An Update on Electa Quinney, The first Female Schoolteacher in Present-day Wisconsin

 

In an earlier post on Electa Quinney, I stated that I hoped I would never come across any data that proved she hadn't taught school in 1828. Well, I came across that data a few months ago and, seeing that "Electa Quinney" is a search term that brings people to this blog, I decided it is time for an update.

Volume XV of Wisconsin Historical Collections contains a letter from an Augustus T. Ambler. The purpose of that letter was to report the death of the Stockbridge Mohican's missionary, Jesse Miner, to the philanthropical society that supported his work.  Miner died in March of 1829.

In that same letter, Augustus T. Ambler reports that he had been teaching for three months and had also been sick for three weeks. Ambler adds that "Electa Quinney, a competent native teacher, will probably take charge of the school this summer."

And she did. Electa Quinney had taught for six years at New Stockbridge, New York and after arriving at Statesburg (which is now Kaukuana, Wisconsin), she taught the children of her people for one more term, in the summer of 1829.

I pieced these things together at about the same time that I got access to Electa Quinney's only known biography, an unpublished college term paper written by Annie Paprocki in 1999. Paprocki says the same thing: Augustus Ambler taught in the winter of 1828-1829 and Electa Quinney took over the teaching duties the next term, before being replaced by Jedidiah Stevens.


Here's a somewhat amusing sidenote:

Out of an understandable eagerness to point to positive role models (or to make money on the web), people need to be careful not to make false claims. I came across a webpage that even claims Electa Quinney was South Dakota's first schoolteacher. Correction: Electa Quinney never even lived in South Dakota. Also, there is no Kaukauna in South Dakata. 


Anyway, to wrap it up, I think Annie Paprocki was right to conclude that Electa Quinney is still a good role model despite not having taught school in 1828. You don't have to be the first one to do something to be a good role model. Electa Quinney was a Christian schoolteacher, and later a wife and mother at a time and place where nothing came easy - especially not to Indians.

How the Stockbridge Bible Made News in the 1920's

You may remember how I tracked the whereabouts of the Stockbridge Bible from Jameson "Sote" Quinney's house to the safe on the altar of the Sergeant Memorial Church and then back to Quinney's house again (before going on to a bank in Shawano and then being sold to Mabel Choate). Of course we'll never know why Sote Quinney brought the two sacred volumes back to his house, but I think it has something to do with rumors he may have been aware of that outsiders wanted the tribal Bible.

Sote Quinney could have learned of those rumors by word of mouth, and he may also have read an article that came out in the newspapers of two "white" towns in 1927. On July 27th of that year, the Shawano Advocate published an article that was also printed in the Wittenburg Enterprise the next day. The article, as I noted in my Spring, 2007 paper printed in The Book Collector, was "full of racial bias and lacked accuracy."

Maybe you can make out some of the words of the article. It starts out by saying "Few Shawano county citizens know that locked securely in a strong safe in the little Presbyterian chuch at Red Springs is the Bible which was presented to the Stockbridge Indians by George III in 1742 when he was then Prince of Wales." Relatively minor details like who exactly gave the tribe its Bible and when the gift was made can be overlooked, but it gets worse.

The newspapers claimed that Quinney found the Stockbridge Bible in "an old rubbish heap." This claim is clearly a caricature of Rev. Earl North's report (which I consider quite reliable). According to North, the two volumes had been "found in a deserted house" and later brought to Sote Quinney because he was a spiritual and political leader of the tribe.

Anyway, I don't think we can consider the newspaper article to be reliable, but, nevertheless, I feel it won't hurt to include a few lines of it here:

Quinney kept this sacred book in his possession for thirty years. Ten years ago he consented to leave it in a small safe in the church. The combination of this safe is a secret, nobody but Quinney knowing how to obtain the Bible....

Quinney has been in ill health for some time, and it is expected that he will give the combination to Rev. McGreaham, pastor of the church for several years, before he dies.

Photographic Evidence in the Story of the Stockbridge Bible

This is part 10 of an ongoing series about the Stockbridge Bible

In the fall of 2003, the staff of the Stockbridge Mohicans' Museum gave me a digital copy of this photo which depicts Rev. Charles Kilpatrick (standing), William Dick (the last person to fluently speak the Mohican language), and the infamous "steel safe" where the Stockbridge Bible was kept.

If you have read my post of June 22, you'll remember that Rev. Fred Westfall was regarded as the villain responsible for sending the two-volume tribal Bible back to Massachusetts in 1930. Part of what made Rev. Westfall such a villain - as members of the Stockbridge-Munsee Historical Committee saw it - was that he took the Bible from the Quinney family and put it in the safe on the altar of the John Sergeant Memorial Church before selling it to Mabel Choate of Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

However, the photo you see above clearly proved that it wasn't Rev. Westfall's idea to purchase a safe. Rev. Kilpatrick's last year of ministering to the Stockbridge Mohicans was 1917, and Rev. Westfall didn't come into the picture until a few years later.

