John Tanner

by Joel Van Valin

Flying back from New Orleans to Minneapolis last year, the passenger next to me-a soccer mom sort who had been giving instructions to her husband over a cell phone as we taxied out to the runway-suddenly discovered herself on a three hour flight with nothing to read. Her mystery novel was packed in her bag, and Sky Mall was nowhere in sight. I rather hesitantly offered her a book I had dug up from the St. Paul library archives, A Narrative of the Captivity and Adventures of John Tanner. She took the dusty tome rather dubiously, but after she began reading she didn't look away from the book until we touched down at MSP.

"Wow," she said, handing the volume back to me with a little bit of awe. "That was ... something else."

Tanner's narrative has that power-almost like a physical slap on the face, it removes us from our comfortable early 21st century life of town homes and office cubicles and places us in a wilderness of forests and lakes as remote as jungles of Papua New Guinea. The oddly disturbing thing about his account is that the setting is right here, on the Minnesota-Canadian border. For state historians, the book is the rarest of treasures-an authentic account of life in Minnesota before it was settled, through the eyes of someone who lived here. Calling Tanner a lost writer of Minnesota may be stretching the definition a bit, as he lived before statehood and never learned to write (his narrative was dictated to Dr. Edwin James at Sault Ste. Marie). But he is undoubtedly a master storyteller. And he was, in a more profound sense, a truly lost man.

Born around 1780, Tanner was kidnapped by Shawnee Indians on the Ohio river when he was nine, and lived among the Indians for the next thirty years. He was taken by the husband and son of Ne-keek-wos-ke-cheeme-kwa (The Otter Woman); she wanted to adopt a white child to replace a son she had lost. The Shawnee told him that the rest of his family had been killed (a lie, as he later discovered), and ferried him up north through St. Ignace, Michigan. The family of the Otter Woman abused him, and he was only saved by death on several occasions by his foster mother. Fortunately a kinsmen of her husband's, an Ottawa chieftain of high status named Net-no-kwa, who had also lost a child, succeeded in `purchasing' Tanner. He was given the name Shaw-shaw-wa-be-na-se (The Falcon).

Not long after Tanner's adoption, Net-no-kwa took the family to the Red River to visit her husband's kinsmen. On the way, her husband died as a result of a drunken fight, and was buried near Grand Portage. By this time Tanner was about thirteen years old, and learning to hunt with a rifle and provide for the family. He could have easily abandoned Net-no-kwa and found refuge at a trading post, but chose to remain among the Indians:

I remembered the laborious and confined manner in which I must live if I returned among the whites; where, having no friends, and being destitute of money or property, I must, of necessity, be exposed to all the ills of extreme poverty. Among the Indians, I saw that those who were too young, or too weak to hunt for themselves, were sure to find some one to provide for them. I was also rising in the estimation of the Indians, and becoming one of them. I therefore chose, for the present, to remain with them, but always indented, at some future time, to return and live among the whites.

After reaching the Red River, Net-no-kwa and her family wandered the north country, living with Ojibwa, Ottawa, and Muskegoe Indians, as chance and circumstance dictated. Even after Tanner had married and had his own family, they traveled about in this random fashion, never staying in one place more than a season. Much of his narrative deals with his daily life; it is filled with accounts of hunting moose, bear, and bison; of war parties (almost always coming to nothing); of disputes between him and various Ojibwa; and dealings with traders. Although he adopted the lifestyle and habits of the Ottawa, he could not come to embrace the careless nonchalance of the Indians in matters of trade. When Tanner mentions how Net-no-kwa sold a hundred and twenty beaver skins, along with other pelts, for rum, with which she made all of the Indians around her drunk, you can almost hear the disapproval in his voice:

Of all our large load of peltries, the produce of so many days of toil, of so many long and difficult journeys, one blanket, and three kegs of rum only remained, beside the poor and almost worn-out clothing on our bodies. I did not, on this or any other occasion, witness the needless and wanton waste of our peltries and other property with that indifference which the Indians seem always to feel.

On other matters, such as his marriage or children, Tanner is nearly silent. Indeed he mentions his dogs more than his daughters, whom he does not even deign to name. He does give one brief, vivid image of his courtship with Mis-kwa-bun-o-kwa (Red Sky of the Morning):

...I was standing by our lodge one evening, when I saw a good looking young woman walking about and smoking. She noticed me from time to time, and at last came up and asked me to smoke with her. I answered that I never smoked. "You do not wish to smoke my pipe, for that reason you will not smoke with me." I took her pipe and smoked a little, though I had not been in the habit of smoking before. She remained some time, and talked with me, and I began to be pleased with her. After this we saw each other often, and I became gradually attached to her.

