To Live Upon Hope

The seventh post in Algonkian Church History was about Rachel Wheeler's PhD. thesis, Living Upon Hope. This, my 107th post, is about her 2008 book with a slightly different title.

To Live Upon Hope: Mohicans and Missionaries in the Eighteenth Century Northeast (Cornell University Press), is written for a more academic audience than this blog, but if you like Algonkian Church History, there's a good chance that you'll also like Wheeler's book.

Wheeler succeeds in showing the contrast between the Moravian Mohicans and their neighboring tribesmen, the Calvinist Mohicans at Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Remarkably, the two types of mission communities were so different that the nature of what was recorded for posterity didn't allow Wheeler to make direct comparisons.

The Moravian Mohicans at Shekomeko practiced a syncretic religion, as Wheeler states on page 95:

Delaware, Shawnee, and Seneca prophets inspired new religious movements that often blended rejection of European goods and the creation of a pan-Indian identity. Adaptation of European-style agriculture and Christianity was another option, as exemplified by the Mohicans of Stockbridge. Somewhere in between was the path chosen by Abraham and Johannes and other Indians of Shekomeko, who found in the blood of Jesus a new source of spiritual power, or manitou, which could be deployed to address the problems brought with colonialism.

They Left on the Sabbath

New York Indian Removal, Part XV:
They Left on the Sabbath

Andrew Jackson's plans to remove all Indians westward were not abandoned by his successor, Martin Van Buren.


The treaty of 1839 may have been written up in good faith. Half of the reservation was sold to the U.S. because Thomas Hendricks and Robert Konkapot had convinced federal officials that about half of the tribe wanted to remove to the Little Osage River in what is now Kansas. Instead we have reports that "70 or 80" Stockbridge Mohicans separated from the tribe (Jones, 106). James Oberly (page 67) also quotes Cutting Marsh as saying that the remaining Canadian Munsees went with them (but it is not clear where he gets that quote).

Although the federal government did a miserable job of implementing the treaty of 1839, the emigrants appear to have added to the problem by ignoring instructions to wait until the treaty was approved by the president and ratified by the Senate. Oberly describes the result:

Unfortunately the Emigrants lacked enough money and supplies to reach their destination.... At St. Louis they became public charity cases and had to be rescued by the U.S. Indian agent there.

Writing from Stockbridge, Massachusetts fifteen years later, Electa Jones was getting her information about the Emigrant party second-hand from Chauncey Hall, an ABCFM schoolteacher. Furthermore, she had no sympathy for the Emigrant party, pointing out "it has been creditably reported that they started on the Sabbath"(emphasis is Jones', page 106). My response is that maybe Chauncey Hall never told Electa Jones that the Hendricks-Konkapot faction left Cutting Marsh's Calvinist (that is, Sabbath-observing) church and started their own Baptist church.....or, from a modern perspective, maybe Ms. Jones was too much of an ideologue to be writing history "creditably."

Those of the so-called Disaffected party who made it safely to the new reservation continued to worship in the Baptist way. Meanwhile, the payments promised in the treaty of 1839 didn't come until after "a tedious delay of between 2 & 3 years"(Cutting Marsh in Wisconsin Historical Collections, XV, page 180).

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.

Some Wept Aloud

A Meeting of Reconciliation and
the Allegations of Robert Konkapot
If 1829 is the correct date, this would be the church building at Grand Kawkawlin, not the reservation on the shore of Lake Winnebago. However, the date given must be wrong. See this post to understand why I say that.
_____________________________________________________
Are you ready to get back to the chaotic things going on amongst the Stockbridge Mohicans in the Territory of Wisconsin?


In some of my recent posts, we've seen that there was factional conflict in the tiny Stockbridge nation. We don't know the whole story, but it had something to do with crime and punishment and whether or not to emigrate to what is now Kansas. Most likely, the pot was stirred by an unscrupulous federal Indian agent (and I regret to remind you that he was an ordained minister), John F. Schermerhorn.

Towards the end of 1836, Rev. Marsh tried to play the role of peacemaker, holding a meeting of reconciliation in which "all wept, many made confession publicly and some wept aloud"(Cutting Marsh's diary, in the Cutting Marsh Papers, Wisconsin Historical Society, November 13, 1836). Marsh did have something like a honeymoon period with the tribe, lasting a few years, but his position as a spiritual leader was compromised by 1836. He appears to have made his situation worse by siding with tribal leaders in political matters.

The official tribal leaders (known as the "Wiskonsin party) left us plenty of data to understand their position and it is spelled out in previous posts. On the other hand, I only have one document written by Robert Konkapot and none written by Thomas Hendricks. On January 16, 1838, Konkapot made a number of allegations against Cutting Marsh and the leaders of the Wiskonsin party in a letter to the president of the ABCFM.

