By the time John Tanner, Shaw-shaw-wase-nase, the Falcon, returned to civilization, he had lived with the Indians for thirty years. He was accepted back by his white relations despite his status of "Indianized" white man or squaw man. Tanner's brother Edward had not recognized him during a chance encounter on his journey back to Kentucky, though Tanner had recognized him. Tanner was "dressed like an Indian" and his hair was long and he wore "strings of broaches, in the manner of the Indians," which was how Edwin James described him in his translation of John Tanner's narrative into English. Edwin James was a physician and amateur linguist of Indian languages. John Tanner had lost most of his English since he had been captured at the age of nine and adopted by the Indians as a son to replace a dead one in one family and then, later, a dead one in another. His first mother was an old Shawnee woman, Otter Woman, and his first father, Manito-o-geezhik, was a cruel and abusive one.
He had to have an interpreter when he talked with his brother. Their father, John Tanner, had given John a hiding for not attending school before his capture. Little John had a curiosity about the Indians his father told him lurked about the settlement before he was captured from the homestead in the Northwest territory, as Ohio was called at the time. They had not shortly come through the Cumberland Gap like many settlers flooding the Indian lands. Kentucky was a breeding ground for Indian haters, where they couldn't be controlled by the American government, let alone the British on whose Indian lands of the crown the Americans were encroaching. Tanner's father had died by the time he met his brother in Detroit, one of the posts the British had not given up to the Americans.
James Fenimore Cooper referred to Lake Ontario as the inland sea, and the forest surrounding it was just as vast an expanse, where Tanner faced many hardships, including disease and the continual pinch of hunger and starvation like a dog barking at the door. At one point on his journey back to his "residence" near the Lake of the Woods he tells his brother that he did not wish to be accompanied by him or "any other white man [...] as I knew he [Edward] could not submit to all the hardships of the journey, and live as I should be compelled to live, in an Indian lodge, all winter." A Narrative of the Captivity and Adventures of John Tanner, (U. S. Interpreter at the Saut de Ste. Marie) During Thirty Years Residence Among the Indians in the Interior of North America is written in the first person, one of many captivity narratives, which were very popular in the 19th century. John was captured in 1789 and it was published in 1830. The title page has Edwin James, M.D. as the preparer "for the press," and editor of an Account of Major Long's Expedition from Pittsburg to the Rocky Mountains, a title not as long-winded as Tanner's narrative. 'Residence' has a misleading ring to it, as if Tanner were a baron overseeing his land--if a baron has any land at all--and neither the American settlers nor the Indians were tenants of the Indian lands the British Crown laid claim to. No one owned the Indian lands in any true sense of the word, not even the Indians. The Narrative is written not really in any kind of style at all, nor is it in the least picaresque as 'Adventures' in the title suggests. It seems as if Edwin James took pains to translate the Ojibwe Tanner used to recount the whole thirty years, which Tanner had an uncanny ability to remember in its entirety. The awkwardness shows in the crabbed text where, probably, John Tanner's memory was not all that vivid, especially when the chronology isn't always easy to follow. The events sometimes pile up as if in a logjam and names are recalled the way they sounded to Tanner's ear rather than the way they were actually spelled. James did not seem to care about correcting the mistakes, perhaps because the names were of men of little importance at the time, names of ordinary traders at small posts scattered throughout the vast sea of forest--except for a name like Lord Selkirk.
