What Jane Knew: Anishinaabe Stories and American Imperialism, 1815–1845

By Maureen Konkle

The children of an influential Ojibwe-Anglo family, Jane Johnston and her brother George were already accomplished writers when the Indian agent Henry Rowe Schoolcraft arrived in Sault Ste. Marie in 1822. Charged by Michigan's territorial governor with collecting information on Anishinaabe people, he soon married Jane, "discovered" the family's writings, and began soliciting them for traditional Anishinaabe stories. But what began as literary play became the setting for political struggle. Jane and her family wrote with attention to the beauty of Anishinaabe narratives and to their expression of an Anishinaabe world that continued to coexist with the American republic. But Schoolcraft appropriated the stories and published them as his own writing, seeking to control their meaning and to destroy their impact in service to the "civilizing" interests of the United States.

In this dramatic story, Maureen Konkle helps recover the literary achievements of Jane Johnston Schoolcraft and her kin, revealing as never before how their lives and work shed light on nineteenth-century struggles over the future of Indigenous people in the United States.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Apr 9, 2024
• ISBN: 9781469675398

Maureen Konkle

Maureen Konkle is associate professor of English at the University of Missouri.

Book preview

Cover: What Jane Knew, Anishinaabe Stories and American Imperialism, 1815–1845 by Maureen Konkle

What Jane Knew

What Jane Knew

Anishinaabe Stories and American Imperialism, 1815–1845

MAUREEN KONKLE

The University of North Carolina Press

Chapel Hill

© 2024 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Set in Minion Pro by Westchester Publishing Services

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Konkle, Maureen, author.

Title: What Jane knew : Anishinaabe stories and American imperialism, 1815–1845 / Maureen Konkle.

Description: Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press,

[2024]

| Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023047028 | ISBN 9781469675381 (cloth ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469678436 (paperback ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469675398 (epub) | ISBN 9798890887368 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Schoolcraft, Jane Johnston, 1800–1842—Criticism and interpretation. | Schoolcraft, Henry Rowe, 1793–1864. | American literature—Indian authors—History and criticism. | Ojibwa literature—Michigan—History—19th century. | Ojibwa literature—Political aspects. | Ojibwa literature—Social aspects. | White people—Relations with Indians—History—19th century. | BISAC: SOCIAL SCIENCE / Ethnic Studies / American / Native American Studies | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Literary Figures

Classification: LCC PS2789.S73 Z76 2024 | DDC 810.9/897—dc23/eng/20231115 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023047028

Cover art: Top, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft (ca. 1825), courtesy of the Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan; bottom, drawing of Sault Ste. Marie (ca. 1837) by Anna Brownell Jameson, courtesy of the Toronto Public Library.

This book will be made open access within three years of publication thanks to Path to Open, a program developed in partnership between JSTOR, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the University of Michigan Press, and the University of North Carolina Press to bring about equitable access and impact for the entire scholarly community, including authors, researchers, libraries, and university presses around the world. Learn more at https://about.jstor.org/path-to-open/.

Contents

List of Illustrations and Map

Prologue

PART I

Chapter 1 This Vain and Transitory World

Chapter 2 Belles Lettres

Chapter 3 Of Mrs. Schoolcraft, You Have Heard

Chapter 4 A Precious Wild Flower

Chapter 5 A New Creation

PART II

Story of Manahbosho

Chapter 6 Leech Lake

O Mr. C!

Chapter 7 Treaty of Washington

Paup-Puk-Keewiss

Chapter 8 Mercenary and Stupid White Man

Six Indians Visit to the Sun and Moon

Chapter 9 Wauchusco and the Spirits

Mukakee Mindemoea; or, The Toad-Woman

Chapter 10 At the Depot

PART III

A Narrative of Wabwindigo

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations and Map

Illustrations

John Johnston, artist unknown (oil portrait, ca. 1790), 26

Ozhaawshkodewikwe by Charles Bird King after James Otto Lewis (oil portrait, ca. 1825), 30

Sault Ste. Marie from Waishky’s Lodge/The Falls of St. Mary’s by Anna Brownell Jameson, Voyage to America Portfolio (drawing, 1837), 32

Shingabawossin by Henry Inman (oil portrait, ca. 1831–34), 55

Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, artist unknown (ca. 1825, daguerreotype of a miniature

[?])