According to Konkapot, "a commissioner" apparently Schermerhorn, entered into a business deal with "five or six men" who "divided the avails of the land amongst themselves." Konkapot also believed that Cutting Marsh was in on the deal. He felt that Marsh was refusing communion to certain Indians based on their refusal to pay taxes. Furthermore, Konkapot alleged that Rev. Marsh refused new converts for secular reasons:

"...one minister visited us last winter [and] by his instrumentality many sinners were awakened and resolved to serve the Lord long as they live, but none ever [were] admitted [to] the church unless they sign[ed] that new law...and they were told that they can not be Christians unless they come under that law."

WI State Journal Series: Down to a Whisper

The Wisconsin State Journal has done us a great service by running a series of articles about Wisconsin's Native languages, especially Menominee, Ojibwe (both Algonkian languages) and Ho-Chunk (a Siouxan language). The Potawatomie (Algonkian), and Oneida (Iroquois) languages also come into play in the series.

Use the links below for articles by Jason Stein:

"Last Hope for Native Languages,"

"Languages a Window into Human Mind,"

Kris Caldwell (pictured right), a 58-year-old Menoninee, explains why her father never taught her how to speak the Menominee language in
"'Through Love we Lost the Language' "

"Overcoming Their Past to Teach the Young"

"A Journey Back to Ourselves"

and, last but not least, an interactive audio-visual experience, "Down to a Whisper" can teach you the basics of Menominee, Ojibwe, and Ho-Chunk.

Reporter/author Jason Stein won the Freedom Forum/American Society of Newspaper Editors Award for Distinguished Writing on Diversity for this series.

A Genealogical Puzzler

A reader sent me an e-mail hoping that I could help him with a genealogical "dead-end," that he admits is "certainly a longshot." After thinking about his question for a while, I consider him an optimist.

The reader wants help identifying the biological parents of an ancestor of his who was "found along the side of the road as an infant...in 1807." The infant was given the middle name of "Shaw" because the adoptive parents figured that - because they found her in a certain part of Ohio - she was a Shawnee.

I'm really not an expert on the Shawnee, but I highly doubt that an Indian born in Ohio around 1807 would have a birth certificate or baptism papers or anything like that. I also think that being born to people who aren't able to take care of you would make it less likely that there is any documentation.

Okay... I'm an optimist too. I want to give my reader some possible sources.

One is the Ohio-based Amy's Genealogy, etc. Blog.

Then there's the National Archives. The problem you're likely to run into with them, however, is they don't claim to maintain records from before 1830. The Shawnee nation had already begun to fade away by that time and besides, you're looking for somebody born more than twenty years before that.

But why not try to talk to a real expert on this kind of thing?
The National Archives has two regional facilities in Ohio:
Dayton (937) 425-0600,
and Miamisburg (937) 425-0601.

If my reader never finds the answer he's looking for, I still think he has a great story to tell at parties and genealogical society meetings.

More About the Munsees

New York Indian Removal, Part XIII:
More About the Munsees

This flag represents the cultural preservation of the Munsee Delaware Indians. It doesn't stand for any geographical or political entity. --->


Not a lot has been written about the comings and goings of the Munsee Delaware Indians in relation to the Stockbridge Mohicans. The Stockbridge-Munsee "partnership," when not made official by the federal government, seems to have been informal enough so as to have been an unwritten one for many years - and it appears to have been an "on-again-off-again" kind of thing.

I believe there were Munsees settled in present-day Wisconsin as early as 1823, but I've been having a hard time locating specific and conclusive documentation of it (I'll keep looking through my papers). Maybe there were a significant number of "New York" Munsees in Wisconsin in the 1820's, but if there were, they don't appear to have stayed through the next decade. Cutting Marsh reported "only one Munsee family is at present on the ground" in a September 21, 1836 letter in the ABCFM Papers.

As I explained in a previous post, about 200 Munsees showed up at the Stockbridge Reservation in 1837, but as "Canadian" Munsees, I cannot say for sure whether or not they were in any way associated with the "New York" Munsees who had settled along the Fox River more than ten years earlier. My guess is that they weren't the Munsees that John W. Quinney had in mind when he went to Washington D.C. to negotiate for new land. That would explain why he complained to the Secretary of War about their arrival. Maybe it also explains why he left the Munsees out of his 1837 constitution.


When the tribe is referred to as the Stockbridge- Munsee Mohicans, it is easy to forget that the Munsees weren't Mohicans. ---->


Anyway, after some months at the Stockbridge Reservation, about 70 of the Munsees continued on to the Delaware Reservation in what is now Kansas. Did the rest stay permanently? Some historians appear to assume that they did. But I have my doubts: when the treaty of 1839 provided an official framework for the Hendricks-Konkapot faction to move to the Delaware Reservation, it is likely that the rest of the Canadian Munsees went with them.