Four years before Tanner was captured by Manito-o-geezhik, the North West Company sent to Grand Portage (on the northwestern shore of Lake Superior) and Detroit: 25 canoes and 4 bateaux with 260 men in canoes and 16 men in bateaux carrying 6,000 gal. of rum, 340 gal. of wine, 300 rifles, 8,000 lb. of powder, 120 cwt. of shot. All of this was valued at ￡20,500. Gregory and McLeod sent 4 canoes with 50 men, 400 gal. of rum, 32 gal. of wine, 64 rifles, 1,700 lb. of powder and 20 cwt. of shot valued at ￡2,850. Ross and Pangman took up the same number of canoes, 40 men, 350 gal. of rum, 32 gal. of wine, 36 rifles, 1,600 lb. of powder, 18 cwt. of shot, valued at ￡2,775. In the following year, 1786, the North West Company increased their outfits to include 30 canoes and 300 men, 2 bateaux and 9 men, 3,000 gal of rum, 500 gal. of wine, 500 rifles, 9,000 lb. of powder, 120 cwt. of shot, valued at ￡25,500, an increase of ￡5,000 from the previous year. Continuing this trend, Gregory and McLeod sent 8 canoes, 83 men, 1,600 gal. of rum, 64 gal. of wine, 104 rifles, 2,800 lb. of powder, 45 cwt. of shot, valued at ￡4,500, an increase of ￡1,650 from the previous year.
1785: NW Co. = £20, 500 (overhead) 1787 (year of amalgamation of shares)
Gregory & McLeod = ￡2,850 NW Co. = ￡22,000
Ross & Pangman = ￡2,775 Gregory & McLeod = ￡4,700
1786: NW Co. = ￡25,500
Gregory & McLeod = ￡4,500
The next year, the year of the merger (amalgamation), the North West Company's overhead was ￡22,000 and Gregory & McLeod's was ￡4,700.
Pangman, Ross and Pond formed a small Montreal Company in 1784, after they disagreed with the arrangement under the auspices of Gregory, McLeod & Company. Hence, the competition that began with the outfit of 1785. In the same year, Pangman, Ross & Pond placed John Ross in charge of the Athabasca district, Alexander Mackenzie in charge of English River, Peter Pangman in charge of Fort des Prairies, and Mr. Pollock, a clerk, in charge of Red River, where Tanner eventually settled, near Sioux country.
According to the cultural anthropologist White, the fur trade suffered from war between 1789 and 1794, due to the American expeditions and raids. Boundary lines were to be moved because of the American obsession with land surveillance. War restricted the hunt because the boundaries of hunting grounds were more or less unrestricted except by family units broken off from Indian bands during the winter when these families fanned out wide to hunt. If the fur trade suffered, the Indians suffered. However, dependence on European manufactures was not total. As early as 1780 the Pianskashaws had returned to hunting with bows and arrows. By 1782, three-fourths of the Wabash villagers were using bows and arrows and wearing buffalo skins in place of blankets. Autochthonous technology avoided reliance on smithery and subverted any kind of built-in obsolescence of technology.
By the winter of 1783-84, the North West Company was created by the leading Montreal merchants and the leading Michilimackinac traders, who were really less a company than an extended partnership. Tanner would later work as a hunter for the North West Company.
Tanner does not mention a Mr. Pollock in his narrative. He was at Red River the first time, when at the age of thirteen, his Indian mother Netnokwa expressed her wish to go there. That would have been 1793, probably after Mr. Pollock had left the trading-house at Red River. The historian of the fur trade in Canada, Harold A. Innis, says that cooperation among small companies was less a factor in the tendency for companies to merge than "the ruinous effects of competition under the conditions of overhead costs," which "became a driving force in favor of amalgamation" (256-7), or merger. For Innis, Pollock's success against Robert Grant and William McGillivray in the Red River department was "probably not [...] important" (257). A new organization, or merger, according to Innis, was "under appreciable disadvantage" because it had "little knowledge of Indian habits, language, and economy" (258). In other words, disgruntled Indians, who were refused credit because of a bad reputation, went to the new firm. The merging of small companies attracted Indians with bad credit, and thus took a loss and absorbed it by an increased overhead to compensate for the loss. In spite of the lack of capital, competition between the Northwest Company and Pangman, Ross, and Pond was "sufficiently ruinous to both companies to warrant an early amalgamation" (258). In short, lack of capital encouraged mergers. [Consider potlatch and destruction of property among certain Indian tribes as a means of gain by a capital loss.]
