominent place in Chicago’s official histories and 

public commemorations.187 

Major John Richardson on the other hand was Canadian. He came of age during the War 

of 1812, where he fought to protect Upper Canada from the possibility of American invasion. 

His writings mostly cohere around the concept of Canadian nationalism. For Richardson, the 

frontier was not a westward-moving wave crashing over Indigenous lands, but rather any 

territory where white civilization met the Indigenous wilderness. Richardson wrote fiction based 

both a mixture of historical narratives, his own personal experiences on the frontier, and other 

sources he could find like Kinzie’s Narrative of the Massacre. For Richardson, the expression of 

a truly Canadian identity was based on the exceptional experience of life in the wilderness of the 

Canadian frontier, which meant both encounters with the region’s Indians and with the border 

fighting of the War of 1812. As is evidenced by his novels, Wau-nan-gee and Hardscrabble, 

Richardson’s literature reveals a certain kinship with American settlers who like he, struggled to 

survive in the Great Lakes frontier.  

By focusing his writing on Chicago during the War of 1812, Richardson revealed his 

understanding of the Great Lakes as a larger region that was wholly different from either the 

Eastern United States or the British metropole. Kinzie and Richardson sold to an international 

187 Joseph N. Balestier, The Annals of Chicago: a Lecture Delivered Before the Chicago Lyceum, January 

21, 1840 (Chicago: Fergus Printing Company, 1876); Keating, World of Juliette Kinzie, 73-75. 

 

 

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audience their notions of frontier nationalism. In an age when two fledgling nations were 

grappling with the construction of their own national identities, writings from the frontier helped 

to lay the mythological foundation of what came to be recognized as each nation’s 

exceptionalism. As these narratives were later commemorated as historical fact, they served to 

perpetuate and justify the violence of settler colonialism and the dispossession and 

marginalization of Indigenous peoples.  

 
 
 

 

 

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CHAPTER FOUR: 

 

MYTHOLOGIZING THE WHITE MAN’S FRIENDS: 

INDIAN LEADERS AND THE WRITING OF CHICAGO’S EARLY STORY 

 

Just after the Chicago Fire of 1871 reduced the wooden city to ash, Chicagoans expressed 

an obvious desire to rebuild. But a city is more than just a place filled with people and structures, 

it begins as a construct of the imagination. So, in addition to erecting new buildings, Chicagoans 

sought to redefine their place in the American imaginary, and to transcend the city’s status as 

merely a provincial town on the frontier. While in the early nineteenth century, Americans 

wrestled with how to construct a new national identity that distinguished them from their 

European forebears, by the end of the century, a new generation sought to perfect the writing of 

that identity into its history. To do so, Americans mythologized Indigenous people and their 

histories, especially when it came to the dispossession of Indians’ lands. As the two previous 

chapters illustrate, in the western territories, this played out in articulations of frontier 

nationalism as first-generation settler colonists sought to assert their own significance while the 

region’s frontier communities evolved into urban spaces. By the second half of the nineteenth 

century, Chicagoans created a discourse based on the mythical histories of the region’s settler 

colonial origins. Personal reminiscences like that of Juliette Kinzie, figured prominently in this 

discourse. By hearkening back to and building upon a mythologized public memory, these 

writers justified the destructive effects of settler colonialism on Chicago’s Indian 

communities.188 

188 This dissertation builds upon the existing scholarship of “settler colonialism.” I primarily accept the 

theories advanced by Lorenzo Veracini, Patrick Wolf, and Walter Hixson. These scholars agree that “settler 

 

 

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Throughout the nineteenth century, Illinois policy makers and settlers perpetrated acts of 

violence against Potawatomi and other peoples indigenous to the lower Great Lakes, most 

especially through physical removal in the 1830s. Through assertions of frontier nationalism, 

white Americans who claimed authority over the state’s historical narrative minimized the nature 

of that violence. As the previous chapter illustrates, mid-century Chicagoans like Juliette Kinzie, 

tapped into a frontier mythology that asserted the importance of Chicago to the nation’s identity 

and growth. While many scholars argue that settler colonialism is the physical dispossession of 

Indigenous peoples’ lands in order to make way for an expansive white settler society, it was 

also the ideological dispossession of those Indigenous peoples from their culture and identity. By 

refusing Indians the right to their own public representation, settler colonialists denied them the 

rights to their stolen lands. This occurred in the Great Lakes during the nineteenth century 

through the monopolization of print and public memory by the dominant settler society.189 

In Chicago, like so many other U.S. frontier cities and towns, the settler generation 

penned place stories to control the shape of the historical narrative. Such place stories allowed 

settler societies to inscribe meaning into the landscape by formulating origin myths that 

celebrated their own colonial history. In doing so, these settlers asserted their claims to regional 

authority in writing. A large part of this process relied on delineating hierarchies of power, with 

the settler authors at the top, immigrating newcomers below them, and Indigenous people and 

 

colonialism” is essentially the logic employed by societies of settler colonists to dispossess Indigenous peoples of 
their lands and resources in order to gain control of those lands and resources for their own gain. Lorenzo Veracini, 
Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Walter L. Hixson, American 
Settler Colonialism: A History (New York: Palgrave, MacMillan, 2013); and Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism 
and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research, 8:4 (2006), 387-409. 

189 For more on the Potawatomi Trail of Death, see Shirley Willard, Susan Campbell, and Benjamin Marie 
Petit, Potawatomi Trail of Death: 1838 Removal from Indiana to Kansas (Rochester, IN: Fulton County Historical 
Society, 2003); John P. Bowes, Land Too Good for Indians: Northern Indian Removal (Norman: University of 
Oklahoma Press, 2016; for more on white memory of James Axtell, “The White Indians of Colonial America,” The 
William and Mary Quarterly 32, no. 1 (Jan 1975), 55-88. 

 

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African Americans at the very bottom. As historian Patricia Limerick has argued in her study of 

Western cities, Americans used a “shiftiness of language” to subjugate Indigenous peoples, and 

to “justify, promote, sell, entice, cover up, evade, defend, deny, congratulate, persuade, and 

reassure” their roles in the violence of settler colonialism.190  

When it came to writing the importance of these cities into the American national 

narrative, settler authors emphasized the city as the picture of modernization, and their place 

stories tied them directly to the project of national progress. Analyzing this phenomenon in 

Seattle’s early history, Coll Thrush adds, “towns and cities were the vanguards of American 

conquest, appearing (and sometimes disappearing) with rapidity.” For the American public of the 

nineteenth century, Western cities illustrated this progress in stark opposition to Indians who 

clearly represented the past and were thus incompatible with America’s urban future. Chicago 

serves as the perfect example of this notion of a Western city exploding into existence while its 

settler population uses a shiftiness of language to justify the means that led to its development.191  

This logic also applies beyond frontier cities to nineteenth-century regional narratives 

from throughout the entire Great Lakes region. In his study of the early historical narrative of the 

lower Great Lakes, James Buss analyzes the ways that narrative construction and control of the 

public memory were often “used as weapons of domination.” Through the use of place stories, 

Great Lakes settlers exerted a monopoly over the shaping of history in a manner that empowered 

the nation while disempowering the Indigenous people who maintained legitimate claims to the 

region’s lands. These place stories mythologized and marginalized Indigenous people while 

190 Patricia Limerick, “Making the Most of Words: Verbal Activity and Western America,” Under an Open 

 

Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past, edited by William Cronon, George Miles, and Jay Gitlin (New York: W. 
W. Norton & Company, 1992), 168-69. 

191 Coll Thrush, Native Seattle: Histories from the Crossing-Over Place (Seattle: University of Washington 

Press, 2007), 11.  

 

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emphasizing and embellishing the role of the pioneer settler populations. In her analysis of 

Wisconsin’s road to statehood, Bethel Saler argues that the republican ideals of the young United 

States inherently contradicted the dispossession of Indigenous peoples.  However, as settlers 

pushed further and further west, they and the frontier administrators tasked with realizing 

Wisconsin statehood needed to construct an appropriate historical narrative while they 

simultaneously formed the state’s government. Saler proves the connectiveness of these 

processes in her analyses of the creation of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin alongside 

the Wisconsin constitutional conventions that occurred from 1846 through 1848. This process of 

imagining a state into being as “political science fiction” also played out in Chicago during its 

formative years.192 

In Chicago, this imaginative process relied heavily on controlling the public 

representation of Indigenous people, which played out in the mythologizing of “the good Indian” 

and “the bad Indian.” In his seminal work, The White Man’s Indian, Robert Berkhofer argued 

Indians were imagined by whites to be either “friendly, courteous, and hospitable to the initial 

invaders of his lands and to all Whites” or they engaged in “constant warfare and fiendish 

revenge against their enemies,” and they were often portrayed as bloodthirsty and cannibals. In 

either case, Berkhoefer argues, “Whites primarily understood the Indian as an antithesis to 

themselves,” and the complete opposite of white civilization. In his 2002 article, Alfred Cave 

notes the American public utilized this myth of the good and bad Indian in commemorations of 

Tecumseh and his brother, the prophet Tenskwatawa. According to Cave, American writers 

described Tecumseh as noble, courageous, and virtuous despite being an Indian, and 

 

192 James Joseph Buss, Winning the West with Words: Language and Conquest in the Lower Great Lakes 

(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2011), 4; Bethel Saler, The Settler’s Empire: Colonialism and State 
Formation in America’s Old Northwest (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 249. 

 

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Tenskwatawa as “a ‘crafty imposter,’ shrewd, cunning, superstitious, fanatical, cowardly and 

cruel, utterly lacking in those qualities of courage, grace and magnanimity that elevated his 

warrior brother to greatness.” The American public divided Indians into two groups, noble and 

ignoble, but both were incompatible with the rising tide of white civilization and thus destined to 

vanish.193  

This process of creating place stories to commemorate the settler colonial version of 

history also reveals the importance of nostalgia in the minds of the settler population as a new 

generation began to take power in the second half of the nineteenth century. In her work on the 

public commemorations of Indians by local historical societies throughout New England, Jean 

O’Brien describes the power of nostalgia. O’brien argues that Americans in the second half of 

the nineteenth century asserted a monopolization of historical representation. For O’Brien, 

nineteenth-century New Englanders competed with other Americans to claim the true heritage to 

the nation’s unique identity. They did so by hearkening back to their colonial forefathers who 

dispossessed New England’s Indigenous peoples and thus earned the right to those Indians’ 

lands. This process, as nationalists like Turner would argue at the end of the century, led to the 

experiences that distinguished Americans from their European forebears.194  

A very similar process occurred in the Chicago region at the same time. Both New 

England and Illinois antiquarians carefully presented a selective historical narrative that bespoke 

their own importance to the United States as a nation. O’Brien contends the nineteenth-century 

New England authors achieved this through a dual process of “firsting,” which exclaimed that 

 

193 Robert F. Berkhofer Jr., The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the 

Present (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), 28-29; Alfred A. Cave, “The Shawnee Prophet, Tecumseh, and 
Tippecanoe: A Case Study of Historical Myth-Making,” Journal of the Early Republic, Vol. 22, 4 (Winter, 2002), 
637.  

194 Jean M. O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England (Minneapolis: 

University of Minnesota Press, 2010). 

 

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New England pioneers laid first claims to the land previously inhabited by Indians through acts 

of settlement, civilization, cultivation, and other methods of claiming true ownership, and 

“lasting,” which declared Indians had truly disappeared from the landscape thanks to the dilution 

of pure Indian blood through interracial mixing and a cultural devolution as Indians assimilated 

to European and later American ways. Like the Chicagoans discussed in this chapter, O’Brien 

argues that New Englanders of the nineteenth century refused to accept any compatibility of 

North America’s indigenous peoples with the modernity that defined European and American 

superiority.195   

This chapter analyzes commemorations of “good Indians” as they appeared throughout 

Chicago’s early historical narrative, which claimed for white Chicagoans a legitimate inheritance 

to the landscape that the supposedly vanished Indians left behind. In perpetuating this myth as 

official history, Chicagoans asserted power over the region’s Indigenous survivors by relegating 

them strictly to the past. Billy Caldwell and Shabbona, two leaders of the Northern Illinois 

Potawatomi in the first half of the nineteenth century whose names appear on prominent treaties 

that resulted in the surrender of all Potawatomi lands in Illinois, found frequent commemoration 

as “good Indians” in the earliest manifestations of Chicago’s historical narrative. In analyzing 

portrayals of these two figures, this chapter argues that settler colonialists intentionally 

misremembered the armed resistance fostered by these Indian leaders, and then attempted to 

erase the cultural persistence of those Indigenous communities who remained. Throughout the 

nineteenth century, settler colonialists in Northern Illinois not only dispossessed Indigenous 

195 O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting, 6, 107. 

 

 

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peoples of their lands, they used the mechanism of dispossession to contribute to the evolving 

rhetoric of frontier nationalism.196 

 

Billy Caldwell and Shabbona as Quintessential Good Indians 

On July 17, 1877, William Hickling donated a letter penned by Billy Caldwell to the 

Chicago Historical Society. Written after the conclusion of the War of 1812, it was a letter that 

certified Shabbona’s worthy service to Tecumseh and the British during the war. Caldwell 

declared Shabbona was a “courageous warrior on many occasions [who] showed a great deal of 

humanity to those unfortunate sons of Mars who fell into his hands.” The historical society asked 

Hickling to also provide biographical sketches of both Caldwell and Shabbona. His sketches 

found their way into the archive that undergirds Chicago’s historical narrative. According to 

Hickling’s description, Shabbona bequeathed the document to him personally in the summer of 

1858, shortly before dying. Hickling claimed a long friendship with Shabbona and “in one of his 

frequent visits to my house,” he bespoke the document’s existence, promised to eventually gift it, 

and claimed, “that no other white man on ‘this side of the border’ had ever seen it.”197 

That Shabbona carried this letter as a badge of honor for forty years, but refused to share 

its existence with even his closest white friends, reveals something of his own sense of 

Indigenous identity in an increasingly white world. Ironically, it may also suggest that as settler 

colonists intruded on Indigenous lands, this was also a memory of his resistance to that 

 

196 For more on American exceptionalism and nationalism, see the various articles in volumes by Eve 
Kornfeld, ed., Creating an American Culture, 1775-1800: A Brief History with Documents (Boston/New York: 
Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2001); Richard W. Etulain, ed., Does the Frontier Experience Make America Exceptional? 
(Boston/New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1999); and a succinct overview of the literature on American nationalism 
can be found in Benjamin E. Park, American Nationalisms: Imagining Union in the Age of Revolutions, 1783-1833 
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018); see also note 7 in the previous chapter. 