In the tribe's museum, I found a letter written by Viola Jacobs Knight in 1978 which explained how the Stockbridge Bible moved from the house of Jamison "Sote" Quinney to the safe in the John Sergeant Memorial Presbyterian Church (where Sote Quinney served as an elder). Ms. Jacobs wrote that when Quinney got older he asked around to see if any member of the tribe was interested in keeping the two historic volumes in their homes and after he realized that nobody would take him up on the offer, he agreed to keep them "in a steel safe" on the altar of the church.

I was getting closer, but I still didn't have all the answers.

The Stockbridge Bible and the John Sergeant Memorial Church

The image below illustrates how thoroughly complex the various splits and reconciliations within the Presbyterian church have been. The point of showing them here is to illustrate that the Presbyterian church is not a single body, but rather a group of denominations. The Stockbridge Mohicans were served by many Calvinist ministers, probably most of them claimed to be Presbyterians (the ABCFM, however, was a predominantly Congregational organization). Click on the diagram to enlarge it.


In telling the church history of the Stockbridge Mohicans, I haven't reached the point where the tribe comes to feel they are not being served by Calvinist church bodies (more specifically the Presbyterians), and move on to Roman Catholic and/or Lutheran churches. That happened at the end of the 1800's, I referred to it in my last post as "a low ebb" in "organized Christianity."

Despite some activity with other denominations at the end of the 1800's, there were still Stockbridge Indians who continued to identify themselves as Presbyterians, remaining loyal to Calvinist roots that stretched back to the ministry of John Sergeant [Sr.] (1734-1749).

The following account is excerpted from my paper that appeared in the Spring, 2007 issue of The Book Collector.

[Jamison] Sote Quinney and other leaders got to know white Presbyterian ministers in the area who came in to preside over funerals. On Sunday, September 29th, 1907, the Assistant Superintendent of the Presbyterian church's Wisconsin Synod visited and preached to the Stockbridge [Mohicans]. the scripture lessons were read from the Stockbridge Bible for the first time in [many] years. finally, at the end of the service, a petition to start a new church was placed on top of the revered Bible. Forty-five adults signed the petition, some of the older ones with tears in their eyes (Putnam, Christian Religion, pages 5-6, and Earl North, in the Interior, 234-235).

On reading of the establishment of the new congregation in a church newspaper [North's 1908 article], a few of the descendants of John Sergeant, the first missionary to the Stockbridges, offered to provide financial support. the rest of Sergeant's descendants were also asked to contribute, and the church became known as the John Sergeant Memorial Presbyterian Church (letter from Charles Kilpatrick to the descendants of John Sergeant, August 15, 1911, in the John C. Adams Papers, State Historical Society of Wisconsin). Sote Quinney was an elder of the Sergeant Memorial Church from its beginning until his death (Jameson [Sote] Quinney is repeatedly mentioned as a church elder in the papers of the John Sergeant Memorial Church which are kept at the Presbyterian Historical Society in Philadelphia, PA).

In the fall of 1915, Quinney was given a free trip to the Presbyterian synod meeting in Milwaukee for the purpose of showing off the Stockbridge Bible (entry in the church records, October, 3, 1915). He brought the two volumes in an oak chest, possibly the same oak chest that was used to transport the Bible since the tribe left Massachusetts (Milwaukee Sentinel, October 10, 1915, an image of that article is in my previous post).

Jamison Quinney and the Stockbridge Bible

What happened to the Stockbridge Bible? The short answer is that after Calvin Colton's (1830) observations on the two-volume Bible, we have no record of what happened to those volumes for decades. Although Jeremiah Slingerland assured whites in Massachusetts at one point that the Stockbridge Bible was "still being guarded like the terraphim of the orientals," no detailed account of the old book was printed until 1908.

The 1908 account was written by Rev. Earl North in an article for The Interior, a Calvinist newspaper ("The Last of the Mohicans: Descendants of Indian Parishoners of Jonathan Edwards Reorganized Into a Presbyterian Church in Wisconsin." 2/20/1908, pages 233-235).

Unfortunately, North did not cite his sources, but he worked closely with church elder Jamison "Sote" Quinney, making it highly likely that Quinney was his source for the following statement:

The old Bible was found in a deserted house and carefully cleaned and put in a place of safety at the home of Mr. Jamison Quinney.

We'll see in a later post why some people insisted that the Stockbridge Bible was never lost or abandoned. I must admit that I didn't want to believe it either. It was important to me that the Bible meant a lot to the tribe. Of course it meant a lot to them, but tribal conflicts and poverty loomed larger.

The above clipping from The Milwaukee Sentinel depicts Jamison "Sote" Quinney holding the Stockbridge Bible.

Here's more from my paper (as printed in The Book Collector), "From Generation to Generation."