Tanner mentions Mackenzie and McGillivray in his narrative. There are a number of McGillivray's in Innis's book. Tanner says of Simon "McGillevray" that he was "a son of him who many years ago was so important a partner in the North West Company" (277). The father would have been William McGillivray, who Innis mentions as one of the partners in Montreal and the interior "who had served an apprenticeship in the interior" (252) along with Alexander Mackenzie and Roderic Mackenzie. They were partners in the Northwest Company. There was also a Simon McTavish, who was an uncle of the McGillivray's. He may have been cognizant of an incident at Rainy Lake (Lac la Pluie) that happened on August 3, 1794, according to Innis. Several ringleaders among the voyageurs demanded higher wages "but without success" (245, Innis). Is the Simon M'Gillivray in Tanner's narrative really Simon McTavis?
SCENE 1
It is a clear fall day. The boy, John Tanner, has escaped to the cornfield from the clutches of his step mother, who wanted him to babysit his infant half brother. He reaches his favorite tree, the large walnut near the edge of the woods. He is gathering fallen walnuts and putting them into his straw hat. He looks up at a sound that catches his attention at the fringe of the woods. He makes out a face peering at him from the underbrush of the woods. He remembers telling his father 'I wish I could see an Indian', which his father quickly dismissed as a foolish idea. 'Do you wish the skin of your top knot ripped off from ear to ear?', his father said.
The figure in the woods is gesturing to him with his arm, motioning him to approach. John's father repeatedly warned him about Indians lurking in the woods. John approaches the woods and the figure recedes into it. John plunges into the woods, his curiosity having been piqued by the glimpse he got of an Indian. He is astonished to find himself looking at an old Indian man smiling at him. As if hypnotized, John allows the old Indian to firmly grab him by the arm. John has second thoughts and panics. He pulls back and begins to resist the old man but does not think to yell for help. Another Indian, a young one, appears out of the underbrush and grabs John's other arm. The old Indian lets go of John's arm and vanishes at a fast pace through the woods. A third Indian, a stout one, approaches John, who is frozen in fear, and raises his tomahawk above John's head and with his chin points up to the sky. John looks up and at that moment the stout Indian brings down his tomahawk on John's head, but the young one grabs the stout one's arm, preventing a savage blow to his head.
The young Indian is scolding the stout Indian when the old man comes back. John has still not collected his senses and is astonished to hear his first words of an Indian language. The old man has said something to the stout Indian that changes his mind. The stout Indian is sulking but resigned to whatever the old man has said. The stout Indian takes John by the other arm and all of them begin to quickly walk through the woods, weaving between the trees on no apparent path.
He had to have an interpreter when he talked with his brother. Their father, John Tanner, had given John a hiding for not attending school before his capture. Little John had a curiosity about the Indians his father told him lurked about the settlement before he was captured from the homestead in the Northwest territory, as Ohio was called at the time. They had not shortly come through the Cumberland Gap like many settlers flooding the Indian lands. Kentucky was a breeding ground for Indian haters, where they couldn't be controlled by the American government, let alone the British on whose Indian lands of the crown the Americans were encroaching. Tanner's father had died by the time he met his brother in Detroit, one of the posts the British had not given up to the Americans.
James Fenimore Cooper referred to Lake Ontario as the inland sea, and the forest surrounding it was just as vast an expanse, where Tanner faced many hardships, including disease and the continual pinch of hunger and starvation like a dog barking at the door. At one point on his journey back to his "residence" near the Lake of the Woods he tells his brother that he did not wish to be accompanied by him or "any other white man [...] as I knew he [Edward] could not submit to all the hardships of the journey, and live as I should be compelled to live, in an Indian lodge, all winter." A Narrative of the Captivity and Adventures of John Tanner, (U. S. Interpreter at the Saut de Ste. Marie) During Thirty Years Residence Among the Indians in the Interior of North America is written in the first person, one of many captivity narratives, which were very popular in the 19th century. John was captured in 1789 and it was published in 1830. The title page has Edwin James, M.D. as the preparer "for the press," and editor of an Account of Major Long's Expedition from Pittsburg to the Rocky Mountains, a title not as long-winded as Tanner's narrative. 'Residence' has a misleading ring to it, as if Tanner were a baron overseeing his land--if a baron has any land at all--and neither the American settlers nor the Indians were tenants of the Indian lands the British Crown laid claim to. No one owned the Indian lands in any true sense of the word, not even the Indians. The Narrative is written not really in any kind of style at all, nor is it in the least picaresque as 'Adventures' in the title suggests. It seems as if Edwin James took pains to translate the Ojibwe Tanner used to recount the whole thirty years, which Tanner had an uncanny ability to remember in its entirety. The awkwardness shows in the crabbed text where, probably, John Tanner's memory was not all that vivid, especially when the chronology isn't always easy to follow. The events sometimes pile up as if in a logjam and names are recalled the way they sounded to Tanner's ear rather than the way they were actually spelled. James did not seem to care about correcting the mistakes, perhaps because the names were of men of little importance at the time, names of ordinary traders at small posts scattered throughout the vast sea of forest--except for a name like Lord Selkirk.