197 Letter of Certification to Chamblee, 1816, Chicago Historical Society, Billy Caldwell Papers, MSS 

Alpha1 C; William Hickling, “Caldwell and Shabonee,” Fergus Historical Series, vol. 10, Newberry Library, Ayer 
MS 51, 1, 9. 

 

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encroachment. When the Chicago Historical Society accepted this document, it inadvertently 

celebrated a bloody moment in the city’s history when Shabbona and Caldwell fought fiercely 

against United States expansion into the lower Great Lakes. In 1833, twenty years after the War 

of 1812, Illinois’s Indigenous communities were forced to cede their remaining lands within the 

state’s boundaries. Following these land cessions, the writers of Chicago’s historical narrative, 

beginning with Juliette Kinzie and stretching into the early decades of the twentieth century, 

fictively reimagined the role of Indians within their version of the city’s history. Thus, Shabbona 

and Caldwell were not remembered as men who stood in the way of westward expansion and 

Indian dispossession, but rather as allies and invaluable supporters of Chicago’s pioneer settlers. 

In actuality, the lives of both men were far more complicated, and their continued resistance to 

white settler encroachment took place long after the signing of the Chicago treaty in 1833. 

However, their actions after this treaty were far less visible and were simply nonviolent.198 

For Hickling and the Chicago Historical Society, this document became important 

because it belonged to Shabbona. It did not matter that the letter proved Shabbona to be a former 

enemy of the United States. Hickling cared only that Shabbona prized it, and that it proved he 

was an authentic Indian warrior. Hickling reinvented Shabbona as a friend to the early white 

settlers of Chicago, and any evidence that proved otherwise was repurposed to fit this 

mythologized narrative. Commemorative accounts like Hickling’s illustrate the marginalization 

that occurred after Indians were physically dispossessed of and removed from their lands. 

Disconnected from the physical territories that were their source of diplomatic power when 

 

198 The Chicago treaty of 1833 served as the final cession of Indigenous lands in the state of Illinois to the 
United States government.  According to Milo Quaife, “by the Chicago Treaty of 1833 the Potawatomi and allied 
tribes, the Chippewa and Ottawa, at length agreed definitely to leave this region and find a new home beyond the 
Mississippi.”  This quote comes from a collection of documents pertaining to the Chicago treaty in “The Chicago 
Treaty of 1833,” The Wisconsin Magazine of History, 1, no. 3 (Mar., 1918), 287; A thorough discussion of this and 
other treaties is located in Francis Paul Prucha, American Indian Treaties: The History of a Political Anomaly 
(Berkely: University of California Press, 1994), 184-192. 

 

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dealing with the United States, Indians were masked by the myth that they had disappeared 

completely. With Indians firmly affixed in the past, white writers and policy makers then began 

to imagine a world devoid of hostile Indians and peopled only by those who welcomed American 

settlement. Hickling, along with the many Chicago writers who followed, cast Caldwell and 

Shabbona into the role of good Indians who welcomed white society and convinced their people 

to relocate to the West. This way, they would be out of the way of the inevitable advance of 

white civilization. 

Born in the early 1780s to a Mohawk mother and abandoned by his British officer father, 

Caldwell spent his early years in Joseph Brant’s community of dislocated Loyalists on Canada’s 

Grand River. When his father, William Caldwell, Sr. later married, he adopted Billy into his 

home, removed him from his Indigenous community, and raised him in the white world in and 

around Detroit. In the late 1790s, Billy Caldwell moved to the Fort Dearborn area, where he 

worked as a trader and interpreter for Thomas Forsyth and John Kinzie. During the War of 1812, 

Caldwell fought alongside Tecumseh against the Americans, serving as a captain in the British 

Indian Department. After the war, Caldwell expressed in a personal letter to British administrator 

William Claus, his frustration with Britain’s failure to provide “a boundary line drawn between 

the Indian territory and the American,” something that Caldwell insisted “was promised to all 

natives by the English Governments.” Caldwell then moved to the United States, worked in 

Chicago with John Kinzie, married a Potawatomi woman, and became crucial to the northern 

Illinois Potawatomi peoples during the treaty negotiations that ceded their territory. When the 

U.S. government forcibly removed the Potawatomi in the mid to late 1830s, Caldwell elected to 

 

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sell off his treaty-allotted lands and moved west with them. He died a leader of a Potawatomi 

community in Council Bluffs, Iowa in 1841.199 

  Caldwell’s companion, Shabbona, an Odawa of western Michigan, claimed a lineage back to 

Pontiac. Shabbona also fought with Caldwell and Tecumseh in the War of 1812. He also married 

a Potawatomi woman, and he moved to the Chicago area after the war’s conclusion. Like 

Caldwell, Shabbona emerged as a crucial intercultural broker between the Potawatomi and the 

encroaching Americans. Shabbona signed a number of treaties on behalf of the Anishinaabeg, 

and he enjoyed many personal allotments and annuities from the U.S. government. In the late 

1820s, like Caldwell, Shabbona opposed Big Foot in the Winnebago Uprising, and he allegedly 

rode from settlement to settlement throughout Northern Illinois to warn white settlers of Black 

Hawk’s impending attack. After the treaty of Chicago in 1833, Shabbona also traveled west with 

many of the Potawatomi during removal. However, unlike Caldwell, Shabbona did not sell off 

his land, and he returned to the Chicago area where he remained until his death in 1859.200 

 

 

 

 

199 Billy Caldwell to William Claus, April 27, 1816, original held in Caldwell Papers in Manuscript Group 
25, B 147, Public Archives of Canada, Ontario, Canada, facsimile located in Newberry Library, Ayer Grayford MS; 
R. David Edmunds, The Potawatomis: Keepers of the Fire (Norman: The University of Oklahoma Press, 1978), 172, 
222, 228, 236-39, 247-48; James A. Clifton, “Merchant, Soldier, Broker, Chief: A Corrected Obituary of Captain 
Billy Caldwell,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, 71:3 (Aut. 1978), 185-210. 

200 For descriptions of Shabbona see Edmunds, The Potawatomis, 172, 177, 198, 231-32, 237, and 241; 

James Dowd, Built Like a Bear (Fairfield, WA: Ye Galleon Press, 1979); Many detailed studies exist on 
intercultural brokers, mediators, and intermediaries.  Clara Sue Kidwell described the ways that Indian women have 
served as mediators “Indian Women as Cultural Mediators,” Ethnohistory 39, no. 2 (Spring, 1992), 97-107; See also 
Between Indian and White Worlds: The Cultural Broker, ed. Margaret Connell Szasz (Norman: University of 
Oklahoma Press, 1994); for mixed blood intercultural brokers, see Gary Clayton Anderson, Kinsmen of Another 
Kind: Dakota-White Relations in the Upper Mississippi Valley, 1650-1862 (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society 
Press, 1984); a discussion of intercultural brokers in the Chicago area is provided in Ann Durkin Keating, Rising Up 
from Indian Country: The Battle of Fort Dearborn and the Birth of Chicago (Chicago: The University of Chicago 
Press, 2012). 

 

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Juliette Kinzie’s Contributions to Chicago’s Early Historical Narrative 

While both of these men figured prominently in Chicago’s early history, they generally 

did not appear in the narratives until after Juliette Kinzie penned her first account in the 1840s. 

Chicago’s early histories can be divided into those that appeared before Kinzie’s mid-century 

writings and those that followed, the power of her influence profoundly shaping all that came 

after. Hickling’s institute, the Chicago Historical Society did not form until 1856, two years after 

Kinzie published Wau Bun. However, the CHS’s predecessor, the Chicago Lyceum for Social 

and Intellectual Pursuits began meeting in 1834, one year after the town’s incorporation, as a 

venue for discussion and debate among Chicago’s elites. Lawyer and Lyceum secretary, Thomas 

Hoyne recalled of the early organization, “it was the foremost institute in the city [and there was] 

not a man of note, not a man in the city of any trade or profession, who had any taste for 

intellectual and social enjoyment, who had loved books, conversation and debate, but who 

belonged to the Lyceum.” At the meetings of the Lyceum, Chicago’s earliest reminiscences 

found articulation.201  

Chicago’s future, not its past was the main subject discussed at meetings of the Chicago 

Lyceum. When the town’s history did come up, it generally served to starkly contrast Chicago’s 

frontier beginnings with the roaring boom of its exploding economy, infrastructure, and 

population base. These early orations and debates seldom made reference to any of Chicago’s 

Indigenous inhabitants of either past or present. In a lecture delivered in 1840 at the Lyceum, 

Joseph N. Balestier declared, “in 1832, the population [in Chicago] was less than 100, in 1835, it 

had reached 2000, and at this time [1840] the population exceeds 5000.” Balestier also spoke of 

 

201 For more on the Chicago Lyceum, see entry in Ulrich Danckers and Jane Meredith, A Compendium of 

the Early History of Chicago to the Year 1835 When the Indians Left (River Forest, Illinois: Early Chicago, 
Incorporated, 2000), 106; quote from A. T. Andreas, History of Chicago. From the Earliest Period to the Present 
Time, Volume I (Chicago: A. T. Andreas, Publisher, 1884), 522. 

 

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the city’s growth in terms of structures and institutions. He stated, “in 1835, the number of 

buildings was very small.  Now they amount to upwards of 1000, more than thirty of which are 

brick.  There are about 100 mercantile firms, and lawyers, physicians, and mechanics in due 

proportion.” Tellingly, Balestier’s account neglects Chicago’s Indigenous population altogether, 

not to mention paying any attention to Caldwell or Shabbona. Instead, his numbers paint a 

picture of Chicago’s rapid growth as a frontier metropolis born out of the wilderness and peopled 

only by enterprising and industrious whites.202 

Chicago histories took on a new form when Juliette Kinzie penned her two accounts in 

the middle of the century. Kinzie centered her narratives on her husband’s family. She 

prominently featured her sister-in-law, Margaret Helm, as well as the family’s longtime friend 

and associate, Billy Caldwell. In 1844, little existed in the way of published Illinois history. 

Consequently, Kinzie’s family reminiscence became the foundational memory for a century’s 

worth of commemorative narratives that followed. Writing about the “Massacre” of Fort 

Dearborn, Kinzie attributes to Caldwell a pivotal role in the battle as the good Indian who 

showed up in the midst of savage brutality just in time to rescue much of the fort’s white 

population from the bloodthirsty Potawatomi warriors. In Kinzie’s early writings, certain 

Chicago origin myths began to take form, most notably those of the good and bad Indian. 

Writing twenty years after the first publication of Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers, Kinzie 

certainly did not create this myth, but her so-called real-life Chicago experiences lent that myth a 

new level of credibility.203 

202 Joseph N. Balestier, The Annals of Chicago: A Lecture Delivered Before the Chicago Lyceum, January 

 

21, 1840 (Chicago: Fergus Printing Company, 1876), 41. 

203 According to Alan Taylor, The Pioneers popularized the notion of “the Indian as a noble savage,” but 
Fenimore Cooper, in his 1828 publication of Notions of the Americans, “characterized New York’s Indians as ‘all 
alike, a stunted, dirty and degraded race,’” in William Cooperstown: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the 
Early American Republic (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 40. 

 

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John Kinzie’s family experienced first-hand Chicago’s monumental changes in the early 

nineteenth century. In 1833 alone, the future city saw the election of its first village board who 

immediately voted for the town’s incorporation, the appropriation of funds from Congress for the 

beginning of construction on Chicago Harbor, the organization of Chicago’s first Baptist and 

Presbyterian churches, as well as Chicago’s first Catholic Parish, the establishment of Chicago’s 

first school, the publishing of Chicago’s first newspaper, the construction of Chicago’s first 

brickyard and kiln, which led also to the erection of Chicago’s first brick house, Chicago’s first 

pork exportation, the opening of Chicago’s first slaughterhouse, which led to Chicago’s first 

exportation of beef the following year, and crucially, the Chicago Treaty of 1833, wherein the 

remaining Indigenous lands in the state of Illinois were ceded to the federal government, and all 

Indians residing in Illinois promised to remove to the West.204  

As white fur traders during Chicago’s frontier era, the Kinzies enjoyed close bonds with 

both the region’s Indigenous population and the territorial administrators and businessmen who 

spent the century divesting the Native inhabitants of their lands and resources. Therefore, the 

Kinzies, as represented through the voice of Juliette, were uniquely poised to deliver a 

convincing account of Chicago’s early history. As the previous chapter illustrates, the city’s road 

to civilization began with Kinzie’s commemoration of the Fort Dearborn “massacre” on August 

15th of 1812. Following Kinzie’s example, nineteenth-century American chroniclers referred to 

this battle as a “massacre” where “vicious” Indians indiscriminately slaughtered innocent 

 

Early History of Chicago, 37-40. 

204 A timeline of Chicago’s history throughout the year of 1833 can be found in Danckers and Meredith, 

 

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Americans. Though scholars over the years have worked carefully to correct this settler colonial 

rendition of Chicago’s foundational narrative, public memory proves resilient.205  

In reality, the Indigenous victory at the Battle of Fort Dearborn illustrates the fact that in 

1812, the area remained under Indigenous control. The U.S. government established Fort 

Dearborn ten years earlier to compete with Britain’s military presence in the Great Lakes. 

Shortly thereafter, traders such as John Kinzie and Thomas Forsyth moved in from Detroit to 

capitalize on Chicago’s geographic location as a crossroads of Indigenous trade networks. 

However, aside from these merchant and military interests, this area remained an Indigenous 

domain. In 1818, the year Illinois achieved its statehood, its white population of 157,000 dwarfed 

the Indigenous population of approximately 16,300. Only eight years earlier, in 1810, whites in 

Illinois Territory, which included Wisconsin, approximated a mere 12,000 people. In a letter to 

William Clark, written in December of 1812, Thomas Forsyth estimated the Potawatomi could 

muster at least 1000 total warriors, the Shawnee, under Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa commanded 

at least 1200 warriors, the Sacs and Foxes boasted 1200-1500 warriors, the Kickapoos “do not 

exceed 500 Warriours,” the Winnebago “amount to 4 or 500 Warriours,” and the Ojibwe, whom 

Forsyth described as “the bravest and most warlike of any Indians that is known,” were simply a 

“very numerous Nation of Indians.” In all, the Indigenous population of Illinois territory 

combined to dwarf the disparate white settlers before the War of 1812. When the United States 

declared war on Great Britain on June 18, 1812, these large and diverse Indigenous populations 

were asked to choose sides. While Tecumseh and his followers, still bitter about their loss at 

Tippecanoe and American settler encroachment in general, immediately joined the British, as 

 

205 For the lasting effects of this mythologized historical narrative, see especially Ann Durkin Keating’s 

Rising up From Indian Country and John N. Low, Imprints: The Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians and the City 
of Chicago (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2016.  

