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The story of John Tanner is the tragic and age-old story of a man who had no country, no people, no one who understood him, no place to lay his head.

His Narrative, which is the story of his thirty years’ captivity among the Ojibways, was written a few years after he settled once more among the civilized whites. The material was written down and edited by Doctor Edwin James, and James’s foreword gives a hint of the almost insurmountable difficulties that surrounded Tanner’s attempt to establish himself among the whites. However, the real story of John Tanner’s long and tragic life unraveled after the book was printed in 1830, for Tanner spent sixteen more years trying to find a place for himself in white society.

Here was a man who had lived as a white boy only nine years, had then been captured and had spent thirty years among the Indians, had married an Indian woman and produced half-breed children, had in every way—physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually—lived as an Indian for so long that he forgot his own name and could no longer speak the English language, but still was impelled by some ancient hunger to try to find his own people, to be a member of the society that had borne him.

He found it—as so many other Indian captives have found it—impossible. Though he rejected his Indian foster people and settled among the whites, educated his halfbreed children in white schools, still he was too much Indian to change environment. His Indian characteristics made him “different.” He was distrusted by the whites. He was not prepared or equipped to make a living according to the white standard. Confused and bewildered, his white heritage constantly fighting with his acquired Indian environmental factors, in his later years he was lonely and “bitter.” He is said to have threatened violence against those who opposed him, but to his credit it must be said that no major act of violence has ever been proved against him; the charges have been founded entirely on supposition, and it is obvious that a factor in those charges was his “difference.”

What follows here is largely the story of Tanner’s life after the publication of the Narrative, during the years of struggle when, not understanding and not understood, he tried desperately to be a “white” once more.

Henry R. Schoolcraft, who firmly believed Tanner had killed his brother, said: “ ... now a grey-headed, hard-featured old man, at war with everyone. Suspicious, revengeful, bad-tempered.”

Elizabeth T. Baird said he was cruel and no religion could be discussed before him.

Mrs. Angie Bingham Gilbert, who had known him as an old man when she was a young child, said he had a strange and terrible personality, a violent and uncontrolled temper, but was very religious and almost noble-looking. It rather looks as if Mrs. Gilbert, having spoken her mind, wanted to soften her remembrance of him.

On the opposite hand, William H. Keating, journalist for Major Long, said he never drank or smoked, was honorable, was attached to his children, and had great affection for his Indian foster mother and her family. The latter two items are quite apparent even in his matter-of-fact telling of the Narrative.

The truth probably lies in a combination of these points of view. Keating knew Tanner in 1823, before Tanner had a chance to become disillusioned as to his place in society. Even before Tanner left the Indians he learned to drink, but rather conservatively, it would seem on the whole. The other commentators knew him later, after he had fought his personal battle with civilization and had lost; when he had found at last that he could not live in an Indian hut, under Indian conditions of sanitation, follow Indian customs in treatment of his family, and still be accepted as a white. Here then, it might seem, was a man who, battling with his own inner turmoil of ideas and evaluations, unaccountably found himself in desperate conflict with the mores of his native race. He fought back, it would seem, with considerable restraint, considering his background, and in the end, lonely, friendless, his oldest daughter separated from him by legislative edict, the people of his adopted town holding him in alternate contempt and awe, even his friends beginning to fear violence from him, he disappeared under a cloud.

That summer of 1846 in Sault Ste. Marie was known as the Tanner Summer; everything bad that happened was accredited to John Tanner. He was hunted by soldiers and bloodhounds, accused specifically of the murder of James Schoolcraft, but he was never found. He disappeared completely, and the time and manner of his death are yet a mystery; the last resting place of his bones is yet unknown to man.

Years later a skeleton was found in a swamp near Sault Ste. Marie and was thought to be his, but there were some doubters. Years after that an ex-army officer confessed the killing of James Schoolcraft, but it was too late to help John Tanner. To the people of Sault Ste. Marie he was still known as Old Tanner, or the White Indian, or the Old Liar.

The book itself has been both praised and condemned. The charge is made that he gives himself the benefit of all doubts, but this, remember, means doubts from the “civilized” point of view. It rather seems that from the Indian point of view he was quite honest. He did not equivocate over the fact that he had been spending his nights in Mis-kwa-bun-o-kwa’s teepee before he married her, nor is he in any manner boastful. He seems honest enough about his drinking; for a long time he did not drink at all, but later on he took it up to a certain extent. Likewise he tells in Indian fashion—the usual word is “stoical”—about sending a little slave girl into the cold without a blanket because she had allowed his tent to burn down. Actually stoicism implies the control of feelings, but it was not that with Tanner. He had no feeling about the matter; the girl had caused them suffering; therefore she was sent away. The element of punishment was not as large as the element of self-protection—which was why Tanner took the girl’s blanket from her: he and the surviving boy would need it to keep warm. In a country where all one’s resources are called on to maintain existence, there is not, biologically speaking, much encouragement to sentiment.