, 78

The canoe on Lake Huron by Anna Brownell Jameson, Voyage to America Portfolio (drawing, 1837), 128

Island of Mackinac, Lake Huron, by Anna Brownell Jameson, Voyage to America Portfolio (drawing, 1837), 171

Charlotte McMurray Johnston, artist unknown (photograph, ca. 1860), 239

Anna Jameson by David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson (salted paper print, ca. 1844), 241

The beach at Mackinac by Anna Brownell Jameson, Voyage to America Portfolio (drawing, 1837), 243

Voyage with Mrs. Schoolcraft by Anna Brownell Jameson, Voyage to America Portfolio (drawing, 1837), 245

Wayish-ky’s Lodge by Anna Brownell Jameson, Voyage to America Portfolio (drawing, 1837), 246

Jane Susan Ann Schoolcraft, artist unknown (oil portrait, ca. 1837), 289

John Johnston Schoolcraft, artist unknown (oil portrait, ca. 1837), 290

Elizabeth Oakes Smith by John Wesley Paradise (oil portrait, ca. 1845), 308

William Johnston, artist unknown (carte de visite, ca. 1850), 320

Anna Maria Johnston, artist unknown (carte de visite, ca. 1850), 327

George Johnston and son Samuel Abbott, artist unknown (daguerreotype, ca. 1850), 336

Mary Rice Johnston and daughter Eliza Jane, artist unknown (daguerreotype, ca. 1850), 337

Map

Anishinaabe villages, ca. 1830, xii

What Jane Knew

The Weendigoes

Saginaw, from Algic Researches, translated by William Johnston (1839); Michilimackinac, Winter 1836–1837

¹

Once there lived in a lonely forest, a man and his wife, who had a son. The father went out every day, according to the custom of the Indians, to hunt for food, to support his family. One day while he was absent, his wife, on going out of the lodge, looked toward the lake that was near, and saw a very large man walking on the water, and coming fast toward the lodge. He had already advanced so near that flight was useless. She thought to herself, what shall I say to the monster that will please him. As he came near, she ran in, and taking the hand of her son, a boy of three or four years old, led him out. Speaking very loud, See, my son, said she, your grandfather, and then added in a conciliatory tone, he will have pity on us. The giant advanced, and said sneeringly, Yes, my son. And then addressing the woman asked, Have you anything to eat? Fortunately the lodge was filled with meat of various kinds. The woman thought to please him by handing him some cooked meat, but he pushed it away in a dissatisfied manner, and took up the raw carcass of a deer, which he glutted up, sucking the bones, and drinking the blood.

Anishinaabe villages (ca. 1830).

Prologue

He’d been pestering her about the story for weeks. It was the winter of 1838, and Henry Schoolcraft was at the agency in Detroit while Jane, his wife, was at home on Mackinac Island, worn down by illness and managing a fractious household. Try to finish & transmit me, in its rough state, the tale you have in hand, he wrote. I will see to it, that your reputation shall suffer, in the phraseology.¹

His anxiety about her writing had only grown over time. This latest story was unusual among those she and her brother and sister had been writing down, lacking what she called majic and even somewhat Christian, on the origin of corn. Once upon a time, she began, also unusually, for the Anishinaabe stories they’d been writing generally didn’t begin that way. Once upon a time there was a poor Indian living in the forest with his wife and children, not especially accomplished at anything, but he had a son who wanted to help his poor fellow creatures.

" ‘There must be a Great Spirit who has made all things and takes care of all!’ said the youth; ‘I must try and find out who it is.’ One day a beautiful stranger appeared to him dressed in shades of green with waving yellow plumes on his head who challenged him to wrestle over three days. At the end of three days the stranger was defeated and buried and became corn. ‘It is my friend and the friend of all mankind,’ the youth said, and ‘none need ever depend alone upon hunting and fishing, as long as there is Mondaumin to live and grow from the ground.’ "²

Schoolcraft read the story to advocate agriculture over hunting; that was why he wanted it. Correct whatever you find amiss, she wrote. As far as she was concerned, he was neglecting her and their two children, this time making treaties with the smaller Ojibwe bands his primary excuse to be in Detroit. "Public duties bring their own fame & reward, when discharged faithfully, she added, but the unobtrusive duties of domestic life are not even thought upon with all its cares & troubles & incessant appeals to forbearance, patience, nor is a word spoken in praise or encouragement to the devoted person who sacrifices health & ease in the fulfillment of these oft neglected duties, & yet human nature is the same in Man and Woman—perhaps the latter needs more encouragement."³

The story was very pretty, he wrote back, ignoring her irritation. No people are more prone to ascribe their gifts to providence, and the invention of the present story, is a sufficient proof, were there none recorded, of their possession of intellect & fancy.⁴ He took out most of the psychological detail and made the youth’s vision of the spirit merely a fantasy, then added Indian names, which he was fond of making up.