 

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Alan Taylor has pointed out, many Indigenous communities waited and watched as events 

played out before joining either side.206 

It was in such a context that Juliette Kinzie affixed Billy Caldwell into Chicago’s pioneer 

history. In her narrative, after massacring the soldiers, hostile Indians entered the Kinzie 

household ready to assault the civilians hiding inside when Caldwell conveniently arrived. He 

“entered the parlor with a calm step, and without a trace of agitation in his manner.” According 

to Kinzie, after Caldwell calmly removed all of his weapons and made himself at home, he 

addressed the hostile Indians, asked their purpose, and presumed, “is it that you are fasting? If so, 

ask our friend here [John Kinzie], and he will give you to eat.  He is the Indian’s friend, and 

never yet refused them what they had need of.” At this point in Kinzie’s retelling, the 

Potawatomi aggressors, seemingly taken aback, refrained from their intended violence. Here, 

Caldwell, a Potawatomi by marriage, served as the quintessential “good Indian” by confidently 

speaking to the aggressors as one of them, and explaining that John Kinzie was not merely a 

white settler seeking to encroach upon their lands, but rather a sympathetic go-between, and a 

long-time friend to the Potawatomi.207   

Shifting away from the earlier focus of the city’s future as articulated by members of the 

Lyceum, Chicago’s later chroniclers built directly on Kinzie’s reminiscences as they constructed 

a coherent origin story. These post-Kinzie accounts began with Henry Brown’s The History of 

Illinois, from its First Discovery and Settlement to the Present Time, published in 1844, the same 

year as Kinzie’s Narrative of the Massacre. Largely, these post-Kinzie accounts relied directly 

 

206 Dorothy Libby, “Thomas Forsyth to William Clark, St. Louis, December 23, 1812,” Ethnohistory, 8, no. 

2 (Spring, 1961), 189; Populations of white settlers are provided by Helen Hornbeck Tanner, Atlas of Great Lakes 
Indian History, Cartography by Miklos Pinther (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), 96; Alan Taylor, 
The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, & Indian Allies (New York: Vintage 
Books, 2010), 171. 

207 Kinzie, Wau-Bun, 187-88. 

 

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on her family reminiscences rather than on other more reliable sources when recounting the 

events of the Battle of Fort Dearborn. Brown plagiarized Narrative of the Massacre so 

indiscriminately that in her preface Kinzie explained her motivation for publishing was to “avoid 

the possibility of its unauthorized appearance in print.” Later antiquarian historians at least 

credited Kinzie with the account of the battle, though they relied on her almost completely, 

utilizing few if any other sources.208 

These antiquarians increasingly commemorated Caldwell’s role in saving the Kinzie 

family, each generation expounding on the embellishments of the last. Nehemiah Matson, in an 

1872 commemorative reminiscence of Shabbona’s life borrowed generously from Kinzie’s 

writings, and he went so far as to insert Shabbona in the tale. According to Matson, before 

Caldwell arrived to save the Kinzies from “massacre” at Fort Dearborn, Shabbona, “with other 

warriors, were standing on the porch, with their guns crossing the doorway, when a body of 

hostile warriors, with blackened faces, rushed by them, forcing their way into the house.” No 

earlier sources corroborate Shabbona’s attendance at this event, though other later chroniclers 

build on Matson’s account. In the 1884 History of Chicago: From the Earliest Period to the 

Present Time, A.T. Andreas also credited Caldwell with saving the Kinzies and other white 

families at Fort Dearborn. Andreas described Caldwell as someone who “proved in this 

emergency that an Indian can be a faithful friend.” Later, in 1919, Clarence A. Burley, then 

president of the Chicago Historical Society affirmed this myth by stating, “at the time of the 

massacre of Fort Dearborn in the War of 1812 Sauganash [Caldwell’s English moniker] was not 

present, but came the next day, and in ‘Wau-Bun’ we are told how he saved the family of Kinzie 

and others from being killed.” A reading of these accounts in chronological order illustrates the 

208 Henry Brown, The History of Illinois, from its First Discovery and Settlement to the Present Time (New 

York: J. Winchester, New World Press, 1844); Kinzie, Narrative of the Massacre at Chicago, 7. 

 

 

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ways in which the myth both perpetuated and served as the basis of historical fact for Chicago’s 

chroniclers well into the twentieth century.209 

 

Myths about Tecumseh and the War of 1812 

In writing about Chicago during the War of 1812, later commemorators and historians 

described Shabbona and Caldwell as charismatic leaders, but also as followers of the even more 

charismatic Tecumseh. Such credit is understandable since Tecumseh successfully built a pan-

Indian resistance movement to halt the spread of American settler encroachment on Indigenous 

lands. However, according to these commemorations, other Indian leaders simply flocked to 

Tecumseh, becoming little more than a part of someone else’s history. To Chicago’s writers and 

historians, Tecumseh was a noble Indian and a great warrior, who, despite his hostility to 

Americans, fought admirably and fulfilled the role of the vanishing Indian. For Caldwell and 

Shabonna, merely being associated with Tecumseh increased their mythologized status in early 

Chicago histories. Arguing that Tenskwatawa played a much more nuanced role than merely the 

foil to Tecumseh’s greatness, Alfred Cave states, “historians generally have been misled by the 

testimony of highly biased commentators, both white and Indian, who were either misled 

themselves or who sought to deceive.” The same assessment can be attributed to Chicago’s other 

commemorated Indian leaders, such as Shabbona or Caldwell. In this case, the commemorators 

glorified their subjects by attributing to them key roles to play in the drama of Tecumseh’s life 

and death. Hickling contended, “the part which Caldwell necessarily took in these affairs may 

 

209 Nehemiah Matson, Reminiscences of Bureau County [Illinois] in Two Parts (Princeton, Illinois: 

Republican Book and Job Office, 1872), 132-33; A.T. Andreas, History of Chicago: From the Earliest Period to the 
Present Time, Vol. I, Ending with the Year 1857 (Chicago: A.T. Andreas, Publisher, 1884), 74; Letter from Clarence 
A. Burley to Henry G. Zander, June 13, 1919, Chicago Historical Society, Billy Caldwell Papers [manuscript], 
1816-1933, MSS Alpha 1 C. 

 

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have entitled him to the appellation of ‘Secretary.’” Hickling simultaneously asserted that they 

were friends of the white settlers and that “Tecumseh and Shabonee used all their influence…to 

mitigate the horrors of savage warfare, in restraining the fury and ferocity of the Indians toward 

the unfortunate captives who fell into their hands.” Here, despite being allies of Tecumseh, 

antiquarian historians like Hickling painted them as good Indians, a direct contrast to the savages 

who massacred the whites they fought.210   

By the 1880s, historians like Andreas further exaggerated the role that both Caldwell and 

Shabbona played in the life of Tecumseh. Andreas claimed that Caldwell “early fell under the 

influence of Tecumseh, became the secretary of that warrior, and was intimately associated with 

him from 1807 until Tecumseh’s death…he undoubtedly was engaged in most of the battles or 

actions in which Tecumseh was engaged, and he was often sent by his chief on important 

missions.” By the turn of the century, Burley, as the President of the Chicago Historical Society, 

further built on the mythology by stating, “from about the year 1807 to the time of Tecumseh’s 

death at the Battle of the Thames…he was intimately connected with Tecumseh and was often 

called his private secretary.” Burley then erroneously asserted that Tecumseh spoke little 

English, and because Caldwell was “a good English scholar, [he] was often brought by 

Tecumseh in council with the British officials.” Though Caldwell’s contributions to the British 

cause in the war should have labeled him an enemy of the United States, by linking him to 

Tecumseh and the myth of the noble savage, later commemorators both forgave and dismissed 

Caldwell’s belligerent role in the war.211 

In Caldwell’s case, these historical embellishments betray the complications of his actual 

life and actions. While Caldwell did enlist with the British at Amherstburg during the winter of 

 

210 Cave, “The Shawnee Prophet,” 640; Hickling, Caldwell and Shabonee, 3. 
211 Burley to Zander, Billy Caldwell Papers; Andreas, History of Chicago, 108. 

 

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1812-13, this was most likely due to his family connections and not because of an affiliation with 

Tecumseh. Caldwell’s father William served the British in the American Revolution as a captain 

in Butler’s Rangers. He made his reputation on border raids and guerilla warfare, and was known 

for his extremely violent tactics, especially at the Battle of Blue Licks. After the Revolution, 

William Caldwell and his legitimate sons established the community of Amherstburg in Upper 

Canada where they heavily engaged in land speculation. However, as the illegitimate son, Billy 

was conspicuously absent from these family ventures.   

When the War of 1812 officially broke out, British military leadership encouraged 

William Caldwell to reestablish a ranger force and renew his border raiding tactics. The elder 

Caldwell commissioned his legitimate sons, but once again, he excluded Billy. Instead, Billy 

found his own commission as an officer in the British Indian Department, and it was there that he 

crossed paths with Tecumseh and Shabbona. In 1814, both Caldwells, father and son, competed 

with each other to succeed Matthew Elliott as superintendent of Indians for the Western District, 

driving a permanent wedge between them. While the narrative of Caldwell fighting in the war to 

help ensure a boundary between white settlements and Indian Country supported Caldwell’s 

mythologized role as a “good Indian,” his actual motivations were likely much more 

complicated. In serving the British Indian Department throughout the war, Billy Caldwell’s 

actions showed signs of colonial ambition and need for familial recognition and legitimacy as 

well as a sense of Indigenous resistance. Nevertheless, Chicago’s early historical accounts 

repeatedly painted Caldwell as Tecumseh’s secretary.212 

 

212 Billy Caldwell, Dictionary of Canadian Biography, 

http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/caldwell_billy_7E.html; William Caldwell, Sr., Dictionary of Canadian Biography, 
http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/caldwell_william_1822_6E.html.  

 

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Shabbona’s participation in the War of 1812 was also praised, despite his own 

belligerence towards encroaching American settlers. Andreas described Shabbona as having first 

“associated with Caldwell and Tecumseh about the year 1807” when he simultaneously became 

“their firm ally in all their enterprises.” Andreas even described Shabbona as “present at the 

battle of the Thames” where he “was by the side of Tecumseh when he was killed.” Like 

Caldwell, Shabbona became memorialized as a good Indian in Chicago’s earliest histories, 

despite his British affiliation. Shabbona actually began the myth that he fought alongside 

Tecumseh when he fell at the Battle of the Thames. An article printed in the Indiana Democrat 

on July 17, 1839, claimed Shabbona “gave at the U.S. Hotel in this city through an interpreter a 

full account of the death of Tecumseh.” In this interview, Shabbona claimed Tecumseh received 

a wound in the neck, believed he would not survive, and thus attacked Colonel Johnson with his 

tomahawk. According to Shabbona, Johnson turned just in time to fatally shoot Tecumseh. 

Shabbona’s recollection ends with the assertion that “none but brave warriors die on the 

battlefield…so Tecumseh, the bravest man that ever was, whom the Great Spirit would not let be 

killed by the common soldier but sent to Col. Johnson to be killed, wanted no grave nor honors.” 

By inserting himself into the mythology surrounding Tecumseh, Shabbona illustrated a keen 

awareness of and willingness to participate in the concept of public celebrity and mythologizing 

in the late 1830s.213 

By 1882, Nehemiah Matson’s Memories of Shaubena further elaborated on Shabbona’s 

account of Tecumseh’s death. Matson claimed that most of his information came directly from 

Shabbona “in the Fall of 1836, [when] Shaubena and his band were encamped on Main Bureau 

creek…near my father’s residence, and being interested in these strange people, I visited it 

213 Andreas, History of Chicago, 109; “Who Killed Tecumseh?,” Indiana Democrat, 10, issue 22 

(Indianapolis), July 17, 1839, accessed March 10, 2017, Readex. 

 

 

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almost daily.” However, Matson’s account reflects almost verbatim Shabbona’s interview from 

the Indiana Democrat in July of 1839. Given Shabbona’s purported strength as an orator, it is not 

impossible that his rendition of the story changed little from 1836 to 1839. However, Matson 

was dependent on interpreters to bridge the language gap with Shabbona, which greatly lessens 

the credibility of Matson’s account. Nor did Matson publish his history until forty years after his 

alleged interview with Shabbona, which gave him plenty of time to consider other sources, such 

as the interview in the Indiana Democrat.214 

In 1888, Gurdon Saltonstall Hubbard published an autobiography detailing his life on the 

Northern Illinois frontier. A famed and successful fur trader, Hubbard moved to Chicago in 1818 

and claimed a life-long friendship with Shabbona. Like earlier commemorators, Hubbard also 

included Shabbona’s account of Tecumseh’s death. In Hubbard’s words, Shabbona “was one of 

Tecumseh’s aids at the battle of the Thames, being at his side when Tecumseh was shot.” 

Hubbard went on to explain how, after Tecumseh’s death, Shabbona and Caldwell became 

“disgusted with the conduct of General Proctor,” whose actions led to the devastating loss at the 

Thames and Tecumseh’s death. Consequently, they “withdrew their support from the British and 

espoused the cause of the Americans.” Hubbard claimed that Caldwell’s and Shabbona’s 

opposition to the encroaching Americans dissolved immediately when Tecumseh died. In 

actuality, Proctor was court martialed for his actions at the Thames, and Caldwell’s sympathetic 

testimony on Proctor’s behalf proved crucial in reducing his sentence. Hubbard’s narrative, like 

so many other commemorative accounts failed to accurately assess Shabbona’s and Caldwell’s 

dislike for the Americans and their actual wartime motivation on behalf of Britain. Histories like 

Hubbard’s mythologized Tecumseh’s leadership, claiming that it was the force of his personality 

214 Nehemiah Matson, Memories of Shaubena: with Incidents Relating to Indian Wars and the Early 

Settlement of the West (Chicago: R. Grainger & Co. Printers, 1882), 11-12. 

 

 

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that was responsible for the loyalty and support of Britain’s Indian allies. From the American 

settler colonial perspective, the encroachment on Indian lands had little to do with the War of 

1812 or why Indians in the Great Lakes tended to side with the British. Thus, this mythologized 

perspective viewed Tecumseh’s death as the reason why Chicago-area Indians abandoned the 

British and why they aided and supported the incoming Americans.215   

Following the signing of the Treaty of Ghent in 1814, which ended the War of 1812, the 

region underwent tremendous changes, mostly owing to a number of land-cession treaties that 

dispossessed Indians of all their lands in the state of Illinois. This did not occur without 

resistance, as several Indigenous groups resorted to violence to push back against the 

government’s encroaching agenda. Throughout this era, both Caldwell and Shabbona rose to 

prominence as cultural negotiators between white settler colonials and the region’s Indigenous 

peoples. Their contributions to early settler society and development encouraged writers to 

further mythologize them as good Indians in Chicago’s origin story. 