The Narrative has the full ring of truth and sincerity if one remembers that this was, to all effect, an Indian speaking. His viewpoint was Indian, his philosophy was Indian, and the Narrative is not to be judged from “civilized” point of view, either as of 1830 or as of 1956. And if anyone doubts Tanner’s innate decency, he has only to read Tanner’s matter-of-fact relation of homosexuality among the Ojibways to realize that here was a man truly sophisticated (in that he pointed no finger of reprehension) but also truly conventional, for while he did not cast aspersions on those who practiced it, neither did he want anything to do with it himself.

From various accounts of his life it is possible to reconstruct a tentative time-table of John Tanner’s career.

He was born about 1780, and captured by Shawnees in 1789. He was married in 1800, and returned home to Kentucky about 1817. About 1818 he must have gone back to his Indian family; in 1819 his brother found him in Canada. In 1820 he left Selkirk Settlement, with his wife and three children, for Kentucky again; another child was born enroute, and his wife stayed at Mackinac, Michigan, while he went on to Kentucky, where one daughter, Mary, died. In 1823 he returned to the Red River to get his wife and two other daughters. On this occasion he apparently was not successful, for his wife hired an Indian to shoot him, and she then ran off with the Indian, while his daughters disappeared.

Sometime in the next few years, however, he must have effected a reconciliation, for his wife lived with him several years and produced two more children. In 1828 he moved from Mackinac to Sault Ste. Marie. In 1830 Martha, his daughter, was taken from him. In 1832 the mother left Mackinac for good.

These are the facts as deduced from his various biographers. Perhaps, however, they did not trouble to read the Narrative, for still other facts appear:

He mentions a child who died of measles (this could have been Mary); he confirms that one son was thoroughly Indian and chose to remain with the Ojibways; he mentions a child who died in 1821, 80 miles from Grand Prairie (this might have been Mary); he tells us that (probably about 1810) he had left his first wife and had taken another, by whom he had three children; this second wife was the one who would not go to Mackinac, it would seem. He also reveals the great trouble caused by his second mother-in-law, for she was often on the scene, and his wife deserted him in company with his mother-in-law; his wife returned a year later (sometime before 1814), and he says she “laughed” as she resumed her place in his household.

It is worth noting that no bitterness or resentment appears in the Narrative against either his wife, his mother-in-law, or the medicine man who seems to have had much undue influence in his domestic troubles. It is significant too that during the winter when his wife was gone, he took care of his children, hunting meat by day, repairing their clothing by night, and he says casually that during that winter he slept very short hours because of his many duties.

Probably in the early 1840’s, in a last desperate attempt to secure acceptance as a white, he married a white woman of Detroit. She bore him one child, but left him because of what to her were squalor and brutality; eventually she was granted a divorce by the legislature. In 1846, perhaps not too long after his wife left him, he disappeared about the time of James Schoolcraft’s murder. There never has been a word from him since, and, as far as known, no human eye ever again saw him as a living man.

He was dis-enamored of his first wife before he married her, and his life after he returned to civilization with his second wife was most unhappy, she wanting to return to her people, he determined to remain with his. She wanted him to marry her in Mackinac according to white customs, she being a Roman Catholic by that time, but his Indian upbringing asserted itself and he refused. Presumably she went back to Red River and was swallowed up in the anonymity of Indian records, which except for unusual happenings were kept only as long as they could be heard from the mouth of one living; three generations were the usual extent.

The third wife was variously described as a poor but respectable member of the Baptist church, and by another writer as a chambermaid in Ben Woodworth’s hotel (an obviously slurring reference; again the writers’ personal sympathies and antipathies color their writings). There seems little doubt, however, that she could not endure conditions in the Tanner menage, which must have been very Indian-like, and asked men in Sault Ste. Marie to advise her. The advice was not given, but a purse was made up to help her “escape.”

There is likewise some confusion as to his children. Quite likely Martha was the oldest, having been born about 1808, and she lived a long and useful life as a teacher. Mary may have been the second, born in 1809, and it was she who died in 1820. Lucy, the baby born in 1820, was drowned in a shipwreck on Lake Michigan. She had been given up for adoption by Tanner before she was a year old, and, Indian-like, he never more had anything to do with her.