Four years before Tanner was captured by Manito-o-geezhik, the North West Company sent to Grand Portage (on the northwestern shore of Lake Superior) and Detroit: 25 canoes and 4 bateaux with 260 men in canoes and 16 men in bateaux carrying 6,000 gal. of rum, 340 gal. of wine, 300 rifles, 8,000 lb. of powder, 120 cwt. of shot. All of this was valued at ￡20,500. Gregory and McLeod sent 4 canoes with 50 men, 400 gal. of rum, 32 gal. of wine, 64 rifles, 1,700 lb. of powder and 20 cwt. of shot valued at ￡2,850. Ross and Pangman took up the same number of canoes, 40 men, 350 gal. of rum, 32 gal. of wine, 36 rifles, 1,600 lb. of powder, 18 cwt. of shot, valued at ￡2,775. In the following year, 1786, the North West Company increased their outfits to include 30 canoes and 300 men, 2 bateaux and 9 men, 3,000 gal of rum, 500 gal. of wine, 500 rifles, 9,000 lb. of powder, 120 cwt. of shot, valued at ￡25,500, an increase of ￡5,000 from the previous year. Continuing this trend, Gregory and McLeod sent 8 canoes, 83 men, 1,600 gal. of rum, 64 gal. of wine, 104 rifles, 2,800 lb. of powder, 45 cwt. of shot, valued at ￡4,500, an increase of ￡1,650 from the previous year.
1785: NW Co. = £20, 500 (overhead) 1787 (year of amalgamation of shares)
Gregory & McLeod = ￡2,850 NW Co. = ￡22,000
Ross & Pangman = ￡2,775 Gregory & McLeod = ￡4,700
1786: NW Co. = ￡25,500
Gregory & McLeod = ￡4,500
The next year, the year of the merger (amalgamation), the North West Company's overhead was ￡22,000 and Gregory & McLeod's was ￡4,700.
Pangman, Ross and Pond formed a small Montreal Company in 1784, after they disagreed with the arrangement under the auspices of Gregory, McLeod & Company. Hence, the competition that began with the outfit of 1785. In the same year, Pangman, Ross & Pond placed John Ross in charge of the Athabasca district, Alexander Mackenzie in charge of English River, Peter Pangman in charge of Fort des Prairies, and Mr. Pollock, a clerk, in charge of Red River, where Tanner eventually settled, near Sioux country.
According to the cultural anthropologist White, the fur trade suffered from war between 1789 and 1794, due to the American expeditions and raids. Boundary lines were to be moved because of the American obsession with land surveillance. War restricted the hunt because the boundaries of hunting grounds were more or less unrestricted except by family units broken off from Indian bands during the winter when these families fanned out wide to hunt. If the fur trade suffered, the Indians suffered. However, dependence on European manufactures was not total. As early as 1780 the Pianskashaws had returned to hunting with bows and arrows. By 1782, three-fourths of the Wabash villagers were using bows and arrows and wearing buffalo skins in place of blankets. Autochthonous technology avoided reliance on smithery and subverted any kind of built-in obsolescence of technology.