As Chicago’s narrative crystalized throughout the nineteenth century, first-hand pioneer 

reminiscences influenced this mythologized historical record, and Chicago chroniclers 

manipulated it to suit their civic agendas. Chicago’s antiquarian historians focused on two 

different events, the Winnebago (Ho-Chunk) uprising in 1827 and Black Hawk’s war in 1832 to 

justify their version of the region’s history. In keeping with the myth of good and bad Indians, 

both of these events presented settler colonialists with evidence that Indians were either the 

aggressors, attacking and killing innocent white settlers or American supporters, willing to aid 

settlers by allying against other hostile Indians. In either scenario, Chicago histories painted all 

215 Gurdon Saltonstall Hubbard, The Autobiography of Gurdon Saltonstall Hubbard, edited by Caroline M. 

McIlvaine (Chicago: R. R. Donnelley & Sons Company, 1911), 53. 

 

 

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Indians, both good and bad, as incompatible with modernity and the westward advance of white 

civilization. 

Beginning with the Treaty of Greenville in 1795 and culminating in the Treaty of 

Chicago in 1833, the federal government engaged in a series of land-cession agreements to 

secure title to the remaining Indian lands of the lower Great Lakes. In large measure, these 

treaties represented deals struck between agents of the federal government and various individual 

Indian leaders. However, very few of these Indigenous leaders received the unanimous support 

of their people. In fact, U.S. officials rarely understood or respected the decentralized nature of 

authority in Indigenous communities. Often, when Indian agents or other government officials 

treated with Indian leaders, they did so without the consent or knowledge of many of the people 

whose lands were ceded. Frequently, the federal government found its hand forced by 

encroaching white settlers who antagonized the region’s Indigenous peoples. 

In 1827, resistance by the Ho-Chunk to land cessions in the northern Illinois area 

culminated in a hostile standoff against encroaching lead miners. The former governor of Illinois 

John Reynolds described the resulting “Winnebago War” as an isolated incident occurring when 

a party of white lead miners abducted several Ho-Chunk women “for corrupt and brutal 

purposes.” However, tensions had been escalating since the War of 1812 as white settlement 

intruded onto Ho-Chunk territory. In fact, prior to this engagement, several Ho-Chunk responded 

to the rumor that Americans had killed Indian prisoners at Fort Snelling by attacking a settler 

household just south of Prairie du Chien, killing two men and injuring a baby. This violent 

episode resulted in the deaths of two American soldiers and ten to twelve Ho-Chunk. Ultimately, 

 

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this violence led U.S. officials to force the cession of Ho-Chunk lands in the 1829 treaty at 

Prairie du Chien. 216 

Following the bloodshed of 1827, Ho-Chunk emissaries led by the war chief Red Bird, 

“accompanied by a few Pottawatomie warriors and petty chiefs, arrived at Shaubena’s village, 

for the purpose of enlisting him in the impending war.” The war party hoped to create “a union 

of all the tribes of the West, for the purpose of checking and driving back the tide of emigration.” 

At this point, Tecumseh’s rise and death were still fresh on everyone’s minds. The Ho-Chunk 

hoped to establish another pan-Indian alliance to thwart further settler encroachment. Matson 

described Shabbona’s reactions to the Ho-Chunk overtures thereby transforming him into a 

friend of the white man,  

In my youthful days I have seen large herds of buffalo on these prairies, and elk were 
found in every grove; but they are here no more, having gone towards the setting sun.  
For hundreds of miles no white man lived; but now trading-posts and settlers are found 
here and there throughout the country, and in a few years the smoke from their cabins 
will be seen to ascend from every grove, and the prairies covered with their cornfields.  
Like elk and buffalo, the red man must leave the land of his youth, and find a new home 
in the far West.  The armies of the whites are without number, like the sands of the sea, 
and ruin will follow all tribes that go to war with them.217 
 
Matson again maintained that his information came directly from interviews with 

Shabbona. However, Shabbona’s warning reads like something directly out of a Fenimore 

Cooper novel. Here, the noble savage or good Indian recognizes the futility of resisting 

American settler colonialism and urges his fellow Indians to put down their tomahawks, remove 

west, and make way for civilization. History, thus viewed through the cloak of modernity, 

 

216 John Reynolds, Reynolds’ History of Illinois. My Own Times: Embracing Also the History of My Life 

(Chicago: Chicago Historical Society, Fergus Printing Company, 1879), 177; Lucy Eldersveld Murphy, Great Lakes 
Creoles: A French-Indian Community on the Northern Borderlands, Prairie du Chien, 1750-1860 (New York: 
Cambridge University Press, 2014), 190-91. 

217 Matson, Memories of Shaubena, 51-52. 

 

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lamented the departure of the noble Indians and justified the land cessions that ultimately 

doomed them.218 

 

Caldwell and Shabbona in the Winnebago War of 1829 and the Blackhawk War of 1832 

Matson transformed Shabbona into a hero by claiming that he singlehandedly persuaded 

many Potawatomi from joining the Ho-Chunk confederacy. According to Matson, “Shaubena not 

only refused to join the hostile bands, but mounted his pony and rode through the country, 

visiting almost every Pottawatomie village in the State, explaining to the chiefs the folly of going 

to war.” However, one Potawatomi war leader named Big Foot tried to rally others to join Red 

Bird’s alliance. In his 1888 autobiography, Hubbard claimed that he and other prominent 

Chicagoans responded to Big Foot’s aggression by enlisting Shabbona and Caldwell to “visit Big 

Foot’s village (Geneva Lake), and get what information they could of the plans of the 

Winnebagoes, and also learn what action Big Foot’s band intended taking.” This type of personal 

reminiscence proved the most accessible of evidence for the mythologizing of Caldwell and 

Shabbona as Chicago’s “good Indians.”219 

In Hubbard’s telling, after they arrived, Shabbona cleverly entered the village alone while 

Caldwell hid outside in case anything should go awry. When Big Foot’s warriors captured 

Shabbona, suspecting him of “being a friend of the Americans, and a spy,” he allegedly talked 

himself out of trouble by sharing his warnings of the dangers of opposing Americans. According 

to Hubbard, once Big Foot deemed Shabbona no longer a threat, he sent him, under escort, back 

to Chicago. When they neared Caldwell’s hiding place, Shabbona “commenced complaining in a 

loud voice of being suspected and made a prisoner,” and alerted his hidden compatriot of Big 

 

218 Preface to Matson, Memories of Shaubena, 11. 
219 Matson, Memories of Shaubena, 52; Hubbard, Autobiography, 170. 

 

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Foot’s plans to raid Chicago’s surrounding settlements. It was Caldwell who then allegedly 

rushed ahead to warn Chicago residents of the impending attack. Little evidence exists to support 

this version of events, but this tale of Shabbona’s protective stance led white settlers to consider 

him the “Friend of the Whites.”220 

  In the years following the 1829 land-cession treaty at Prairie du Chien, while Big Foot’s 

resistance had been quelled, the Ho-Chunk remained disaffected with United States and its 

settlers, as did many of the Mesquakie and Sauk. In a treaty signed in 1804, a minority faction of 

the Mesquakie and Sauk had ceded a swath of land that included Saukenuk, their ancestral 

village and central homeland. Many Sauk and Mesquakie later claimed that Saukenuk was not a 

part of the original cession. In 1829, as settlers claimed lands west of Lake Michigan, the Sauk 

split into competing camps, an accommodationist faction led by Keokuk, and a resistance faction 

led by Black Hawk. Keokuk’s faction agreed to remove to the west so Americans could settle at 

Saukenuk, but Black Hawk’s faction refused to vacate their homeland. In 1831, a large 

contingent of American militiamen forced the resisting Sauk to capitulate and remove from 

Saukenuk. They were unable to return to Illinois without presidential approval.221  

In 1832, Black Hawk and his followers renewed their resistance to U.S. encroachment 

under the influence of the Winnebago Prophet, Wabekieshiek. They intended to peacefully return 

to Saukenuk to sow their traditional cornfields. However, when U.S. officials learned of this, 

they pursued the band for weeks. During the entire time, Black Hawk and his followers showed 

no signs of aggression. Black Hawk’s camp was primarily comprised of women and children, 

and when he attempted to negotiate a possible surrender, the militia attacked his peace envoy 

 

220 Hubbard, Autobiography, xxv ,171-72. 
221 For details on Black Hawk’s war, see Black Hawk, The Life of Black Hawk, or Mà-ka-tai-me-she-kià-

kiàk (New York: Penguin Books, 2008 [1833]); Kerry A. Trask, Black Hawk: The Battle for the Heart of North 
America (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2007); and Tanner, Atlas of Great Lakes Indian History, 151-53. 

 

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sent under a white flag. The Americans pursued the envoy back to Black Hawk’s main camp and 

engaged Black Hawk’s forces but were soundly routed. Such an embarrassing defeat led to a 

large-scale military response.  

The Americans then mustered a force of over 7000 soldiers and militia and declared war 

on Black Hawk. In the ensuing months, Black Hawk’s followers dodged American advances by 

hiding in the woods and marshes and subsisting on foraged foods. They lashed out at soldiers in 

localized guerilla raids, burned settler fields and homes, and raided stores because Black Hawk 

knew that confronting the Americans in open battle would result in defeat. Throughout the 

conflict, Ho-Chunk, Kickapoo, Potawatomi, and Mesquakie joined Black Hawk. Ultimately, in 

July, the U.S. military proved too much for Black Hawk’s followers. While fleeing, Black 

Hawk’s band attempted to cross the Mississippi. When they tried to surrender, “the whites paid 

no attention to their entreaties—but commenced slaughtering them!”  According to Black Hawk, 

when the Sauk saw “that they were murdering helpless women and little children [they] 

determined to fight until they were killed. As many women as could, commenced swimming the 

Mississippi, with their children on their backs. A number of them were drowned, and some shot, 

before they could reach the opposite shore.” Shortly afterward, Black Hawk and his son were 

captured and the threat of another Indian uprising was quelled.222 

Settler colonial renditions of this conflict paint a very different picture than the one told 

by Black Hawk, an event which became yet another foundational thread woven into the mythical 

early history of Chicago. Black Hawk’s resistance was re-envisioned as a war, and it served as 

direct evidence that Indians were a problem that could be solved only by their removal. 

Shabbona and Billy Caldwell were once again glorified in commemorative accounts of this 

222 Black Hawk, Life of Black Hawk, 85-86. 

 

 

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imagined war. Antiquarian historian A.T. Andreas compared Black Hawk to Big Foot and Red 

Bird before him, leaders who attempted to secure a large confederacy of Indians that would 

strike at American settlers. In Andreas’s perspective, it was Shabbona, Caldwell, and Alexander 

Robinson who dissuaded many of the young warriors from joining Black Hawk. Andreas argued, 

“many of the younger warriors were in favor of joining Black Hawk, the councils of Shawbonee, 

Robinson, and the Sauganash [Caldwell] prevailed, and the Pottawatomie chiefs not only 

prevented the tribe from taking part in the war, but did their utmost to serve and protect the 

whites.” Again, Caldwell and Shabbona played the role of the good Indians, siding against 

hostile Indians in order to protect innocent American settlers.223 

The mythology behind Andreas’s history, like so many others, can be traced back to 

folkloric memories of Chicago’s earliest settlers and their first-hand recollections of encounters 

with Shabbona and Caldwell. At a meeting of the Kendall County Historical Society on 

September 29th, 1870, Judge George M. Hollenback clearly invoked this fictive public memory. 

In his speech commemorating Chicago’s first generation of white settlers, Hollenback drew on 

his own personal experiences as well as the memories passed down through his family. 

Hollenback’s uncle, George B. Hollenback, helped establish the first American settlement in 

Kendall County in the early 1830s. In his speech, the younger Hollenback claimed to be the first 

“white child born on Fox River.” Both Hollenback and his twin were born at his uncle’s house in 

1831, and they spent their entire lives in Illinois.224   

 

223 Andreas, History of Chicago, 36. 
224 George M. Hollenback, “The Old Settler’s Picnic,” Originally published in The Kendall County Record, 

September 29, October 6, and October 13, 1870, Kendall County, Illinois Genealogy website, 
http://kendallkin.org/county-history/old-settlers-picnic/old-settlers-picnic-9-29-1870combined.html (accessed 20 
July 2016). 

 

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Hollenback’s account frequently referenced Shabbona, whom he described as an intimate 

friend of the whites. According to Hollenback, while Black Hawk’s supporters readied 

themselves for an attack, “the Pottawatomie Chiefs could not be drawn into the war [since] 

Shabbona and his friends wished to gain all the time he could in order that his scheme for the 

preservation of his white friends might be successful.” Hollenback even claimed his own family 

was among those saved by Shabbona’s actions. Black Hawk’s rebuke by Shabbona and Caldwell 

serves as one of the core stories in the region’s myth of the “good Indians.” To white 

commemorators, the “only reasonable inference” for why the Potawatomi refused to fight 

alongside Black Hawk was because of their friendship with and love for their white settler 

neighbors.   

 

The Treaty of Chicago, 1833 and the Removal of Chicago’s Indians 

The Black Hawk War, as it came to be called, held very real effects throughout the 

region. Although most Potawatomi abstained from joining Black Hawk, American settlers and 

policy makers alike demanded the forced removal of the region’s Indians because of the 

continued threat of an Indigenous uprising. Settler paranoia and greed enabled the United States 

to negotiate the cession of the remaining Potawatomi lands in the state of Illinois. Caldwell and 

Shabbona both served as signatories on both the treaty of Prairie du Chien in 1829 and the treaty 

of Chicago in 1833, which led to Potawatomi dispossession in Illinois. In nineteenth-century 

historical accounts, both Caldwell and Shabbona were remembered as understanding the dangers 

their people faced in the wake of westward-moving civilization. The roles that Caldwell and 

 

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Shabbona played in these treaties and the physical removal that followed contributed a great deal 

to their myths as “good Indians.”225 

Hickling commemorated Caldwell’s role in these treaty negotiations as a hero who sold 

off his own lands and “informed his red brethren, that his intention was formed to go with his 

tribe, and share with them the trials and privations incident upon their removal to a new home.” 