Since there were two other children with him in 1820, James and John must have been on the scene. One report mentions two Johns; another says one brother was an Indian chief, and another says John was killed at the Battle of Bull Run. James became a minister; he was not too well spoken of, and died in a fall from a wagon about the time of the Riel Rebellion. Of the two children born after 1820, nothing appears—nor of the one born to his wife from Detroit.

The killing of James Schoolcraft requires some elaboration, for it is that crime that put Tanner under a cloud. True, he was unsocial and often violent and had been locked up in jail to recover from his fits of temper, but he had not committed a felony. He had threatened Doctor James for writing things that made people ridicule him, but no printed record appears that he ever tried to implement the threat, though Thomas W. Field flatly says Tanner tried to kill Doctor James (this seems to be on the authority of Henry Schoolcraft, who does not say that; he says Tanner “threatened” to kill the doctor). Field’s is a strong statement, especially so since in the same sentence Field says Tanner “actually murdered” James Schoolcraft. A murder, of course, is a legal conviction, and it does not seem reasonable that Tanner was ever tried in court, for he was never found. Further, the army officer, Lieutenant Tilden, is said by two writers to have confessed years later to the killing of Schoolcraft, and even the people of Sault Ste. Marie seem to have lost their strong conviction of Tanner’s guilt in this matter after a few years.

James Schoolcraft was a “gay, handsome” man, and Tanner was supposed to have killed him for having improper relations with Tanner’s daughter. This would imply a young daughter, for among Indians the value of chastity was realistically appraised; it was common practice among many tribes to put a higher value on a girl, for purposes of marriage, if she was a virgin. Bear in mind that a husband invariably paid the parents for a girl he married, and her marriage value decreased as her sexual experience increased. In this respect the Indians were quite civilized.

But none of Tanner’s children had lived with him for years; all accounts agree on that. Therefore it appears that the last two children born to his second wife must have returned with her to her people, and likely the small child of his third wife must have been taken with her; this last child, at any rate, would have been too young for any normal relationship with James Schoolcraft—and nothing else is even implied. Therefore there was only Martha who may have been in Sault Ste. Marie (Lucy and Mary both having died), and Martha was probably 38 years old, and far beyond the age where an Indian would feel impelled to kill to preserve her value, or a white parent to protect her honor. In other words, she had reached the age of discretion. For the record, however, no hint is ever given that Martha was involved, and all accounts say that she lived a good and useful life.

Who, then, did kill Schoolcraft? One account offers this answer: Schoolcraft and Lieutenant Tilden were rivals for the attention of a woman. Likewise, there were other bits of evidence that seemed to indicate Tilden, while the main thing against Tanner was his unsocial attitude. For those who consider character in the nature of evidence, it is interesting to know that Lieutenant Tilden was later court-martialed in Mexico. The two reports of Tilden’s confession must be considered, and likewise the fact that the body found years later was presumed to be Tanner’s. If it was, how did he die?

On the whole, John Tanner is representative of a class of persons not uncommon on the old frontier: repatriated captives. A great many of them had a hard life, and the reasons were several: they acquired Indian mores during their captivity, and it was never easy for them to reconcile their Indian ways with the new—to them—ways of the whites. Second, anything connected with Indians was looked on with deep suspicion by whites on the frontier; John Tanner was not only feared but also mistrusted. It would seem the public attitude toward him softened a great deal in retrospect, for in after years the citizens of Sault Ste. Marie refused to give Tilden a clean bill of health over the Schoolcraft killing.

It is, however, inescapable that Tanner’s attempt to live among the people of his blood was a tragic experience. He was not only a man without a country but a man without a race.

Here, then, is John Tanner’s Narrative, as it was first printed a hundred and twenty-six years ago. It is not a flowery and sensational tale of adventure, as were most Indian captivity stories of that time; it is rather a study of Indian life and customs, and would be much better known if it had been more readily available. But the book never appeared in more than the first edition, and is classed as quite rare. It was printed in New York in 1830 by G. & C. & H. Carvill; in London also in 1830; in Paris (French translation) in 1835 without the vocabularies; in Leipzig (German translation) in 1840 without the vocabularies. A partial mimeographed edition was produced in this country in 1940, but otherwise this work, which in all respects is deserving of the term “classic,” has been almost inaccessible to most persons. It would seem, therefore, that the present edition is a real service to students of the frontier.

Noel M. Loomis.

Minneapolis, Minn., Aug. 25, 1956.