In the spring of 1822 Schoolcraft had arrived with the US Army at Sault Ste. Marie to oversee the federal government’s relations with the Indigenous tribes from that place across the western Great Lakes region to the upper Mississippi. This included villages at L’Anse at the Keweenaw Peninsula on Lake Superior, La Pointe and Fond du Lac at the western end of the lake, Lac du Flambeau, Lac Vieux Desert, and Lac Courte Oreilles in present-day northern Wisconsin, and Leech Lake and Red Lake in present-day Minnesota. In 1824, he estimated the Indigenous population of his agency at 7,324 living in twenty-five independent bands, the most distant of which at Pembina was over a thousand miles away.⁵ There were relatively few white settlers, mainly workers in the fur trade married into Indigenous communities; the trade was centered on Mackinac Island, south of Sault Ste. Marie. In a departure from the normal course of affairs for government officials, the territorial governor and superintendent of Indian affairs Lewis Cass additionally charged Schoolcraft with collecting information on the Indigenous inhabitants, including especially their language. Cass had got it into his head that he could prove the inferiority of those he viewed as savages once and for all, but he needed facts to back himself up. He was writing a book about it.

That the Indian agent wanted Ojibwemowin, the language, must have been quite a surprise and even a little thrilling for Jane. An American who seemed to care about the language that she loved so much and who even wrote poetry, as did she, would not have been common in those postwar years. He set up his office in one of her father’s outbuildings and moved in with the family. They lived in a log house that backed onto the rapids of the St. Mary’s River, surrounded by the storehouses of a fur trade that hadn’t recovered from the Americans plundering and burning the family business in 1814 and never would. Her parents were Ozhaawshkodewikwe, a daughter of Waabojiig, a powerful hereditary leader of the Adik or Caribou doodem (clan or totem) at Shagwaamikong at the western end of Lake Superior, and John Johnston, a Protestant Irishman with literary habits and a sometimes romantic view of the world into which he had married. They believed it prudent to accommodate the Americans because Johnston had fought for the British in the last war and had no intention of either becoming an American or moving across the river.

It was mainly Jane, aged twenty-two, to whom Schoolcraft turned to fulfill his duties. Within two months of his arrival they had formed an attachment; they were married in October of the next year.

She might have missed becoming an explainer of her relatives to outsiders had her uncle not died. When she was nine years old her father decided that his favorite child should be turned over to his sister and her naval officer husband in Wexford, Ireland, for proper finishing and better prospects. Ozhaawshkodewikwe’s feelings about this proposal are unrecorded. Her namesake aunt was eager to take up what had been Jane’s recently deceased grandmother’s plan; to commemorate the new start, the family cut Jane’s hair short in the style for children of the day and had her miniature painted in Dublin on a visit to her uncle, the bishop of Dromore. All along she cried for her mother and home. Then her uncle died of apoplexy and her aunt was too grief-stricken to care for a child. According to family lore, when his cousin, the attorney general of Ireland, offered Johnston a position and a chance to stay, he declined, saying, I have married the daughter of a king in America and I shall return to comfort her & educate my children.⁶ Before six months had passed, Jane and her father began their journey home. One night in November 1810 Ozhaawshkodewikwe dreamed that they were camped on an island in the St. Mary’s River, unable to get any farther in the night; she sent out boatmen, who found them and brought them home. The next day the river froze for the season.⁷

After this episode Jane became subject to gentle contention between her parents. Her father made her a Christian on his own model, a reader of the bluestocking Hannah More and a writer of devotional verse. Her mother taught her so well the practices and beliefs of Ojibwe people and especially Ojibwemowin that her father by his own account couldn’t succeed in his business without her. He relied on her perfect knowledge of Ojibwemowin, so much so that when he raised up a troop of his workers to help defend Mackinac against the Americans in 1814, he took Jane along to interpret.⁸