The Potawatomi, having relinquished ownership and usufruct rights to their homelands had little 

choice but to accept removal to the West. Though Chicago society praised Billy Caldwell and the 

treaty awarded him choice real estate for his contributions to the treaty process, he chose his 

people over the government-allotted lands he received in the city. Hickling’s account clothed 

Caldwell in the myth of noble savagery because he led authentic Indians away from the advance 

of white civilization rather than allowing them to degrade themselves through assimilation. For 

commemorators, Indians who accepted removal like Caldwell and Shabbona, and those who 

fought valiantly and perished like Black Hawk and Tecumseh could now be fictively removed 

from the landscape in Illinois and safely memorialized in a fictively imagined history.226 

The Potawatomi who ceded their lands in the 1833 treaty cleared the landscape for settler 

expansion by relocating to Council Bluffs, Iowa. According to Chicago’s early historians, the 

success of this relocation rested on either military force or cooperation by Indian leaders. 

Caldwell was quickly commemorated as a leader who “when the time came for the removal of 

the Indians… Caldwell’s influence was exerted to make the removal peaceful and successful.” 

Caldwell became “determined to leave his cherished white friends behind, and cast his fortunes 

 

225 Tanner, Atlas of Great Lakes, 159; Prucha, American Indian Treaties, 187-88; Matthew L. M. Fletcher, 

“Avoiding Removal: The Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians,” Nation to Nation: Treaties Between the United 
States & American Indian Nations, edited by Suzan Shown Harjo (Washington D.C. and New York City: 
Smithsonian Books, 2014), 86-87; Clifton, Prairie People, 233-37; Edmunds, The Potawatomis, 243-49; Keating, 
Rising Up from Indian Country, 228-31. 

226 Hickling, “Caldwell and Shabonee,” 7-8. 

 

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with his people, and share their privations and trials with them.” Considering the quickly rising 

value of his Chicago property, Caldwell’s monetary sacrifice indeed was substantial. 

Commemorators celebrated the contributions of good Indians like Caldwell by framing their 

actions as the best pathway for their fellow Indians to follow.227 

Memorializing accounts of Caldwell barely discuss his relocation to Council Bluffs or the 

trouble he caused for the United States thereafter. Despite the Potawatomi removal out of 

Illinois, Caldwell failed to fade into oblivion. In the correspondence of Indiana Senator John 

Tipton, the Agent in charge of Indian removal in the late 1830s, accounts abound of Caldwell 

resisting the designs of federal officials. In a letter to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs on June 

29, 1837, Tipton noted, “it will be but a few years before the whites will want to setle [sic] up 

missouri [river] to Council Bluffs.” This meant the Potawatomi, who had already removed from 

Illinois, would need to again remove further west to make way for more settlers. Tipton 

complained that Caldwell “is not a very good Indian…he urges them to go north,” but “it is 

better to setle (sic) them at once out of danger in permanent homes on the Osage river.” Once the 

Potawatomi were relocated in Council Bluffs, Caldwell determined to remain in place despite 

diplomatic pressures from U.S. officials and military officers to push them further west. 

Commemorative accounts of Caldwell’s life are conspicuously silent on his post-removal actions 

and stances. In the minds of settler colonial administrators like Tipton, Caldwell had ceased to be 

a “good Indian,” but for commemorators, Caldwell fit the mold perfectly.228 

Shabbona’s life post-removal differed considerably from Caldwell’s, and as a result, the 

commemorative record celebrated his actions to the time of his death. Following the Chicago 

 

227 Andreas, History of Chicago, 109. 
228 “Tipton to Harris, June 29, 1837,” The John Tipton Papers, compiled and edited by Nellie Armstrong 

Robertson and Dorothy Riker, (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Bureau, 1942), 412-13. 

 

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treaty in 1833, Shabbona also accompanied the Potawatomi to Council Bluffs. However, unlike 

Caldwell, Shabbona did not sell his treaty-allotted lands in Illinois, since he planned to return. 

The lands allotted to Shabbona could only be legally transferred from his ownership by order of 

the President of the United States. However, local settler colonial interests in Illinois declared his 

lands abandoned after Shabbona embarked on his journey, and the local government 

requisitioned them, and then sold them off to speculators while he attended business in the west 

with the Potawatomi. When Shabbona returned, he found his home occupied by white settlers 

with no recompense or legal recourse. Shabbona immediately sought retribution through the 

legal system. When that failed, his white neighbors, inspired by tales of his nobility, donated a 

small plot of land and a house for him to live out his remaining years as the ultimate good Indian 

and “white man’s friend.” 

The fact that historical societies and other public groups continued to invoke memories of 

both Shabbona and Caldwell generations later suggests that Chicago’s public memory is more 

indebted to folklore, than to legitimate historical evidence. In many cases, local historians who 

reimagined the early history of Chicago simply reshaped the past by invoking each other’s 

mythologized narratives rather than analyzing archival evidence for themselves. For example, in 

his article written for the Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society in 1912, titled, 

“Shabbona: The Whiteman’s Friend,” the Reverend N. W. Thornton remarked that members of 

the Kane County Federation of Women’s Clubs decided to sell commemorative spoons 

sometime around the fall of 1905 in order to raise funds for the improvement and preservation of 

“certain historic features of the roadway lying along the Fox river from Aurora as far north as 

Elgin and Carpentersville.” When deliberating on the specific nature of the commemoration for 

the spoon, the Women’s Club decided upon “a good likeness of old Chief Shabbona, who 

 

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thousands of times had passed over the trail now marked by the roadway sought to be 

improved.” The society included with the spoon a commemorating note that read, “Shabbona, 

the Indian chief whose picture adorns the bowl of the Fox river valley souvenir spoons, was 

probably the most conspicuous Indian among the many who made their homes in the beautiful 

Fox river valley before the advent of the white man… He was known as the white man’s friend, 

and saved many from massacre, particularly during the Black Hawk war in 1832.  He died at 

Seneca, Ill., July 18, 1859, and is buried in Evergreen cemetery, Morris, Ill., where a monument 

was erected to his memory a few years ago.” Such commemorations illustrate the fact that 

Shabbona remained a household name in northern Illinois well into the early twentieth century, 

fifty years after his death. In this climate, Indians were relics of the past, a bygone era of 

pioneers and warfare.229 

In the preface to his history, Nehemiah Matson remarked, “the memory of Shaubena 

should be preserved, and a record of his beneficent deeds go down to posterity, so that coming 

generations may learn to honor the name of this noble red man. Through his persistent labor and 

influence, a union of the different tribes for the purpose of making war on the frontier 

settlements was prevented, and people are now living whose lives were saved by this tawny 

philanthropist.” Matson’s account represents perhaps the most blatant example of the 

mythologizing of the good Indian. Matson’s book was subsequently cited by other later histories 

and illustrates the far-reaching spread of this myth in Chicago. Before the publication of 

Chicago’s early histories, Juliette Kinzie’s 1868 letter to historian, Lyman Draper also asserted 

that Shabbona deserved historical remembrance. According to Kinzie, “Chambly [an iteration of 

Shabbona] was an excellent Indian—kind, affectionate, honourable—patient of injuries. His 

229 Thornton, “Shabbona, The Whiteman’s Friend,” Newberry Library, Ayer MS 51, 1-2. 

 

 

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memory deserves to be embalmed among the best and noblest specimens of uncultured 

humanity—indeed, his example is worthy the emulation of many who pride themselves upon the 

factitious advantages of refinement and civilization.” Not only did Kinzie describe Shabbona as 

the noblest of Indians, but she went so far as to compare his value to those of “refinement and 

civilization.” Here was a good Indian indeed. Though largely missing from the modern historical 

discourse, Caldwell and Shabbona continue to live on in a misty haze of public memory both in 

these early histories and in place names and local history commemorative projects they adorn.230   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

230 Juliette A. Kinzie, “Letter to Lyman Draper, August 10, 1868,” Bulletin of the Chicago Historical 

Society 1, no. 4 (August, 1935), Chicago History Museum; Matson, Memories of Shaubena, 11-12. 

 

 

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CHAPTER FIVE: 

 

INDIGENOUS INTELLECTUALS AND INDIAN-AUTHORED HISTORIES AS 

WRITING AGAINST THE MYTH: 

STRATEGIES OF SURVIVANCE 

 
 

Figure 6.1: “Simon Pokagon” by E. A. Burbank231 

  

 

231 E. A.  Burbank, “Simon Pokagon,” Newberry Library Digital Collections, 

http://publications.newberry.org/digitalexhibitions/archive/files/e7e6853e35c97819b824e422a8dfa439.jpg (2) 
(accessed 6 May 2019). 

 

 

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In December of 1898, a month before he died, Simon Pokagon finally published a long-

promised article in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. Entitled, “Massacre of Fort Dearborn at 

Chicago,” Pokagon’s piece sought to broach a topic, so familiar to the Chicago public, yet from 

an unfamiliar Indigenous perspective. Though Pokagon utilized the well-trodden written 

accounts that filled numerous white commemorations of the battle, he also incorporated 

traditional Potawatomi knowledge, passed down orally from the previous generation. Invoking 

Juliette Kinzie’s foundational narrative of Fort Dearborn, Pokagon remarked, “the earliest 

detailed account I have been able to find was written by a woman, who claimed the story was 

told her by an eye-witness twenty years after occurrence, and she did not publish it until twenty-

two years later.” Poignantly, Pokagon argued, “the account was traditional when first published.” 

In stating this, Pokagon exhibited a keen understanding of the nature of the American historical 

narrative while also hinting at its overlap with Indigenous modes of knowledge transference.232 

As the previous chapter illustrates, in the nineteenth-century United States, history was 

not simply recorded; rather antiquarian historians presented a narrative that reflected the values 

of the era, and more particularly the region. This process of contested collective remembrance is 

one that Ari Kelman argues, “both shapes and is bound by contemporary politics.” Utilizing 

sources such as Kinzie’s family reminiscences as the basis of Chicago’s foundational story, these 

historians emphasized their own social standing, while also justifying the dispossession of the 

region’s Indigenous inhabitants. By writing back against the settler colonial narrative, Pokagon 

adapted to an aspect of Western society considered beyond the scope of Indigenous capabilities, 

the writing of history. Pokagon used this particular strategy of survivance to explain to whites 

 

232 Simon Pokagon, “The Massacre of Fort Dearborn at Chicago: Gathered from the Traditions of the 

Indian Tribes Engaged in the Massacre, and from the Published Accounts,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 98 
(December 1, 1898), 649. 

 

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that Indians did not disappear, and that they were actually quite compatible with modern 

American society.233  

In an interview with the Chicago Daily Tribune, a year before he published his account of 

the Battle of Fort Dearborn, Pokagon indicated that he would correct the historical record by 

recounting his father Leopold Pokagon’s version of the conflict. Along with Simon’s grandfather 

Topinabe, Leopold was present at the battle, and together they attempted to hedge the violence 

committed by the young ungovernable Potawatomi warriors bent on the destruction of 

encroaching American settlers. By presenting his father’s perspective of the battle, Simon sought 

to persuade his white audience to see the conflict as more than merely a “massacre,” that 

Indigenous loss of life more than doubled that of the Americans, and that many of the Indians 

involved tried to mitigate the violence by acting on behalf of the settlers, soldiers, and civilians. 

Focusing on familiar “good Indian” examples like Black Partridge, who prevented the murder of 

Margaret Helm, Simon emphasized the Indigenous agency that set his father’s account apart. 

More than just another “noble Savage,” Black Partridge represented for Pokagon the humanity 

and true ambivalence that characterized the Indigenous lived reality in the Great Lakes during 

the age of settler colonialism.234   

Pokagon clearly enunciated what this dissertation has argued, that the rhetoric of frontier 

nationalism marginalized Indigenous people while it emphasized the importance of frontier 

settlers and their institutions. Settler colonialists wrote themselves into power as they wrote 

Indians out of existence. However, despite the prevalence of frontier nationalism in Chicago’s 

regional narratives, Pokagon subversively stated, “I am writing a book which will tell of the 

233 Ari Kelman, A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek (Camridge: Harvard 

 

University Press, 2013), x. 

234 Pokagon, “The Massacre of Fort Dearborn,” 653. 

 

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treachery of the white man,” and he boldly declared, “I have been taught a little in the white 

man’s ways and I will use what he has taught me to set my people right.” Pokagon’s life and 

work illustrates the truth that Indians could read and did write back against the settler colonial 

narrative. In his writings, Pokagon drew upon a long legacy of strategies of resistance that 

stretched all the way back to the Seven Years War. Over this century and a half, Indigenous 

intellectuals such as Joseph Brant, John Norton, Peter Jones, and Simon Pokagon creatively 

adapted new strategies that allowed them to push for the survivance of their communities. By 

utilizing their understandings of Western education and literacy, Euro/American legal systems, 

private property, Euro/American ideas of land usage, and ultimately their writing of Indigenous 

history, they were able to push back against the settler colonial systems that sought to eliminate 

them as a people and a culture.235 

While the previous two chapters focus on the perspective of white settlers as they evolved 

their notions of frontier nationalism by disappearing Indians from the historical narrative, this 

current chapter explores the ways in which Indigenous intellectuals utilized the tactic of writing 

their own histories to counter the settler colonial rendition of the nation’s history. Spanning the 

entire nineteenth century, the writings (both actualized and intended) of Brant, Norton, Jones, 

and Pokagon reveal a legacy of survivance that evolved along with the literary output of the 

white settler colonialists who increasingly wrote to disempower Indigenous claims to lands in the 

Great Lakes by writing Indians out of existence. Great Lakes Indians initially learned to read and 

write in order to negotiate with whites without being taken advantage of at treaty proceedings. 

Dating back to Brant at the turn of the nineteenth century, Indigenous intellectuals then used 

their literacy to write back against the settler colonial narrative that sought to justify their 

235 Simon Pokagon, “Fort Dearborn Massacre from an Indian’s Point of View,” Chicago Daily Tribune 

(Feb 7, 1897), Proquest Historical Newspapers: Chicago Tribune, 37. (Accessed 28 June 2016). 

 

 

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dispossession. By tapping into the burgeoning Western print culture, these Indians continually 

disproved the myths of their disappearance. 

Several scholars have highlighted the importance of Indians writing as a means of 

combatting the dominant narrative and assuring cultural survivance. While many have even 

included Great Lakes Indians in their studies, few have commented on Pokagon, and fewer still 

on Brant or Norton. These Indigenous intellectuals, Brant, Norton, Jones, and Pokagon are what 

Gerald Vizenor refers to as “postindian warriors,” people who “arise from the earlier inventions 

of the tribes only to contravene the absence of the real with theatrical performances.” In their 

writing for non-Indigenous audiences, Indigenous authors exhibited awareness of the settler 

colonial representations or “simulations” of Indigeneity that they needed to work against. 