....Jamison "Sote" Quinney kept the Stockbridge Bible at his house for a number of years. Rev. North's report doesn't claim that Sote Quinney found the Stockbridge Bible, but rather that the two volumes were brought to him because he was both a political and religious leader of the Stockbridges. We'll see later that Quinney, although he kept the Bible at his house, didn't behave as if it were his personal property.

I've been told that Jamison Quinney was the grandson of Austin E. Quinney.

Partisanship, Even Within the Quinney Family

Aside from the fact that they died when he was a small child, what we know about Jeremiah Slingerland's parents is minimal. Little Jeremiah was raised by female relatives in New York State until another relative, John W. Quinney, took a liking to the seven-year-old, unofficially adopted him and brought him to present-day Wisconsin (Jones, 1854). Based on Slingerland's letters and other data, he appears to have been close to both John W. and Electa Quinney, referring to them as "Uncle John," and "Aunt E."

As you may remember, Electa Quinney married Dan Adams and they had a son named John C. Adams. By the time John C. Adams had grown up and attended Lawrence University (it may have been called "Lawrence College" back then), Slingerland was one of the biggest leaders in the Indian Party. Of course the Indian party had also been known as the "Quinney party," so it may come as quite a surprise that John C. Adams devoted most of his adult life to advocating for the Citizen party (aka the "Old Citizen Party," the "Citizen Party of 1843," or the "Chicks party").




This photo of John C. Adams graces the cover of James Oberly's A Nation of Statesmen --->











How did the bitterness of the in-fighting among the Stockbridge Mohicans play out in the Quinney family?
In a letter to his mother dated May 12, 1872, John C. Adams related that he had visited Jeremiah and Sarah Slingerland and had "quite a talk" with them in which he spoke plainly about tribal politics and chose not to stay overnight because "as I told them, my room was better than my company."

John Clark and Daniel Adams

While they were still in New York State, the Oneidas split into factions over the issues of religion, culture and emmigration. Since the Oneidas are an Iroquois nation, I don't claim to know all their splits and reconciliations. Nevertheless, some of it is relevant here.

According to J.N. Davidson, the first Oneidas to emmigrate to what is now Wisconsin were from the First Christian party. Meanwhile, back in New York, a faction of the Second Christian Party broke off and became known as the Orchard party. The Orchard party aligned itself with the Methodist church and headed west. Davidson tells us about one of their missionaries:

"In 1832, July 21st, there arrived among them a man of fervent spirit, Rev. John Clark, a member of the New York conference of the Methodist Episcopal church."

Within two months, an "unpretentious structure of logs" was built to serve as "a combined church-and-school." The day after that building was dedicated, September 17, 1832, marked the first day of school for this party of Oneidas. Their teacher was Electa Quinney.

After some time, John Clark decided to move on to other mission fields. Taking his place was a Mohawk preacher (who also, of course, came from New York), Mr. Daniel Adams (Davidson, In Unnamed Wisconsin, page 66).

As Marty Zank pointed out in a recent comment, Dan Adams and Electa Quinney were married and eventually had a son. After only a few years with the Oneidas, Mr. Adams was called to serve the Senecas on their new reservation west of the Mississippi.

What kind of relationship did John Clark and Daniel Adams have? All I can say about it is that it must have been positive. Why else would Dan and Electa Adams name their son John Clark Adams?

Electa Quinney

It would not be difficult for me to write up a timeline of the succession of Calvinist (Congregational and Presbyterian) ministers serving the Stockbridge Mohicans from the first John Sergeant to well into the 1900's. On the other hand, although notable schoolteachers also served the tribe, their comings and goings are not nearly as well documented. One reason for this is that teachers weren't always paid out of the same pot. Sometimes the mission society would hire a teacher, but at other times funds came from the federal government or from the tribe's own treasury. That increased the level of turnover.

I can remember the names of a few of the tribe's teachers: Timothy Woodbridge, John Konkapot (son of the first Konkapot), Daniel Simon (a Narragansett), Jedidiah Stevens, Chauncey Hall, Jeremiah Slingerland, Sarah Slingerland, and, of course, Electa Quinney.

Electa Quinney is relatively well-known as the first schoolmistress of what is now Wisconsin. It is generally believed she took on the job for the children of her tribe beginning in 1828. Within about two years after that, Jedidiah Stevens was hired to teach. But it seems that Stevens' teaching was somewhat sporadic because he was busy farming at certain times of the year - something the mission societies appear to have been in support of.

J.N. Davidson appears to have been the first to proclaim Electa Quinney as Wisconsin's first schoolmistress. I really don't know how he determined that she was the tribe's schoolteacher in 1828. Nevertheless, I've never come across anything that would prove him wrong on that point and I hope I never will.

However, in the early days of Cutting Marsh's ministry with the Stockbridges, Jedidiah Stevens was the schoolteacher. Since Stevens also farmed, his teaching was rather sporadic. In the ABCFM records Cutting Marsh noted - circa 1831 - that Stevens wasn't teaching and the tribe went ahead and hired one of their own members (a woman, and I'm not aware of any other Stockbridge woman from that era who was qualified to teach). What may have happened was that Electa Quinney taught from 1828 to about 1830 and then Stevens taught for a while and then Ms. Quinney taught again.