Ozhaawshkodewikwe’s father had forced her to marry Johnston because he traded with their band. By her own account she was terrified. He was twice her age; they spoke to one another in French, of which he had only a rudimentary knowledge at the time. After her father’s death and the birth of two sons, she still wasn’t sure of the marriage, so she returned to her mother for a period of time to think it over.⁹ Eventually she went back to the Sault, which was overlaid on a place called Bow-e-ting, significant to the Anishinaabe people (the collective name for culturally and politically related tribes, including Ojibwe, Odawa, Potawatomi, Saulteax, and Algonquin) from time immemorial, the site of medicine society ceremonies and the home place of the Crane band of Ojibwes. Many of Ozhaawshkodewikwe’s family members lived in the village or in the vicinity, including two of her brothers, Waishkey and Keewyzi, and a sister, whose daughter Ogeewyahnoquotokwa was a member of the Midewiwin, the medicine society, and performed the shaking tent ceremony to divine the future.¹⁰ Two of Waabojiig’s sisters lived in the village. One, named Obemauunoqua, was married to another Irish trader, John Sayers.¹¹

Ozhaawshkodewikwe had eight children with John Johnston: Lewis, George, Jane, Eliza, Charlotte, Anna Maria, William, and John. All of them received Ojibwe names, which were given by an elder, who would have received the name from the spirits and maintained a relationship with the child.¹² Ozhaawshkodewikwe followed her relatives’ traditional round of activities: sugar-making in the late winter, fishing at the rapids in late summer. She was said to have produced 3,000 pounds of sugar in a typical season.¹³ She always attended the annual distribution of presents from the British Crown reaffirming its relationship with Indigenous nations, first at Drummond Island at the mouth of the St. Mary’s River, then, after the United States and the British changed their border in 1828, at Penetanguishene, at the eastern end of Georgian Bay. She raised a number of Indigenous children not her own, including a girl named Nancy whose father died in a duel, a boy named Tom Shaw, and another named Colin. Despite her husband’s piety, she remained uninterested in Christianity until after he died, when Ojibwe Methodist exhorters came to the Sault in the 1830s.

Like many Indigenous people whose lives are recorded in archives, she understood English but refused to speak it; her husband learned to speak Ojibwemowin. She inculcated in her children an attentiveness to the aesthetics of Ojibwemowin, and like her father she was said to have been a skilled storyteller, although she seems not to have been responsible for the principal story cycle of the culture hero Manabozho.¹⁴ Her children seem not to have known it until William came back from Leech Lake in the spring of 1834 with an almost complete version from a teller whose name is unknown.

Peculiarly for a fur trader, Johnston had a fascination for the stories told by Ojibwe people from the moment he first heard them through an interpreter at Shagwaamikong. In Ireland he’d read James Macpherson’s translations of Ossian, the ancient Scottish bard whose Highlanders must have seemed the figure of the Ojibwe warriors he encountered, Waabojiig not least of all. The Highlanders lived free and independent lives, Macpherson wrote, their language and customs pure; they were fond of military fame, and remarkably attached to the memory of their ancestors.¹⁵ Johnston heard living bards tell stories about heroes and their adventures, and inspired, he began to write them down. Unfortunately he soon discovered that his French-Canadian interpreters had been playing tricks on him; he threw his manuscripts into the fire.¹⁶

His family were seventeenth-century Scottish settlers in Ireland rewarded with a grant of land near the Giant’s Causeway for their loyalty to the English king, but in straitened circumstances after his father’s death when he was a boy.¹⁷ He sought his fortune in Canada in the 1790s with no idea what he would do; he ended up in the fur trade as a last resort. John Johnston was still a gentleman, however, for whom writing poetry was a social grace, who valued literature for its beauties and its moral instruction. A practiced writer of occasional verse and odes on writers he admired, like Samuel Johnson, and, before emigrating, on ladies who caught his eye, he kept a large library, if the account left by a British surveyor who dined with the Johnstons in the mid-1820s is anywhere near accurate.¹⁸ It included the full range of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English literature (Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Johnson, Goldsmith); numerous works of Protestant theology, including particularly the sermons of Hugh Blair; English history, popular poetry (Robert Burns was a favorite); moral works for children; and a selection of French literature. According to Schoolcraft, among contemporary writers John Johnston read Walter Scott, Washington Irving, and, interestingly, James Fenimore Cooper, as well as the poets Robert Southey, Thomas More, Thomas Campbell, and Lord Byron.¹⁹ The house would have been packed with books. He taught the children to read and write until Jane could take his place. Like other fur traders, he sent his sons to Montreal to study with, in his case, the available Protestant ministers (John was sent to New York after his father’s death). While Jane received no formal education after the aborted trip to Ireland, Eliza and Charlotte briefly attended school in Upper Canada after the war, and Anna Maria was later sent to a school in Massachusetts for a few years.