Adhering to the Western conventions of writing, Indigenous intellectuals were able to practice 

the survivance of their culture by publishing Indigenous storytelling traditions. However, as 

Maureen Konkle argues, Indigenous authors, “not only explained traditions, but they also 

explained their experience of whites and that of their tribes generally; they wrote about treaties 

and broken agreements; they wrote about the progress of the Indian nations as they understood 

it.” All this, they did to boost the public’s awareness of Indigenous communities, and the ways in 

which so-called “civilized” white society has employed a logic of elimination to destroy 

Indigenous lifeways in order to obtain Indians’ lands. As Philip Round has argued, “print 

provided these Native authors and their communities with a much-needed weapon in their battles 

against relocation, allotment, and cultural erasure.” For Indigenous intellectuals of the Great 

Lakes, writing was the ultimate act of subversion in an era when the dominant culture relied so 

heavily on the acceptance of its own historical narrative.236   

236 Gerald Vizenor, Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance (Lincoln: University of 

Nebraska Press, 1994, 1999), 4-7; Donald B. Smith, Sacred Feathers: The Reverend Peter Jones (Kahkewaquonaby) 

 

 

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Writing in the last decade of the nineteenth century, a time when Indians had been safely 

relegated to the nation’s past, Pokagon did not pose the threat that Indians writing a half century 

earlier would have. He did not possess large plots of land that blocked the westward spread of 

settler society, nor did he command a force of Indigenous warriors capable of physically 

resisting settler encroachment and United States militias. Instead, Pokagon utilized the trope of 

pathos to speak truth to power and subvert the narratives that celebrated colonial conquest of 

Native America. What Pokagon did possess was a clear understanding of the conventions of 

historical narratives, Christianity, and American progressivism and reform, and he sought the aid 

of sympathetic whites. In his writings, Pokagon marshalled all of this knowledge to combat the 

narratives that declared Indigenous intellectuals like him an impossibility at worst and an 

aberration at best.237 

 

Joseph Brant and the Legacy of Survivance 

Though many other Indigenous authors penned histories throughout the second half of 

the nineteenth century, the legacy of Great Lakes Indians writing historical accounts can be 

traced back to Joseph Brant at the turn of the nineteenth century. Learning from his patron and 

mentor, Sir William Johnson, Brant well understood the power that stemmed from a strong 

public persona, as well as the ability to control one’s narrative. Long before he died in 1807, 

Brant articulated an intention to pen his own history of the Haudenosaunee. Unfortunately, other 

 

and the Mississauga Indians (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), 246-47; Maureen Konkle, Writing Indian 
Nations: Native Intellectuals and the Politics of Historiography, 1827-1863 (Chapel Hill: The University of North 
Carolina Press, 2004), 160-61; Philip Round surveys Native American contributions to the world of print, 
particularly as Indians created new genres to subvert colonial control in Removable Type: Histories of the Book in 
Indian Country, 1663-1880 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 5. 

237 For an excellent take on the use of pathos as a trope in Pokagon’s writings, see Jason Edward Black, 

“’We Celebrate Our Own Funeral, the Discovery of America:’ Pathos, Promise, and Constraint in Simon Pokagon’s 
(Potawatomie) Resistance to the 1893 World’s Fair,” The Canadian Journal of Native Studies, XXXVIII, 1 (2018), 
165-81. 

 

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matters always took precedence. Brant’s’ intended history was hinted at in his response to an 

1801 questionnaire designed by Reverend Samuel Miller, who was conducting research for a 

project on the history of New York. Miller sought out both Brant and Norton for their insight on 

the history of the Haudenosaunee, illustrating the reputation both men enjoyed as educated 

Indians. In his responses, Brant provided information on the formation of the Six Nations 

confederacy, the traditional Haudenosaunee creation story, the history of Iroquois interactions 

with French Jesuits, the political structure of the confederacy, as well as how the Haudenosaunee 

interacted with neighboring tribes. Through it all, Brant carefully illustrated an awareness of the 

differences in notions of time and space between Western and traditional Indigenous cultures.238  

Thirty-seven years later, when William Stone penned Brant’s earliest biography, he 

confessed his knowledge of the questionnaire’s existence, but lamented his inability to locate it. 

In a footnote, Stone explained that Brant had “contemplated writing a history of The Six Nations; 

and it is quite probable that his reply to the queries of Doctor Miller was both a valuable and a 

curious document.” Indeed, it is both, as no doubt it contains much of what would have ended up 

in Brant’s history had he found the time to write it. Other correspondence confirms Brant’s 

intentions, especially a 1789 letter to Brant in which Harvard President Joseph Willard stated, “I 

am pleased to hear, from the Rev. Mr. Kirkland, that you are writing a history of the natives of 

this country. I hope, when you have finished it in your own language, you will give us a 

translation in English, as I doubt not we shall have many curious and important things contained 

in it, respecting the various Indian nations, that we are now unacquainted with.” News of Brant’s 

238 Douglas W. Boyce, “A Glimpse of Iroquois Culture History Through the Eyes of Joseph Brant and John 

Norton,” American Philosophical Society 117, no. 4 (15 August 1973), 286, 288-92. 

 

 

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writing ambitions had spread, illustrating the power that such a history might have achieved had 

it been published.239 

Brant cherished his education and his literacy, and he fully understood the power of 

writing an Indigenous history. What better way to prove to the British and American reading 

publics that Indigenous people were as deserving of rights and protection from settler 

encroachment as other citizens and colonial subjects? Had Brant succeeded, he could have 

counted it among the many different ways in which he dedicated his life to the survivance of his 

Mohawk community. Though ultimately, his only published writings were in service of 

Christianizing the Iroquois, Brant did correspond prolifically throughout his life. Regardless, 

many of his letters and actions speak directly to his advocacy for the education of his people.  

Toward the end of his life, Brant was able to secure admission for his sons at Dartmouth 

College, the successor of Wheelock’s institute where Brant attended as a young man. In a letter 

to John Wheelock, the College’s president and son of Brant’s former teacher, Eleazor Wheelock, 

Brant recalled, “nothing can ever efface from my memory the persevering attention your revered 

father paid to my education, when I was in the place my sons now are.” Further illustrating the 

importance he placed on education, Brant stated, “The reason that induced me to send them, to 

be instructed under your care, is the assurance I had that their morals and education would be 

there more strictly attended to than at any other place I know of.” Brant’s patronage stretched far 

beyond his own family, as he consistently worked to adapt his entire Mohawk community to 

withstand a half century of intense social, cultural, and geopolitical upheaval. At his Grand River 

 

239 Stone went so far as to reach out to Miller, who was still alive in the 1830s for more information on this 

document. Miller remembered receiving Brant’s response, but could not locate it. Willard to Brant, Cambridge 20 
July 1789, quoted in Stone, Life of Joseph Brant, Vol. II, 287-88, 440-41. 

 

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community in Upper Canada, Brant erected a schoolhouse and a church, and secured teachers 

and ministers to help his people constantly adapt to the changing world around them.240 

 

 

John Norton and the History of the Haudenosaunee 

John Norton, the other respondent to Miller’s 1801 questionnaire, used his own Western 

education to ultimately fulfill Brant’s dream of writing a history of the Haudenosaunee from an 

Indigenous perspective. Norton was born and raised in Scotland, though his father was a 

Cherokee who was taken to England as a boy after his village was destroyed in a conflict with 

the British. In 1785, Norton travelled to Canada as a soldier in the service of the 65th Foot, and 

two years later he deserted and worked as a schoolmaster at John Deserontyon’s Mohawk 

community at the Bay of Quinte. Sometime between then and his employment under the Detroit 

fur trader John Askin in the early 1790s, Norton met and befriended Brant. Very soon after, 

Brant facilitated Norton’s adoption into the Mohawk, and Norton quickly ascended to a 

leadership position. Over the next two decades, Brant groomed Norton as a war leader and an 

intercultural broker between the Mohawk and the British Empire. Along the way, Norton 

completely immersed himself in Mohawk culture and society. After the conclusion of the War of 

1812, Norton traveled to London where he completed his Journal under the patronage of several 

of Brant’s philanthropic and political backers. In his biographical introduction to Norton’s 

Journal, historian Carl Klinck argues that Brant most likely served as Norton’s main source of 

information on the Haudenosaunee, and that the chapter titled, “Brief Account of the Five 

Nations,” was in fact, “the history of his people which Brant wished to write.” Furthermore, 

240 Brant to Wheelock, 9 February 1801, in Stone, Life of Joseph Brant, 470-71. 

 

 

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Klinck argues, “Norton had lived through some of the events, and Brant, who had lived through 

more, was probably his guide.” Lisa Brooks contends Norton “drew on the many versions of the 

narrative cycles that he heard from Six Nations elders both within and outside the longhouse, as 

well as from the history that his ‘uncle’ Joseph Brant had always wanted to write.” Brooks 

describes the ways in which Indigenous knowledge transference was a communal process that 

nineteenth-century Indigenous writers tapped into when penning their histories. In any case, 

Norton completed the task that Brant initially set out for himself.241  

Norton’s Journal presents a rendition of the Haudenosaunee creation story and the 

founding of the Five Nations confederacy, both drawn from traditional Haudenosaunee oral 

sources. Norton also described the near-century-long protracted war between the Haudenosaunee 

and the “Algonquins and other Nations of the Chippawa race.” For his main source of 

information, Norton relied on “the late Colonel Brant, Thayendanegea, (who is descended from 

Wyandot prisoners adopted by the Mohawks both on the father and mother’s side).” According 

to Norton, Brant received these stories directly from his grandmother in traditional oral fashion, 

then passed them down to Norton. In his rendition of the war, Norton began with a ghost who 

sang a war song before attacking a father and son who were on a hunt. As the ghost killed and 

scalped the father and son hunters, it sang a song heralding a time of warfare. The song went, 

“They think that all the earth is in peace, and they are secure; but I shall convince them of their 

mistake.” Norton admitted there were many such tales of this kind, but because “they savour too 

 

241 For more about Norton’s life and career, see Carl Benn, “Introduction,” A Mohawk Memoir from the 

War of 1812: John Norton~Teyoninhokarawen (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019); see also the Canadian 
Dictionary of Biography, by Carl F. Klinck (http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/norton_john_6E.html); quote from Carl 
F. Klinck, “Biographical Introduction,” The Journal of Major John Norton, 1816 (Toronto: The Champlain Society, 
1970), xl; another detailed biography of Norton can be found in the fifth chapter of Timothy Willig, Restoring the 
Chain of Friendship: British Policy and the Indians of the Great Lakes, 1783-1815 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska 
Press, 2008); an even fuller treatment can be expected in Willig’s forthcoming biography on Norton; Lisa Brooks, 
The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 
2008), 243-44. 

 

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much of the marvellous,” he only shared a few of them in his journal. However, Norton 

explained such stories were significant “because it gives some view of ancient manners.” In 

saying this, Norton approached his history of the Haudenosaunee rather like an ethnographer, but 

with an insider’s perspective. Norton presented these tales to a British audience to illustrate to 

them the changes that the Mohawk had made over the last century thanks to their willingness to 

adapt beyond their traditional beliefs.242  

In his journal, Norton recounted the violence that ravaged the Ohio River valley in the 

decades following the Revolutionary War. Norton specifically emphasized Brant’s role in 

founding the Western confederacy of Indians to keep the United States from treating with 

Indigenous bands individually. Norton also explained Brant’s deep disappointment when that 

confederacy split over the issue of the Ohio River as the border between Indigenous territory and 

the United States. Norton described the confederacy’s critical victories over Generals Harmar 

and St. Clair, and he lamented the confederacy’s loss to Anthony Wayne’s standing army in 

1794. All the while, Norton emphasized the wisdom of the Haudenosaunee and their central 

importance to the stability of the Great Lakes region. Norton’s Journal presented his British 

audience with numerous examples of Indigenous culture, but he also wrote with a mind to 

conveying a history that met Western standards of historical narratives. Norton’s attention to 

diplomatic and wartime detail reveals his understanding of the conventions of Western notions of 

linear historical time versus Indigenous oral traditions that focused more on cyclic time. Norton 

was using his history to sell to the British the idea that the Mohawk were still incredibly 

important to Britain’s North American aspirations, not least because of their ability to creatively 

adapt to the changing social and geopolitical environment.243  

 

242 Norton, Journal of Major John Norton, 105-6. 
243 Norton, Journal, 174-90. 

 

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That both Brant and Norton emphasized the composing of an Indigenous-authored 

history illustrates the importance that these Mohawk leaders placed on using their Western 

education to share their Indigenous perspective with a global audience in the growing world of 

print culture. Though neither man ultimately achieved this goal in his lifetime, their intentions 

and attempts attest to their belief in the power of public opinion in shaping the circumstances that 

Indigenous people faced on a daily basis. Through the education of their community, Brant and 

Norton hoped other Mohawk would continue to disprove the myths that settler society used to 

justify Indigenous marginalization. However, both Brant and Norton received backlash from 

more traditionalist factions of Haudenosaunee. Mohawk leaders Aaron Hill and Deserontyon 

rebuked Brant for his embracing of Western law and culture, even though he did so to help 

secure the survival of his community’s Iroquoian culture and values. Norton also battled 

traditionalists, who, spurred by administrator William Claus sought to deny Norton’s cultural 

authority among the Haudenosaunee. Critics accused Norton of being too much of an 

accommodationist, and for seeking to adapt the Mohawk to the point that they were hardly 

distinguishable from the dominant settler communities that bordered them. However, Norton’s 

Journal illustrates his attention to keeping alive the traditional knowledge passed down by 

Brant.244 

This strategy of survivance in the writing of an Indigenous history proved prescient, 

despite Norton’s inability to publish his Journal. In his writing, Norton displayed a keen ability 

to bridge the transference of traditional Mohawk knowledge with the conventional tropes of 

European narrative construction. Norton presented Haudenosaunee stories as compatible 

connections between Indigenous cultural customs and European social and legal traditions. 