More than any other author, we have J.N. Davidson to thank for recording Electa Quinney's career:

Miss Quinney, Wisconsin's first school mistress, was educated at Clinton, New York, and at Cornwall, Connecticut. At the latter place she spent six years. It was in 1828 that she began to teach the mission school at Statesburg, probably, as I have said, the first free school in Wisconsin.

The [Judge] E. S. Miner of Necedah, one of her [former] pupils [and son of the missionary Jesse Miner], says that she was a better teacher than the average of teachers to-day [the 1890's]. Her methods, many of them, were similar to those of the present day. The pupils were mostly Indian children, but the language used was English.... She rarely whipped; opened her school with prayer. It was modeled after the best public schools of New England at that time.

The quote is from Muh-He-Ka-Ne-Ok, pages 56-57.


Addendum of June 17, 2009: An article from 1888 appears to be Davidson's source.

Dr. John Peter Quinney

As you may remember from my post of 3/25/2009, the treaty of 1856 had the Stockbridge Indians moving from Calumet County to Shawano County (use this link to see a Wisconsin map) but since the land wasn't well-suited to farming, not all of them made the move. John Peter Quinney was one Stockbridge Mohican who was living in Calumet County in 1850 but never showed up in any Shawano County census. Instead, he moved to Dodge County (see map at right) where he lived first in Beaver Dam and later moved to Watertown. Somewhere along the way he married a woman who was a native of Prussia, Germany.

John P. Quinney was a physician by trade. Several decades after he died, a ledger and a small notebook in which he wrote down some of his treatments were copied and those typed copies were mailed to the Wisconsin State Historical Society where they are preserved to this day. (Here's a link to the record for the John Peter Quinney Papers, the document itself is not currently online.)

Some of his treatments and even some of the names of symptoms and illnesses which he discusses are difficult for me to make out, maybe the best I can do here is to quote the document - which claims to be verbatim, spelling included:

"Receipt for Hair Growing"
Take fine Salt, rub over the head briskly,
[Then] make a decoction of burdock root, And
Sage equal quantity, To rub over the head three times
a day.
When the hair is coming on, Shave it in order to increase its groth.

Above: Burdock root.





Right: Prickly Ash berries






Here's another one:

"Bidders [Bitters?] for a Weak Constitution"
Best rye whiskey pint
water one pint
Best underground Peruvian Bark 1 oz.
Columbo root 1 oz.
Prickly Ash berries 1 oz.
Black Cherry bark 1 oz.
Poke or Skoke root 1/4th oz.
Mandrake Root 1/4th oz.
Cloves 1/4th oz.
Of all to be dry articles and pulverized
before puting into Spirits.
Doz. Tea Spoon full to begin with. incrase
dayly untill to one table Spoon full no more.

Above left: Mandrake root
Above right: Cherry bark


John P. Quinney's medicine wasn't completely herbal, here's an example of his kind of "western medicine":

"Rumatic Latiner Linement"
1 Z Muriatoc acid
1 Z Spirits Turpentine
bathe with this on the afflicted part three or four times a day

Quinney even used fried "Rabbits liver" as an ingredient for spasms. Unfortunately, the rest of that treatment, "about seven short lines, is illegible," according to the man who borrowed the original manuscript from Quinney's grandson.

Below right: Rabbit's liver

Descendants of King Ben

When I'm not blogging, I work as a librarian. As it is with other professions, we librarians share tips of the trade with each other over the internet. One librarian, Bob from the public library in Lincoln, Nebraska, told the group

"There's a lot of bad genealogy out there, and people need to be aware of the pitfalls.
When we lead people to a source, we need to tell them that there may be other sources they need to check, and that even the most authoritative sources may have errors."

That comment began an active thread of messages and everybody seemed to feel Bob had made an important point.

<---The gravesite of Hannah Chicks (Since there were two Hannah Chickses, the stone clarifies that this was the wife of John Chicks) Stockbridge Indian Cemetery, Stockbridge, WI.


I know a member of the Chicks family who has done some really good genealogical work. However, he has shared his family tree only with people he knows and not publicized it.

On the other hand, my acquaintance from the Chicks family met with another genealogist who was doing Stockbridge Mohican genealogy poorly. The other man's family tree had already been circulating over the internet by the time "Mr. Chicks" told me about their meeting. He said that the other fellow was doing an ambitious tribal genealogy by getting names and dates of the ancestors of people that he came in contact with. Apparently he was accepting input from a number of people and adding it to his database or family tree uncritically.

Since I have two printouts of that family tree, and since it has circulated over the internet, misleading who knows how many people, I feel no qualms about criticizing it now.