When the migration to the Delaware reservation didn't quite work out, the treaty of 1856 not only allowed members of the Hendricks-Konkapot faction into the new reservation that was created, but also made it official that the Munsees would be included. But how many Munsees came to live on the new reservation in Shawano County, Wisconsin? I really don't think anybody knows for sure. [Some information on that can be found in a post written several weeks after this one: "The Munsees: According to an Indian Party Brief."]

Airlift to Wounded Knee

In the first couple months of this blog, one of my readers told me that his favorite book was The Island at the Center of the World. So last weekend I headed for my public library, looked that book up in the online catalog and went upstairs to find it. But the book wasn't where it was supposed to be. I figured that as long as I was there, I'd browse that part of their collection. A few feet away was the book you see on the right, Bill Zimmerman's Airlift to Wounded Knee.

As soon as I saw the cover photo and the "absolutely spellbinding" recommendation, I knew I would borrow the book (and read it too), but as I made my way through it over the course of the week, I kept asking myself one question: Is this the stuff of Algonkian Church History?

It is for this reason: The 1973 siege of Wounded Knee (although it was very much about the Oglala Sioux), for reasons that are explained in the book, marked a nationwide change in the self-image of American Indians. In less than three months, the scale that had been tipping towards shame dramatically tipped to pride.

If you aren't familiar with the siege, here's some bare-bones background on it: As a protest, many Oglala Sioux "occupied" the village of Wounded Knee (which was part of their Pine Ridge Reservation anyway). The FBI, other federal agents, and the hired "goons" of a crooked tribal official, surrounded Wounded Knee and attempted to block anybody from going in and out, even if all they were bringing in was food.

Essentially the Wounded Knee siege was a 71-day armed standoff and although both sides experienced casualties, the government wielded much more firepower. As starvation became an issue, Bill Zimmerman, the book's author and an amateur pilot, was called on to organize an airlift of supplies.
Zimmerman alternates chapters between the Sioux and his own adventure with the Airlift. Reading his book in 2009, I felt that he made too many references to the Vietnam War, but he nevertheless convinced me that the federal government was doing roughly the same thing in South Dakota as they were doing in Indo-China. The author has a bias, but when you risk your life to deliver food to starving people, you have a right to tell things from your own point of view.

When the author expects to die at any minute and then survives to be chased by the FBI, you know you're reading a true thriller! So much the better if it's a true story.

Here's a couple articles about the Wounded Knee siege: From a Libertarian viewpoint and from a Liberal viewpoint.

The First Permanent Split in the Stockbridge Tribal Church

New York Indian Removal, Part XII:
The First Permanent Split in the Stockbridge Tribal Church

An understanding of this post depends upon my posts of Part X and Part XI of the New York Indian Removal series.

This illustration of the westward migration of the Delaware Indians acknowledges the Munsees in Canada, but doesn't recognize their stopoff at the Stockbridge Reservation in Wisconsin.
It is unfortunate that there is a lot more data available and known to historians from the point of view of the Quinneys and Rev. Cutting Marsh than there is from the point of view of Thomas Hendricks and Robert Konkapot. In the most politically correct terminology, they were the leaders of the "Emigrant party." Cutting Marsh, of course, called it the "Disaffected party," and I have also used that term, not as a slight to Hendricks, Konkapot, or others in the party, but because I suspect that one of the main reasons that they were so willing to leave good agricultural land for a drier climate to the west (present-day Kansas), is that they had had enough of the Quinney-led, missionary-backed tribal government.

As I have outlined before, various historians have offered various explanations for the origin of the factional conflict, but I think that my "Crime and Punishment" post [see the comment where I give due credit to Roger Nichols for my viewpoint] best explains how Hendricks and Konkapot emerged as leaders. They were also, of course, members of the tribe's other leading families and that may have something to do with their "disaffection."

In my last post you read that the Quinneys had accused Thomas Hendricks and Robert Konkapot of bringing roughly 200 Munsees to the Stockbridge Reservation in Wisconsin so they could cash in on the $500 offered in the 1836 Schermerhorn treaty. Instead, it is more likely that their main intention was to add numbers to their "disaffected" party.

Since there wasn't a lot of separation between church and state in the tribe from 1734 up until the 1830's, events in the tribal church are significant benchmarks in following the conflict. In a May 28th, 1838 letter to David Greene of the ABCFM, Cutting Marsh reported that he had suspended Thomas Hendricks from the tribal church and excommunicated Robert Konkapot for "slander, lying and dishonesty."

Marsh's next letter to the ABCFM (11/29/1838) marks the first permanent split in the tribal church of the Stockbridge Mohicans. (An earlier split was reconciled when Samson Occom died and members of his congregation re-joined John Sergeant[Jr.]'s congregation). Marsh had the nerve to tell his supporters that it seemed "as though the adversary [meaning Satan] had sent two Baptists to help them." Somehow Hendricks and Konkapot got in touch with two Baptist Indians who had ties with the tribe, brought them to the reservation and held their own worship services to rival those of Cutting Marsh and the tribe's regular leaders.

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!