By the winter of 1783-84, the North West Company was created by the leading Montreal merchants and the leading Michilimackinac traders, who were really less a company than an extended partnership. Tanner would later work as a hunter for the North West Company.
Tanner does not mention a Mr. Pollock in his narrative. He was at Red River the first time, when at the age of thirteen, his Indian mother Netnokwa expressed her wish to go there. That would have been 1793, probably after Mr. Pollock had left the trading-house at Red River. The historian of the fur trade in Canada, Harold A. Innis, says that cooperation among small companies was less a factor in the tendency for companies to merge than "the ruinous effects of competition under the conditions of overhead costs," which "became a driving force in favor of amalgamation" (256-7), or merger. For Innis, Pollock's success against Robert Grant and William McGillivray in the Red River department was "probably not [...] important" (257). A new organization, or merger, according to Innis, was "under appreciable disadvantage" because it had "little knowledge of Indian habits, language, and economy" (258). In other words, disgruntled Indians, who were refused credit because of a bad reputation, went to the new firm. The merging of small companies attracted Indians with bad credit, and thus took a loss and absorbed it by an increased overhead to compensate for the loss. In spite of the lack of capital, competition between the Northwest Company and Pangman, Ross, and Pond was "sufficiently ruinous to both companies to warrant an early amalgamation" (258). In short, lack of capital encouraged mergers. [Consider potlatch and destruction of property among certain Indian tribes as a means of gain by a capital loss.]
Tanner mentions Mackenzie and McGillivray in his narrative. There are a number of McGillivray's in Innis's book. Tanner says of Simon "McGillevray" that he was "a son of him who many years ago was so important a partner in the North West Company" (277). The father would have been William McGillivray, who Innis mentions as one of the partners in Montreal and the interior "who had served an apprenticeship in the interior" (252) along with Alexander Mackenzie and Roderic Mackenzie. They were partners in the Northwest Company. There was also a Simon McTavish, who was an uncle of the McGillivray's. He may have been cognizant of an incident at Rainy Lake (Lac la Pluie) that happened on August 3, 1794, according to Innis. Several ringleaders among the voyageurs demanded higher wages "but without success" (245, Innis). Is the Simon M'Gillivray in Tanner's narrative really Simon McTavis?
SCENE 1
It is a clear fall day. The boy, John Tanner, has escaped to the cornfield from the clutches of his step mother, who wanted him to babysit his infant half brother. He reaches his favorite tree, the large walnut near the edge of the woods. He is gathering fallen walnuts and putting them into his straw hat. He looks up at a sound that catches his attention at the fringe of the woods. He makes out a face peering at him from the underbrush of the woods. He remembers telling his father 'I wish I could see an Indian', which his father quickly dismissed as a foolish idea. 'Do you wish the skin of your top knot ripped off from ear to ear?', his father said.
The figure in the woods is gesturing to him with his arm, motioning him to approach. John's father repeatedly warned him about Indians lurking in the woods. John approaches the woods and the figure recedes into it. John plunges into the woods, his curiosity having been piqued by the glimpse he got of an Indian. He is astonished to find himself looking at an old Indian man smiling at him. As if hypnotized, John allows the old Indian to firmly grab him by the arm. John has second thoughts and panics. He pulls back and begins to resist the old man but does not think to yell for help. Another Indian, a young one, appears out of the underbrush and grabs John's other arm. The old Indian lets go of John's arm and vanishes at a fast pace through the woods. A third Indian, a stout one, approaches John, who is frozen in fear, and raises his tomahawk above John's head and with his chin points up to the sky. John looks up and at that moment the stout Indian brings down his tomahawk on John's head, but the young one grabs the stout one's arm, preventing a savage blow to his head.
The young Indian is scolding the stout Indian when the old man comes back. John has still not collected his senses and is astonished to hear his first words of an Indian language. The old man has said something to the stout Indian that changes his mind. The stout Indian is sulking but resigned to whatever the old man has said. The stout Indian takes John by the other arm and all of them begin to quickly walk through the woods, weaving between the trees on no apparent path.
Labels: Tanner
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