Several years after the town of Stockbridge, Massachusetts was established, the Chief Sachem of the Mohican nation came to town and made Stockbridge the main council fire or capital city of the once-mighty nation. That Chief Sachem was Benjamin Kokhkewenaunaunt, or King Ben for short. Patrick Frazier tells us that King Ben was David Naunauneekanuk's father (see pages 55 and 254). Naunauneekanuk was John W. Quinney's grandfather (Quinney said so in front of the United States Congress).

Another one of King Ben's sons was Joseph Shauquethquet. According to Lion Miles, his descendants took on the the surname of "Pye," which was certainly easier to pronounce than Shauquethquet. In the 1800's there were three Benjamin Pyes. (Duplicate names are another thing about Stockbridge genealogy that is problematic. There were also three Levi Konkapots.)


The gravesite of Lucy Pye. Stockbridge Indian Cemetery, Stockbridge, WI. ----->


The document that I somehow got ahold of a few years ago is called
"The Descendants of Benjamin Kokhkewenaunaunt."

Although I noticed a number of (arguably) relatively minor errors in this family tree, I will focus on one particularly significant error. This error is the kind of thing that sometimes results when people who speak only English may run into when they read names in another language. The genealogist who circulated his family tree on the internet listed one person as "Mary Waunquauwasquoh Naukhaunuhoshuoh." Maybe "Waunquauwaquoh" and "Naukhaunuhoshuoh" seem to be quite similar to us, but a big mistake was made in assuming that this was one person.

Based on that assumption, The Quinneys are related to the Chickses. If that were true, it would give new significance to the Citizen vs. Indian conflict. (For a number of years, the Citizen party was commonly known as the "Chicks party," and the Indian party was commonly known as the "Quinney party.") If the author of "The Descendants of King Ben" was correct, the longstanding intertribal feud would have been a feud within one extended family.

The member of the Chicks family who does good genealogy talked to Lion Miles, a current resident of Stockbridge, Massachusetts who has studied the Mohican language. According to Miles, Mary Waunquauwasquoh and Mary Naukhaunuhoshuoh are two diferent people, and, as a result, it cannot be said that the Chicks family and the Quinney family are closely related.

Establishment of the Shawano County Reservation

New York Indian Removal, Part XVIII:
Establishment of the Shawano County Reservation

In authorizing Superintendent Francis Huebschmann to make the treaty of 1856, Commissioner of Indian Affairs George Manypenny noted that attempts at a compromise to somehow re-create the Stockbridge reservation on the east shore of Lake Winnebago had proved futile. Manypenny decided there should be a new reservation which would "be a home alike for the Stockbridges, whether known as 'citizens' or 'Indians,' and the Munsee parties to the treaty of September 3rd, 1839, wherever they may now be"(letter from Manypenny to Huebschmann of January 7, 1856, in the John C. Adams Papers).

The new reservation would essentially be purchased with proceeds from the 1848 sale of the old reservation. As a result, the Indian party objected to the idea of sharing a new reservation with members of the Citizen party, Munsees, and those who left for Kansas after the treaty of 1839 was signed. They were splitting the new reservation among 409 people instead of the 177 Indian party family members recognized in the 1848 census. The Indian party argued that members of the Citizen party had already taken allotments or payment for their land and that the federal government only had an obligation to treat with their relatively small party.

Many Indian party members, led by Austin E. Quinney, refused to move to the new reservation until 1859. The Arvid E. Miller Memorial Library/Museum (the Stockbridge-Munsee Community's tribal museum) in Shawano County possesses a large peace medal which was given to Austin E. Quinney by the federal government. Although the museum staff told me they have no idea why it was awarded to Quinney, my guess is that he received it after he gave up his protest and showed up at the new reservation.

Anyway, the "Citizen vs. Indian" conflict truly was a bitter one - and a complicated one. But the establishment of the new reservation in Shawano County is about more than that.


Shawano County, Wisconsin: The treaty of 1856 established a new reservation for the Stockbridge and Munsee Indians in the townships of Red Springs and Bartelme.

By 1856 Jeremiah Slingerland was one of the Stockbridge Mohicans' most powerful leaders. Slingerland and Superintendent Francis Huebschmann butted heads over exactly where the new reservation would be located. (In fact, they accused each other of being dishonest. I prefer to think they just misunderstood each other, and I doubt that enough written evidence exists for any solid conclusions to be made.)

As Oberly points out (on page 89), the treaty of 1856 didn't actually define where the new reservation would be located (nor even how large it would be). As a result, it was largely up to Superintendent Huebschmann to determine where the Stockbridge Indians would wind up. While Huebschmann may have been honest, he stuck the tribe with a reservation on the swampy and sandy land of the Wolf River Batholith. How could he have justified that?

The Indians at Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and their descendants in New York and Wisconsin had made the transition to an agricultural economy much like that of white Americans. It was one of the things they were supposed to do to become "civilized." But after the treaty of 1856, those who wanted to continue farming showed up on the reservation to get their annuity payments and rented better land in nearby counties. Others did their best on the new reservation, trying to make a go of it by some combination of farming, logging, trapping, berry picking, hunting and fishing, and seasonal labor.