The narrative contains many curiosities, including false prophets, a man who dressed and acted like a woman (Tanner was driven half crazy by the man's unwanted attentions), and his impression of the inhabitants of the Selkerk colony ("Those Scots labourers who were with me, were much more rough and brutal in their manners than any people I had before seen"). He has an encounter with ghosts and on several occasions goes on medicine hunts to save his family from starvation. The later chapters concern his return to Kentucky in 1820 and meeting with his siblings there, and his attempt to bring his children back with him to live among the whites (he had by then become estranged from Mis-kwa-bun-o-kwa). His acquaintance with Governor Cass, Governor Clark, James Schoolcraft1 and other luminaries of the age, and visits to frontier towns like Chicago and Cincinnati-topics most Western narrators would digest with luxury-are quickly glazed over; either they did not impress Tanner deeply, or he felt they were so familiar to likely readers that they did not need describing.

Tanner eventually found his way up to Mackinac, where he worked for Schoolcraft as an interpreter; in 1828 he moved over to Sault Ste. Marie, and this was where he dictated his narrative to Dr. James. In a lengthy and verbose introduction, James trots Tanner out rather like a circus attraction:

John Tanner, whose life and adventures are detailed in the following pages, is now about fifty years of age. His person is erect and rather robust, indicating great hardiness, activity, and strength, which, however, his numerous exposures and sufferings have deeply impaired. His face, which was originally rather handsome, bears now numerous traces of thought and passion, as well as of age; his quick and piercing blue eyes, bespeak of stern, and violent, and unconquerable spirit, which rendered him an object of fear to many of the Indians while he remained among them, and which still, in some measure, disqualifies him for that submissive and compliant manner which his dependent situation among the whites renders necessary.

The good doctor does take pains, however, to assure us that the narrative is Tanner's own work: "In an attempt to aid this unfortunate individual in addressing his countrymen, it seemed desirable to give his narrative, as nearly as possible, in his own words, and with his own manner." It was wise of James to do so. Though Tanner's plain style cannot compare to Jonathan Carver's fascinating journal or Thomas McKenney's brilliant Sketches of a Tour to the Lakes, those gentlemen of wit and breeding were, after all, only visitors. It is only in Tanner's rugged, dignified prose that we can begin to grasp what Minnesota was like before settlement.

And what of Tanner after settlement? He had left the Ojibwa due to feuds that had developed, in part, because he was white. But he did not fit in with the Americans, either. He had learned to solve conflicts using his own means, and rule of law was foreign to him; townspeople distrusted and feared him because of his past. "The story of John Tanner is the tragic and age-old story of a man who had no country," Noel M. Loomis writes in the 1956 reprint of the narrative, "no people, no one who understood him, no place to lay his head."

After the publication of his narrative in 1839, he apparently threatened Dr. James because of things that had been printed in the book. His daughter Martha was taken from him, and though he married a white woman, she left him because of what she described as his squalor and brutality. The denoument came with James Schoolcraft's murder in 1846. Though another man eventually confessed to the crime, Tanner was at the time the main suspect, and he fled the Sault rather than trust to justice. He was never heard from again; like another lost writer, Francois Villon, he slips out of the chains of history without any known death or final resting place.

Louise Erdrich writes in the introduction to the Penguin edition2 that "There are still Ojibwa who were frightened into good behavior, as children, by the threats of Tanner's ghostly appearance." John Tanner, if his ghost were to visit us, would probably be surprised that his narrative is still in print over 160 years after its first publication; and more than surprised on learning that it was read by a woman in a large metal bird flying at 20,000 feet. He would be astounded at Minnesota's highways and plowed fields, and shocked by its cities, and would likely return to his old hunting grounds around Rainy Lake, to pursue his beloved moose and bear. In those woods at least he would find something familiar; only there are more beaver now, because the fur trade is over.

1The brother of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, who discovered the true source of the Mississippi river at Lake Itasca.
2This edition does not include the appendixes originally tacked on to the narrative, relating to the Ojibwa language and customs. And strangely, Dr. James is not even mentioned as the editor, though his footnotes were retained (some referring to appendixes that are no longer there!).

© 2008 by Joel Van Valin.


Joel Van Valin is the publisher of Whistling Shade and the author of the fantasy novel The Flower of Clear Burning.