244 Willig, Restoring the Chain of Friendship, 164-66. 

 

 

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Norton’s Journal declared that Indigenous groups were deserving of international recognition as 

political equals and not merely as dependents. This concept is one that reflects the decades of 

diplomatic battles fought between Norton and Brant on the one side and British administrators 

William Claus and John Johnson on the other. Following the Revolution, Brant and later Norton 

continually sought to secure complete land tenure for their Mohawk community. Norton 

intended to publish his Journal in order to obtain support from British philanthropists and 

government officials to aid in this cause. Like his mentor Brant, Norton understood that in order 

to secure land title rights from the British government, Indigenous people needed to prove they 

were progressive, educated, “civilized,” and thus worthy of citizenry or at least fair treatment as 

an acknowledged foreign nation. In the ensuing decades, this same tactic was even more 

successfully employed by Peter Jones in his advocacy for Upper Canada’s Mississauga.245 

 

 

Peter Jones’s History of the Ojebway Indians 

In November of 1850, the Mohawk community at the Grand River reinterred the remains 

its former patriarch, Joseph Brant, in a tomb at the reserve. The occasion was marked by 

speeches from several renowned speakers, including the Methodist Minister and Mississauga 

chief, Peter Jones (Kahkewaquonaby). Jones began by expressing a “personal interest in the 

history of” this famed Mohawk, arising from the fact that Jones’s father, “Augustus Jones, and 

Joseph Brant, maintained the closest friendship to the day of Brant’s death.” Jones explained 

how Brant even gave his Mohawk name, Thayendenagea to Peter’s brother John Jones out of the 

affection he shared for their father. After describing the relationship that developed between 

Brant’s Mohawk and Jones’ Mississauga from the moment the Haudenosaunee were forced to 

245 Jeffrey Glover, “Going to War on the Back of a Turtle: Creation Stories and the Laws of War in John 

Norton’s Journal,” Early American Literature 51, no. 3 (2016), 2. 

 

 

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flee their homelands in New York following the Revolution, Jones emphasized the loyalty and 

attachment Brant maintained to the British throughout his life. However, after skimming over 

Brant’s bravery and wartime exploits, Jones touched on what he considered to be the Mohawk 

leaders’ most important characteristics: his dedication to education and Christianity in order to 

best poise his people for survival. Jones commended Brant on his translations of “the Gospel of 

St. Mark into Mohawk, and other portions of the Holy Scriptures, as well as the book of 

Common Prayer, which were printed amongst the Christian portion of the Six Nations.” He then 

declared, “Brant was the principal means of the erection of this church, now the oldest in 

Canada, and procured the bell which has so often summoned the people of God together to 

worship in his holy courts.” For Jones, Brant was an inspiration in strategies of survivance. His 

community on the Grand River had fended off the worst effects of settler colonialism even 

during the turbulent 1830s when British Indian policies seemed to abruptly change course 

towards removal.246 

  By 1850, Jones had already accomplished a great deal for his Mississauga community, whom 

in 1823, at the time of his conversion, he described as “in a most degraded state; they were 

pagans, idolaters, superstitious, drunken, filthy, and indolent.” But as of 1843, in response to a 

query proposed by commissioners appointed to look into the state of Indian Affairs in Upper 

Canada, Jones portrayed his Mississauga as “sober, and comparatively clean and industrious; 

they have formed themselves into settlements, where they have places of worship and schools, 

and cultivate the earth.” According to Jones, this successful transformation should be attributed 

to the emphasis they, like Brant’s Mohawk before them, placed on education and religion. For 

 

246 The speech was recorded by the Brantford Herald in its coverage of the event, quoted in Peter Jones, 

History of the Ojebway Indians; with Especial Reference to their Conversion to Christianity (London: A. W. 
Bennett, 1861), 210-13; Smith, Sacred Feathers, 217. 

 

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Jones, such an undertaking had always required the political, financial, and social backing of 

British elites. It was for this reason that Jones pursued a public persona, writing prolifically both 

in correspondence and in hopes of publication. Though, like Brant and Norton before him, Jones 

never lived to see the publication of his History of the Ojebway Indians, he still labored over it 

for twenty years in hopes that he could elevate Canada’s Indians in the minds of the British 

public.247 

After Jones’ death, his wife Eliza fulfilled his dream when she compiled his notebooks 

and published his History. Over the two decades Jones spent on his History, Eliza was always 

involved, if at times only as his muse. In a letter to his wife from April of 1833, Jones described 

his journey to visit many different Ojibwe villages surrounding Lakes Huron and Michigan. In 

this letter, Jones eagerly stated, “I hope to furnish myself with many interesting particulars 

relative to the customs and manners of the Indians in that remote quarter, where they live more in 

a state of nature, than those do who live in the frontier of white settlements.” Articulating his 

excitement for this tour of the region, Jones stated, “should the Lord spare me to finish the 

proposed History of my nation, such information will be a great acquisition to the work.” Jones 

eventually died in 1856 before he could complete his History, and Eliza published it five years 

later. In his life, Jones, like Brant before him, found his attention mostly drawn to the physical 

needs of his community, as well as the political battles they waged over securing legal title to the 

 

247 Jones, “Answers to the Queries proposed by the Commissioners appointed to enquire into Indian Affairs 

in this province,” in History of the Ojebway Indians, 236; Smith, Sacred Feathers, 246-47; Smith, Mississauga 
Portraits: Ojibwe Voices from Nineteenth-Century Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 25-29; 
Maureen Konkle, Writing Indian Nations: Native Intellectuals and the Politics of Historiography, 1827-1863 
(Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 181-85. 

 

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lands they possessed. However, as evidenced in his correspondence, Jones’ History was never far 

from his thoughts.248 

Illustrating his understanding of the power of narrative, an entire chapter in Jones’ 

History focused on British public opinion concerning Indians. This chapter includes 

transcriptions of several letters from Jones’ correspondence with various British government 

agents, all focusing on the Mississauga’s successful adaptation to British standards of 

civilization. Jones appealed to his British audience with statements such as, “No one will deny 

that the Indians have been more kindly treated by the British Government than by the 

American.” Jones cautioned that though the British government provided more paternal 

protection to its Indigenous populations than the United States, “I think that some acts of the 

Colonial Government cannot be considered as doing full justice to the natives.” Getting directly 

to the point, Jones declared, “Indians at the present time enjoy no political rights or advantages. 

They cannot vote at elections for members of Parliament, nor sit as jurors, however qualified 

they may be, simply because they have no title-deeds for their lands.” This chapter was so 

adroitly placed at the end of Jones’ History, after he had already detailed the progress made by 

his Mississauga toward achieving British standards. Ultimately, Jones revealed his true intention 

by stating, “I know of no legal impediment to their possessing such rights…It is my firm 

conviction that many of the Indians are sufficiently instructed in the knowledge of civil affairs to 

be able to use the rights of British subjects as judiciously as many of their white neighbours.” In 

Jones’ estimation, the British public simply needed to bear witness to this fact, then by their own 

ethical standards, they might recognize and eventually award Indigenous people their rights.249 

 

248 Transcription of a letter from Peter Jones to Eliza Jones, Donald Smith Fonds, Box 1, File 4, E.J. Pratt 
Library, Victoria College, Toronto University; see also other letters from throughout Jones’ life also in the Donald 
Smith Fonds. 

249 Jones, History of the Ojebway Indians, 207-18. 

 

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Simon Pokagon’s Fulfillment of the Legacy 

While Jones’ Mississauga and Norton’s Mohawk both enjoyed a direct lineage to Brant’s 

intellectual legacy, the Pokagons of western Michigan evolved their own strategies of survivance 

that stretched back to Potawatomi resistance at the end of the eighteenth century. By the time of 

the Treaty of Greenville in 1795, Simon Pokagon’s father Leopold and grandfather Topinabee 

had already begun a process of incorporating certain elements of the dominant white culture into 

their Potawatomi community such as Catholicism, Western notions of land usage, education, and 

a market economy. They did so in order to prove to the United States that they were “civilized” 

and thus should be exempt from the nation’s harsher Indian policies like removal. This southwest 

Michigan band of Potawatomi had already been in the process of extracting itself from the 

Western Confederacy of Indians ever since the united Indian nations turned away from Brant’s 

strategies of survivance in favor of a more militaristic stance. The St. Joseph Potawatomi’s 

decision proved prescient when Anthony Wayne’s standing army beat Little Turtle’s forces into 

submission at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in August of 1794. From that point on, under the 

leadership of Topinabee and Leopold Pokagon, the Potawatomi of the St. Joseph River sought in 

earnest to adapt to the standards proposed by the United States government in much the same 

manner that Brant adapted his Mohawk in Upper Canada to British standards. By proving the 

Potawatomi were capable of American notions of progress, Topinabee and Pokagon believed 

they could ensure their people would fare better than their Indigenous neighbors.250 

Under the leadership of these two adaptive chiefs, the St. Joseph Potawatomi continually 

petitioned for a Catholic priest to minister to them throughout the early decades of the nineteenth 

 

250 For an in-depth discussion of the Pokagon response to the Western Confederacy’s militaristic stance up 
until the Treaty of Greenville, see Ben Secunda, “In the Shadow of the Eagle’s Wings: The Effects of Removal on 
the Unremoved Potawatomi, Volume I” (PhD Diss., University of Michigan, 2008), 163-71 accessed April 13, 2018, 
ProQuest Dissertations & Theses. 

 

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century. As Chapter Two argues, this St. Joseph band focused their efforts on adaptive resistance 

to American concepts of land use and property value, Christianity, and education, rather than on 

seeking the military aid of the British to halt the spread of American settler encroachment. 

Identifying themselves as the “woodland band,” these Potawatomi acted mostly with 

ambivalence during the War of 1812, when the Indiana and Illinois bands flocked to join 

Tecumseh against the United States. After the Battle of the Thames, when Tecumseh fell, almost 

all the Potawatomi returned to their villages and quickly signed treaties with Cass to remain 

neutral for the remainder of the war. In the decades following the war’s conclusion Great Lakes 

Indians faced mounting pressure from Cass, Andrew Jackson, and other U.S. officials to remove 

west of the Mississippi. Leopold and his St. Joseph band were then able to negotiate with Cass 

for a clause in the Chicago Treaty of 1833 that allowed them to remain in Michigan on private 

lands purchased by the sale of individual allotments that Leopold and his wife had obtained from 

previous treaties. This clause depended mostly on the “woodland band’s” Catholic worship and 

other proofs of their “civilized” adaptation. Over half a century later, the Pokagon band (now 

named in honor of their beloved leader Leopold) faced the threats of mounting internal divisions 

and a lack of fulfillment of Treaty promises by the United States government. At this point 

Leopold’s son Simon Pokagon embarked on a literary career that began with his visit to Chicago 

in 1893 for the World’s Columbian Exposition.251  

 

251 Ben Secunda, “To Cede or Seed? Risk and Identity Among the Woodland Potawatomi During the 

Removal Period,” Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology, Vol 31, 1 (Spring 2006), 57-88; Secunda, “The Road to 
Ruin? ‘Civilization’ and the Origins of a ‘Michigan Road Band’ of Potawatomi,” Michigan Historical Review 34, 
no. 1 (Spring, 2008), 118-49; Susan Sleeper-Smith, Indian Women and French Men: Rethinking Cultural Encounter 
in the Western Great Lakes (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), 106-7; Clifton, Pokagons, 69; R. 
David Edmunds, The Potawatomis: Keepers of the Fire (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989), 266-67. 

 

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Figure 6.2: Catalogue of Exhibits on the Midway Plaisance252 

A day after the closing of the great fair, the Chicago Daily Tribune reflected on the 

grandeur of the previous six months. One writer described the Fair as “a little ideal world, a 

realization of Utopia, in which every sight was beautiful and ever day a festival, in which for the 

time all thoughts of the great world of toil, of injustice, of cruelty, and of oppression outside its 

 

252 The Encyclopedia of Chicago states of this catalogue, “Some planners of the World's Columbian 

Exposition envisioned the Midway portion of the Fair as a lesson in ethnography and human development. The 
villages created in the Midway were supposed to provide visitors with glimpses of "primitive" cultures, in contrast 
with "civilization" as presented in the White City. Most visitors, however, went to the Midway not for its alleged 
anthropological insights, but for entertainment and shopping, enticed by the Ferris Wheel and other attractions and 
concessions.” W. B. Conkey Company, World's Columbian Exposition, The Electronic Encyclopedia of Chicago, 
http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/11421.html (accessed 4 September 2020). 

 

 

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gates disappeared.” Considering the Exposition an instant success, Chicagoans celebrated the 

event as the pinnacle of the narrative of “progress” that scholars like Frederick Jackson Turner 

traced from Columbus’ 1492 voyage to the rise of Chicago as a frontier metropolis. However, 

this triumphal narrative depended on defining Western Civilization in opposition to the world’s 

“uncivilized” Indigenous cultures. As such, Indians did occupy a place at the Fair, but it was one 

designed to perpetuate the mythologized settler colonial narrative that had marginalized and 

“vanished” Indigenous peoples for almost a century.  

At the Fair, Indigenous people, Indigenous culture, and Indigenous artifacts were put on 

display, representing the primitive “other” to provide contrast to the progress of American 

“civilization.” Frederic Ward Putnam, the curator of Harvard’s Peabody Museum served as 

organizer for the Fair’s anthropology exhibit, which he referred to as “The March of the 

Aborigine to Civilization.’” Putnam explained, “At the top of the exhibit was the government 

schoolhouse, followed by an ‘Esquimau village, and, in order, Crees from Manitoba, Penebscots 

from Maine, Iroquois from New York, Quackuhls {Kwakwaka’wakw), Chippewas from 

Minnesota, Winnebagos from Wisconsin, Sioux, Blackfeet, Nez Perce and other tribes from the 

far west.’” Blatantly missing was any truly Indigenous representation or Indigenous perspective. 

As Paige Raibmon argues, “Colonized peoples—almost always of color and often feminized—

were living evidence that countries such as Canada [and the United States] had graduated from 

colony to colonizer.” Putnam stressed the authenticity of the Indians in his exhibits, which meant 

they needed to appear static and unchanged, the opposite of Pokagon’s Potawatomi.253 

 

253 “Good-By to the Fair,” Chicago Daily Tribune (1 November 1893), 4; Raymond Fogelson, “The Red 

Man in the White City,” Native Chicago, ed. Terry Straus (Chicago: Albatross Press, 2002), 140; Raibmon, 
Authentic Indians, 34, 37; Putnam quote from “Quackuhls are Here: Arrival of the Vancouver Natives with James 
Deans,” Chicago Daily Tribune 12 April 1893, p. 1. 