Sources:
*An "Indian Party Brief," (as reprinted in the Concordia Historical Quarterly).
*James Oberly, A Nation of Statesmen. University of Oklahoma Press, 2005.
*The John C. Adams Papers. Wisconsin State Historical Society, Madison, WI.
*Joseph Schafer, The Winnebago-Horicon Basin, (see especially page 75).

On to Minnesota?

New York Indian Removal, Part XVI
On to Minnesota?

Before we can wrap up the New York Indian Removal Series, treaties made between the United States and the Stockbridge Mohicans in 1848 and 1856 should be addressed. I would be the first to tell you that you aren't going to fully appreciate those treaties unless you understand the Indian party vs. Citizen party controversy. But at the same time, I don't feel obligated to flesh out that controversy here because James Oberly handled it very well in A Nation of Statesmen (see pages 71-78).

Nevertheless, I'll give you the basics. Members of the Chicks family and their political allies petitioned the government to be made citizens and the request was granted in an act of Congress in 1843, not only to those who wanted it, but to all the Stockbridge Mohicans. The reservation was allotted and Indians began selling land to whites. But lobbying by John W. Quinney and his allies resulted in an 1846 act of Congress, which reversed the act of 1843. Now the Stockbridges were recognized as Indians once again by the federal government. Then in 1848, the government recognized only the members of the Indian party in making a treaty that was to send them on to Minnesota.



<---Edward Thomas's painting of Fort Snelling, near today's "Twin Cities" of Minnesota.




In 1849 Jeremiah Slingerland, Austin E. Quinney, Elisha and Joel Konkapot, Moses Charles, and Thomas Snake visited the area around Fort Snelling (Jones, page 114). Electa Jones asserted this would be the location of the tribe's "Last Removal" in her 1854 book.... But here's what really happened: The Federal government and the Indian Party never came to an agreement as to where specifically the new reservation would be located (see Oberly, 79-82).

The Signing of the Treaty of Traverse de Sioux. This painting by Francis Millet was done in 1905, based on sketches made by an artist present at the signing of the treaty in 1851.

In 1851 the United States acquired land from the Dakota Sioux. They expected the Stockbridge Mohican signers of the treaty of 1848 to make their new reservation on that land. But the Indian Party refused to move. According to an "Indian Party Brief" that was later printed in the Concordia Historical Quarterly (page 121, volume unknown), the Indian party claimed that the treaty of 1848 required that their new land should have been made available to them sooner.

The Treaty of 1839

New York Indian Removal, Part XIV:
The Treaty of 1839
This modern map of Calumet County, Wisconsin, shows that the eastern half of the Stockbridge Mohicans' two-township reservation became the township of Chilton after the tribe sold it to the federal government in the treaty of 1839.


Not being in the decision-making loop, people like Robert Konkapot may not have really known the things that were going on in the Stockbridge Mohicans' tribal government. The allegations he made (see my previous post) against tribal officials and Rev. Cutting Marsh aren't necessarily accurate. Nevertheless, a deal to sell a township (or one-half of the Stockbridge Reservation), did occur. Ironically, when the actual deal was made with the federal government, the Hendricks-Konkapot faction were involved in the negotiations and it was agreed that the proceeds of the sale of that good land would go towards the moving expenses of their "Emigrant" party.

We would assume that losing half of their good land would be highly upsetting to the Stockbridge Mohicans. However, I have seen no evidence that they were forced into the treaty of 1839. Rather the treaty was something that the two rival factions had negotiated for. As James Oberly (page 66) notes, Austin E. and John W. Quinney spent time in Washington D.C. in 1838 and their visit prompted Thomas Hendricks to tell the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, "Whatever Quinney proposes, we oppose."

So is it true that the two factions wanted to be rid of each other so badly that they voluntarily made a treaty which gave up half (the better half) of their reservation? Not exactly. If the treaty would have been properly implemented by the federal government, the emigration to what is now Kansas could have been successful. As it was, however, at least some and possibly many Indians died along the way and others eventually found their way back to Wisconsin. Others succeeded amongst other tribes in Kansas and Oklahoma.

Further reading:
Read the treaty online.
See pages 66-67 of James Oberly's A Nation of Statesmen.

Munsee Removal and the Quinneys' Perspective

New York Indian Removal, Part XI:
Munsee Removal and the Quinneys' Perspective


This painting of Austin E. Quinney is owned by the Wisconsin State Historical Society. --->


To missionary Cutting Marsh, there was nothing wrong with the 1837 Tribal Constitution of the Stockbridge Mohicans (reprinted on pages 209-213 of James Oberly's
A Nation of Statesmen). So when members of the Hendricks and Konkapot faction - also known as the Disaffected party - opposed it, Marsh felt that they just weren't ready to adhere to the laws that "all civilized nations" had in common (letter from Marsh to Green, December 13, 1838 ABCFM Papers).

Marsh wasn't specific about what the Hendricks and Konkapot faction were doing to oppose the new constitution. However, after considering the Schermerhorn treaty of 1836 and a hand-written copy of an old letter I found in the John C. Adams Papers (at the Historical Society in Madison, WI) I have concluded that it had a lot to do with the Munsee Delawares.

The treaty the United States made with the Menominees in 1832 set aside two townships on the east shore of Lake Winnebago for the Stockbridge and Munsee Indians, but the vast majority of Munsees remained either in New York State or in southern [southeastern] Ontario, Canada. By the 1830's, present-day Wisconsin was a popular destination for white settlement and instead of removing New York Indians to Wisconsin, the federal government aimed to move them west of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers. As a result, the Schermerhorn treaty of 1836 contained a clause in which any chief who would "remove his Tribe or any party of not less than 100 persons [would receive] $500 for his services"(the treaty is reprinted in Oberly, pages 243-246).

As you may remember, the tribal leaders (aka leaders of the "Wiskonsin party") had seen the land west of the Missouri River and decided not to make the move. While John W. Quinney was lobbying Congress not to ratify the Schermerhorn treaty, Thomas Hendricks and Robert Konkapot were lobbying Congress to ratify it (see Oberly, 62).

A handwritten, undated letter, addressed only to "the Honorable Secretary of War," and signed by John W. Quinney and Austin E. Quinney, alleged that Thomas Hendricks and Robert Konkapot left their reservation and met up with roughly 200 Canadian Munsees near Detroit. According to the Quinneys, Hendricks and Konkapot persuaded the Munsees to "come round by the way of Green Bay, telling them that that was the easiest and they would be provided with everything necessary by the government in this route to the end of the journey." Furthermore, the Quinneys claimed that Hendricks and Konkapot induced the Munsees by telling them that there were Munsee lands near the Stockbridge settlement which had recently been sold and they could receive some of the proceeds of that sale if they showed up.


<------ Joel Poinsett, U.S. Secretary of War, 1837-1841. An amateur botanist, Poinsett imported a plant from the Aztecs that was named after him (the Poinsettia).


As the Quinneys tell it in their letter, nearly all the Munsees wanted to continue on their way to what is now Kansas, but they were "persuaded to remain until the [Schermerhorn] treaty was ratified." In other words, the Quinneys were alleging that Hendricks and Konkapot worked to keep the Munsees on the Stockbridge reservation in order to collect the $500 payoff promised in the treaty. They even pointed out that these were "Canadian" Munsees, not the New York Munsee Indians that the government was so eager to see gone.

Was it worth $500 for the two leaders of the "Disaffected party"? You'll see in my next post that Hendricks and Konkapot may have been motivated by more than that.

The Need for a Constitution

New York Indian Removal, Part X:
The Need for a Constitution

This map of the Wisconsin Territory (from the David Rumsey Map collection) shows that the move from Grand Kawkawlin (Statesburg) to Stockbridge in Calumet County wasn't a long one.


As you may recall from my previous post, the negotiations that brought the Stockbridge and Brothertown Indians to their reservation on the east shore of Lake Winnebago involved a rather large delegation of Menominees, but there were only two representatives for the Oneidas, and John W. Quinney - whether it was his intent or not - bargained on behalf of not only the Stockbridge Mohicans, but also the Munsee and Brothertown Indians.

In a September, 21, 1836 letter to ABCFM officer David Green, Cutting Marsh explained that the treaty that brought the Stockbridges to their current reservation had also set aside a share of it for the Munsees. Some Munsees, apparently a small number, had already settled along the Fox River in the 1820's (and most people assume they went along with the Stockbridges to their next reservation on Lake Winnebago), but the bulk of them remained in New York and the southern part of Ontario, Canada.

According to James Oberly, John W. Quinney wrote the Stockbridge Mohicans' first constitution as protection against the removal policies of the federal government. That conclusion fits in with some significant data, namely things that were happening to other Native nations and the sequence of signing the Schermerhorn treaty in 1836 but later seeing the land and deciding that it was not fit to move onto.

The first constitution of the Stockbridge Mohicans, written sometime in 1837, does appear to have been one of Quinney's ways of protecting his people from treaties, including Schermerhorn's. However, the plot thickens when the rise of the Disaffected party and the Munsees remaining in New York and present-day Ontario are thrown into the mix. Stay tuned.

Ellis Describes More Negotiations

New York Indian Removal, Part IX:
Ellis Describes More Negotiations

Let's back up a little ways. Remember the treaties of 1821 and 1822? Remember how they were sloppily done and appear to have aimed to set up conflict between the New York Indians and the Wisconsin Natives? Remember how the summer council of 1830 didn't resolve anything? (See this post if you don't remember.)

To take us further, I think the best source is Albert G. Ellis' "Advent of the New York Indians Into Wisconsin," (originally printed in Wisconsin Historical Collections, Volume II, pages 415-449). (Ellis is pictured on the left.)