 

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As anthropologist Raymond Fogelson has pointed out, the 1893 World’s Columbian 

Exposition allowed the city of Chicago to define its sixty years of progress in contradistinction to 

the backwardness of the authentic Indians displayed on the Midway. Fogelson argues, “the 

world’s uncivilized races and cultures were taken as markers to measure the distance that 

separated ‘them’ from ‘us.’” As such, the burgeoning field of anthropology, especially under the 

guidance of Franz Boas, played a critical role in how Indigenous peoples would be represented at 

the fair. Romantic ethnologists like Boas argued that authentic Indians were vanishing, and that 

events like the Columbian Exposition might be the last chance many Americans would have to 

see them before they disappeared completely. In the meantime, as scholars such as Raibmon, and 

David Beck and Rosalyn Lapier have noted, while ethnologists mourned the vanishing of 

authentic Indians, representatives of the federal government like Richard Henry Pratt were 

dedicated to the assimilation and uplift of American Indians through education, particularly 

boarding schools. Then there were those like Simon Pokagon, a Potawatomi leader, who 

believed that his people could be saved from annihilation by assimilating, but that Indigenous 

culture did not necessarily need to be sacrificed as a prerequisite. Pokagon represented one of the 

many Indigenous people that Beck and Lapier argue, “wanted to retain their cultural heritage 

[while] some wanted to abandon it, and yet others desire to become part of the modern world 

without giving up their connections to their homelands or cultural beliefs.”254  

Pokagon was among the throng in attendance at the Columbian Exposition’s opening day 

in Chicago. There he witnessed representations of Indians that supported the settler narrative of 

barbarity and backwardness. Especially upsetting to Pokagon were the Indigenous peoples in the 

 

254 Fogelson, Red Man in the White City, 140; David R. M. Beck and Rosalyn R. Lapier, City Indian: 

Native American Activism in Chicago, 1893-1934 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015), 22-23; Raibmon, 
Authentic Indians, 46-49. 

 

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Midway that were “playing Indian.” Pokagon saw no acknowledgment of Indian advancement or 

education to serve as a foil to the settler narrative, and the Indians that played along gave that 

narrative legitimacy in the eyes of the public. According to the preface in Pokagon’s Queen of 

the Woods written by his longtime editor and attorney C. H. Engle, when Pokagon visited the 

fair, “he saw all nationalities provided for except the original Americans…While he stood sadly 

considering the great wrong to his people, a little girl of his own race, unnoticed before, stepped 

quietly up to him and, seemingly in pity, handed him some wild flowers.” As Engle tells it, the 

girl’s gesture reduced Pokagon to tears, and he immediately returned to his home near Hartford, 

Michigan, and began penning his Red Man’s Rebuke. When Pokagon declared to Chicago’s 

fairgoers, “we have no spirit to celebrate with you the great Columbian Fair now being held in 

this Chicago city,” he opened a fair number of eyes, including those of the city’s mayor, Carter 

Harrison.255  

Because of the publicity garnered by Pokagon’s rebuke, a group of women debating 

whether and how educated Indians could be given an opportunity to hold a congress at the fair, 

officially invited him back to Chicago to share his perspective. At that meeting, Pokagon first 

thanked the women, then remarked, “I rejoice that you are making an effort, at last, to have the 

educated people of my race take part in the great celebration. That will be much better for the 

good of our people, in the hearts of the dominant race, than war-whoops and battle-dances.” 

Seeking to correct the public’s perception of Indians and Indigenous culture, Pokagon then 

gladly accepted an invitation from Mayor Harrison to attend the fair as a guest of the city. 

Pokagon declared, “The world’s people, from what they have so far seen of us on the Midway, 

will regard us as savages; but they shall yet know that we are human as well as they.” This 

255 C. H. Engle, “Publisher’s Notes,” Pokagon, Queen of the Woods, 8-10; Beck and Lapier, City Indian, 

 

205 

24-26. 

 

 

statement sums up the last decade of Pokagon’s life as he launched into a public career with the 

goal of writing Indians back into the public narrative to prove they had a place in modern 

society.256 

Other scholars have divided over how to assess Pokagon’s public persona, especially the 

last decade of his life. Anthropologist and Potawatomi expert James Clifton doubted the 

authenticity of Pokagon’s writings. Writing in the mid-1970s, Clifton scathingly claimed that 

Pokagon was “little more than literate, with his creative writings being the result of a 

collaboration with the imaginative” wife of his editor, C. H. Engle. Clifton boldly accused 

Engle’s wife of ghosting “Pokagon’s essays, poems, and novels,” a claim that he substantiated 

with a single footnote referencing only four works. Those sources include, David Dickason’s 

“Chief Simon Pokagon, the Indian Longfellow,” an article published in the Indiana Magazine of 

History; a self-published book by Everett Claspy entitled, The Potawatomi Indians of 

Southwestern Michigan; Frederick Hodge’s Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico, 

published by the Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin; and an article by George Quimby 

entitled, “Some Notes on Kinship and Kinship Terminology Among the Potawatomi of the 

Huron,” published in the Papers of the Michigan Academy of Science, Arts, and Letters. In 

Clifton’s later study, The Pokagons, he further stated that the semi-autobiographical Queen of the 

Woods was “issued over Simon Pokagon’s name after his death in 1899 [and that] Engle’s wife, 

however, was most likely ‘ghost writer’ of this cloyingly romantic frontier fantasy.” This time, in 

support of his defaming remark, Clifton offered no source references. Rather, Clifton was far less 

interested in the cultural ramifications of Pokagon’s literary battles with the settler colonial 

 

256 C. H. Engle, “Publisher’s Notes,” Simon Pokagon, O-GÎ-MĀ-KWĖ MIT-I-GWÄ-KÎ (Queen of the 

Woods) (Hartford, Michigan: C. H. Engle, 1901), 9-13; “Appendix 1: Pokagon’s Address at The World’s Columbian 
Exposition, Chicago, 1893,” Simon Pokagon, O-gi-maw-kwe-mit-i-gwa-ki=Queen of the Woods (East Lansing: 
Michigan State University Press, 2011), 191-92. 

 

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narrative than he was in Pokagon’s struggles to achieve political power within his own band, 

which according to Clifton, made him something of a failure. Clifton dismissed out of hand the 

value of Pokagon’s perspective on Indigenous representation in American history and his 

advocacy of Indigenous culture and rights to the American public.257 

Few scholars shaped the modern historical discourse of Simon Pokagon more than 

Clifton, and not until recently have other scholars begun to dig deeper into the life, actions, and 

writings of this enigmatic Potawatomi leader. Of the four sources Clifton listed in his single 

footnote on Simon Pokagon, Quimby made no reference to Pokagon whatsoever, Hodge’s 

encyclopedia-like reference included only glowing praise for Pokagon as having “bore the 

reputation of being the best educated full-blooded Indian of his time.” Dickason similarly 

described Pokagon in positive terms, stating Pokagon was “sorely troubled by the social and 

economic difficulties confronting the Indians of his generation [and he was] deeply sensitive to 

the romantic virtues and beauties of unexploited nature; and…his affection for his ill-starred 

family is poignant and personal.” Dickason then asserted that Pokagon’s rhetoric, based on white 

romanticism, “weakens the vigor of his English style and disappoints a modern reader. One feels 

that he is not speaking with the spontaneous voice of his own primeval culture, but rather is 

borrowing the white man’s nineteenth-century clichés.” However, Dickason insists, “Queen of 

the Woods is a unique document from a genuine Indian source, an emotional and at times lyrical 

remembrance of things past rather than a synthetic, sterile exercise such as Hiawatha.” Of 

Clifton’s four sources, only Everett Claspy could account for Clifton’s rejection of Pokagon’s 

authorship. However, Claspy merely stated, “the mid-twentieth-century Potawatomi leader 

 

257 James A. Clifton, Prairie People: Continuity and Change in Potawatomi Indian Culture, 1665-1965 
(Lawrence: The Regents Press of Kansas, 1977), 312; Clifton, The Pokagons, 1683-1983: Catholic Potawatomi 
Indians of the St. Joseph River Valley (Lanham: Maryland: University Press of America, 1984), 103-4. 

 

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Michael Williams [was] ‘of the opinion that the wife of Engle…had a lot to do with [Pokagon’s] 

literary output.’” Clifton took this comment on editorial contribution to mean that Engle’s wife 

“ghosted” Pokagon’s writings. In fact, Pokagon was “borrowing the white man’s clichés,” but he 

was doing so for his writings to resonate with a white audience.258  

Pokagon did not merely write for a white audience; he presented to them a still-thriving 

Indigenous culture believed by the dominant society to be dead. Using more than just words, 

Pokagon spent the last decade of his life living out the Potawatomi culture that he insisted still 

existed. By producing his writings on birch bark, Pokagon provided his reading audience with an 

example of Potawatomi cultural continuity, and proof that Indians had been writing since long 

before the white man taught them Western literacy. In his 2010 article, “Written in Birch Bark: 

The Linguistic-Material Worldmaking of Simon Pokagon,” Jonathan Berliner argues that not 

only did Pokagon indeed author his own work; he did so with a keen understanding of the 

cultural significance of both his words and the medium. Berliner contends that Pokagon’s “birch-

bark booklets bring together multiple cultural traditions, including nineteenth-century tourist art, 

traditional Algonquian writing, and a long history of writing on bark that dates to the early 

history of writing itself.” Berliner also addressed Clifton’s criticism by stating, “since the 1960s, 

critics have surmised that Pokagon was assisted in the composition of his writings by his 

publisher, C. H. Engle, and by one of Engle’s wives.” Berliner referenced an interview with one 

of Engle’s descendants, who was very skeptical of the notion of Engle’s wife as Pokagon’s 

 

258 George I. Quimby, “Some Notes on Kinship and Kinship Terminology Among the Potawatomi of the 
Huron,” Papers of Michigan Academy of Science, Arts, and Letters, Vol. 25 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan 
Press, 1968 [originally published in 1939]), 553-63; Frederick Webb Hodge, Handbook of American Indians North 
of Mexico, Vol II (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1910), 274-75; David H. Dickason, “Chief Simon 
Pokagon: ‘The Indian Longfellow,’” Indiana Magazine of History, 57, no. 2 (June 1961), 128; Everett Claspy, The 
Potawatomi Indians of Southwestern Michigan (Dowagiac: self-published, 1966), 23. 

 

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ghostwriter. While conceding that Pokagon did receive assistance from Engle, Berliner argues, 

“it is doubtful…that Engle had more than an editorial role.”259 

  

Figure 6.3: “Chicago in My Grandfather’s Day”260 

Pokagon, himself addressed the medium of his birch bark in the opening of his Red 

Man’s Rebuke, in which he stated his object was “out of loyalty to my own people, and gratitude 

to the Great Spirit, who in his wisdom provided for our use for untold generations, this most 

remarkable tree with manifold bark used by us instead of paper.” For Pokagon, producing books 

on traditional birch bark was yet another way to illustrate to Western society the ways that 

Indigenous culture was more sophisticated than given credit for. The celebrated Ojibwe author 

Louise Erdrich comments on the traditional use of birchbark in her book, Books & Islands in 

259 Jonathan Berliner, “Written in the Birch Bark: The Linguistic-Material Worldmaking of Simon 

 

Pokagon,” PMLA 125, no. 1 (Jan., 2010), 74-76. 

260 “Chicago in My Grandfather’s Days,” Simon Pokagon, Red Man’s Rebuke. 

 

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Ojibwe Country. In a section where she explores the root of the word, “Ojibwe,” she admits her 

preference for the meaning derived from the word, “Ozhibii’ige, which is ‘to write.’” She 

continues, “Ojibwe people were great writers from way back and synthesized the oral and 

written tradition by keeping mnemonic scrolls of inscribed birchbark. The first paper, the first 

books.” Pokagon, then, was tapping into an ancient custom of writing on birch bark; one that far 

preceded European contact.261 

A Pokagon Band Potawatomi tribal member interviewed by Berliner explained that in the 

present day, Simon Pokagon is remembered with ambivalence. The anonymous tribal member 

lamented, “Simon had a lot of expectations placed on him—both fair and unfair—because he 

was the son of such a respected leader.” However, because Simon excelled as a public presence, 

he was able to utilize strategies of survivance to advocate for Indigenous culture and rights to an 

American audience, and the acclaim and recognition he received served as a double-edged 

sword. As with Joseph Brant a century before him, Simon Pokagon bridged the worlds of 

Indigenous and white societies, however, the more successful he proved in the American public 

sphere, the less trusted he was by his own community who increasingly saw him as both an 

accommodationist, willing to sacrifice his Indigenous traditions and beliefs for the dominant 

settler culture, and as self-centered rather than community oriented. Berliner’s Potawatomi 

informant added, “Simon’s talents lay more in writing and public speaking than in community 

leadership and advocacy, and there were a lot of mixed feelings about him within the 

community.” Perhaps that is ultimately why Clifton dismissed him as significant.262 

261 Pokagon, Red Man’s Rebuke; Louise Erdrich, Books & Islands in Ojibwe Country: Traveling Through 

 

the Land of My Ancestors (New York: Harper Perennial, 2003), 8. 

262 Pokagon tribal member quoted in Berliner, “Written in the Birch Bark,” 76. 

 

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Scholar Lisa Cushing Davis analyzes the contrast in tone and message between 

Pokagon’s Red Man’s Rebuke and his more conciliatory speech during the Chicago Day 

celebration at the Exposition. Davis argues that Pokagon was always conscious of his audience, 

and his rhetoric and performance tended to focus more on earning acceptance from the American 

public than maintaining his status within his own community. As Cushing argues, Pokagon’s 

messages and attitudes” earned him the respect of white citizens,” but at the cost of 

disillusionment among the Potawatomi. Like Brant a century before, some of Pokagon’s people 

saw his attempts at bridging the Indian-white cultural divide as an act of assimilation. Regardless 

of how Pokagon might have been viewed as not Indigenous enough by his Potawatomi 

community, his advocacy still successfully reached a wide American audience, many of whom 

were set on moral reform in the early Progressive era.263 

Ultimately, Pokagon, like his father before him, managed to utilize strategies of 

survivance to prove to the dominant settler colonial society that another narrative of the nation’s 

history existed. Like Brant, Pokagon faced continual accusations of accommodation by his own 

people, but he endured, and he was able to continue to exert influence over white society. Like 

Norton, he presented Indigenous history to the Western world not as something inferior, but as 

compatible and equal in many ways. Like Jones, Pokagon used his Christianity to highlight the 

moral failures of the Western world and reflect them back to the dominant society. While the 

settler colonial narrative neatly wrote Indians out of existence as settler societies dispossessed 

them of their lands, Indigenous intellectuals utilizing strategies of survivance refused the silence 

that was thrust upon them. Each of these Indigenous intellectuals, Brant, Norton, Jones, and 

Pokagon proved that Indians could thrive in modern society without having to abandon their 

263 Lisa Cushing Davis, “Hegemony and Resistance at the World’s Columbian Exposition: Simon Pokagon 

and The Red Man’s Rebuke,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, 108, no. 1 (Spring 2015), 32, 44. 

 

 

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cultural identities. In doing so, they have all left a record of subversion in a historical narrative 

otherwise monopolized by settler colonial viewpoints. While today, the Frederick Jackson 

Turners of history face continued scrutiny in a society that increasingly progresses past the 

nineteenth-century conceptions of “progressivism,” these Indigenous intellectuals are enjoying 

renewed celebration as their acts of survivance have surely left an enduring legacy that will only 

grow with time and continued reflection. 

 

 

 

 

212 

 

 

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213 

 

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