The new Indian agent in the Green Bay region, Colonel Samuel C. Stambaugh, was denied permission to take ten Menominee Chiefs to negotiate a new treaty in Washington, D.C. Instead, Stambaugh left Green Bay with fourteen Menominees on November 8, 1830. Three weeks later they arrived at Detroit where they picked up Eleazar Williams and Daniel Bread who would represent the Oneidas. The party of sixteen Indians and a few federal officials finally made it to Washington on December 11th, and were joined by John W. Quinney of the Stockbridge Mohicans (Ellis, page 433).

John W. Quinney -->

As Ellis tells it (433-434), the officials of Andrew Jackson's administration worked with the Menominees and essentially ignored the New York Indians. The first treaty that was written up (he refers to it as "the Stambaugh treaty") didn't allow the New York Indians the quality nor the quantity of land they wanted. Senators from New York opposed that treaty. They wanted enough land set aside not only for the New York Indians that were already in Wisconsin, but also for the Senecas and other Indians that had stayed put up to that point.

So the Senate never bothered to vote on whether to ratify the Stambaugh treaty. In the next session of Congress, however, a treaty was passed with more favorable terms for the New York Indians. On page 440 Ellis reveals the terms of that treaty relevant to the Stockbridge, Munsee, and Brothertown Indians.

Sure the Stockbridge and Brothertown Indians would have to move again, but instead of the swampy land on the west bank of the Fox River that Andrew Jackson's administration wanted them to go to, they were moving to good land on the east shore of Lake Winnebago. John W. Quinney's negotiations had paid off!

Last Sermon in Stockbridge, Wisconsin

A white congregation had taken the place of one that was once almost exclusively Indian. But they continued to worship in the "old Mission House" until December 19th, 1869. On that day Rev. L. P. Norcross attempted to give his congregation the church history of the Stockbridge Mohicans. (So his sermon was about history, instead of religion.)

The Oshkosh Times had the foresight to print Norcross' sermon (referring to it also as a "MEMORIAL DISCOURSE") in their December 29th, 1869 issue. Of course Norcross didn't have a lot of good resources to work with, so it wouldn't be fair to have high expectations of his sermon. Nevertheless, we can call it a good faith attempt at recounting the past.

Norcross tells us how church attendance was enforced when the tribe still lived in Massachusetts:

"These Indians were very strict, very moral and pure in their habits, especially observant were they of the Sabbath, and the whipping master applied the benefits of his office to all strolling pleasure-seekers with whom he came in contact."

While I'm inclined to think that the term "whipping" is not the most appropriate, Norcross is in the right vein because the old Indian church for many years did have an officer known as a "beadle" who at least wielded some kind of a stick (Calvin Colton observed this in 1830).

Norcross reported something that I have seen nowhere else, something about what he called "the Hendricks and Quinney trouble." Certain political documents (which Norcross was unaware of) will tell us more about this conflict, but Norcross has an anecdote of how the conflict may have started. "It was about a single cow, which Austin E. Quinney claimed was stolen from him by one Hendricks, and, I believe proved on him."

Christmas at Shawano County, 1858

When they came to what is now Wisconsin, the Stockbridge Mohicans were an agricultural people, but after they lost their land on the east shore of Lake Winnebago, the next move was to a part of Shawano County, where most of the land was too swampy and rocky to farm. The treaty of 1856 that created the Shawano County reservation was welcomed by the Citizen Party, but many in the Indian Party protested it by refusing to move.

Jeremiah Slingerland, whose life story will be spelled out in future posts, was one Indian Party member who didn't participate in the protest. Slingerland and his wife, Sarah, were the tribe's schoolteachers, and Jeremiah had a number of irons in the fire, he farmed, preached, and was active in tribal politics. (I don't refer to him as "Reverend Slingerland," since he was not ordained until many years after he graduated from an eastern seminary.)

On December 25th, 1858, Jeremiah Slingerland wrote a letter to his Aunt, Electa (Quinney) Candy (she is another person who will be featured in future posts). The letter is largely about politics: members of the Indian Party were trying to purchase land from their "Uncles," the Oneidas. He tells also of tough times, saying that Benjamin Doxtator is "about blind from drunkenness." A truer indicator of poverty, however, is his description of the school. Slingerland tells his aunt that "My school is in progress tho, not so many attend as in the fall because many can't get shoes - the agent will send up a box of them tho, to furnish the school children."

The Slingerlands adopted a number of children who didn't make it into adulthood. At the age of seven, they also adopted "Teaspoon" Davids, aside from him none of their children reproduced. The Christmas Day letter seems to be the only evidence of a "Franky" Slingerland, here's what it says:

"Today is Christmas and our little Franky is five years old - A Merry Christmas to you."

and

"Franky wants me to say to Aunt this is his birth day and is five years old."

The letter is contained in the John C. Adams Papers at the Wisconsin Historical Society in Madison.