His children acquired his enthusiasm for literary play. George and Charlotte kept commonplace books; George rearranged famous poems to make new ones. Jane made up her own collection of poetry copied from the family library. After the war Jane, George, and their father made up two anthologies of Ojibwe literature, one of stories and the other of songs.²⁰ The stories included Jane’s versions of mythological traditions or aadizookaanag, and examples of dibaajimowinan, or stories about human beings or historical events—these were told to Johnston by his friend Gitche Gauzinee. Jane and George wrote down nagamonan, or songs in both Ojibwemowin and English.²¹ The collections also included Jane’s inventions based on Ojibwe songs and stories, something no other Indigenous person seems to have written down before she did. From this play Jane and her brother learned that the beauties of Ojibwemowin could be conveyed both in writing and in English.

Under Cass’s mentorship, Schoolcraft pursued a career as an Indian expert parallel to his duties as agent. He published accounts of his official travels in the West, newspaper articles on the prospects for missionizing the Indians, and long reviews of books he couldn’t have read because they were written in French. (Jane was fluent in French.) After Jane showed him the family’s writing, to further ingratiate himself with Cass he included stories from that collection as well as new ones in a manuscript newspaper that circulated in Sault Ste. Marie, Detroit, and possibly New York in the later 1820s. When Cass eventually abandoned his research for more straightforward political propaganda, Schoolcraft became fixated on producing a dictionary and grammar of Ojibwemowin, an endeavor for which he was entirely dependent on Jane, who worked on it, off and on, for the duration of their marriage. By the early 1830s he was conducting interviews and soliciting translations and various reports from Jane and her family, anticipating writing his own books on Indians.

He seems not to have understood how important the stories his wife and family had been writing down were until William returned from a winter trading at Leech Lake with a number of stories and other narratives, including a long account that he titled Story of Manahbosho. Schoolcraft couldn’t deny what Story of Manahbosho looked like: it was an epic, the story of a culture hero.²² The category may have had no meaning for Anishinaabe people, but to Schoolcraft it meant that Indigenous people were much more sophisticated than he had been prepared to accept. He tasked Jane, William, Charlotte, and later George with gathering what eventually became dozens of Ojibwe and Odawa mythological and historical stories. The family gave him the stories in English, always—despite his claims to expertise, he never learned to speak Ojibwemowin. He copied the stories over repeatedly, obsessively, and edited, taking out the obvious sexual and scatological references, inserting what were to his ear more pleasing names. After several years of collecting he published Algic Researches: Comprising Inquiries Respecting the Mental Characteristics of the North American Indians (New York: 1839), listing Jane and her family as informants and giving the impression that he’d written everything himself.²³ This was not true. Though he added notes, comments, prefatory remarks, afterwords, and sometimes his own poems—those mainly to stories written by Jane—he didn’t change the substance of the stories that were handed to him, or much of the writer’s original language. Despite his literary affectations, Schoolcraft thought himself primarily a scientist with an obligation to fact, and the stories as written were fact.

The facts were disturbing, if you were Henry Schoolcraft. The stories revealed that Indians were ruled by a doctrine of metamorphosis, he wrote in the book’s Preliminary Observations. Indians lived surrounded by thousands of spirits—their Great Spirit was no supreme being, but one spirit among many. Spirits could take any shape.²⁴ They infused the landscape, in places and natural things, and they

"[presided]

over daily affairs and over the destinies of men."²⁵ Even animals were endowed with reasoning powers and faculties.… They endow birds, and bears, and all other animals with souls, which … will be encountered in other shapes in another state of existence.²⁶ These were the actual opinions of the natives, he wrote, and furthermore although they weren’t limited to this function, the stories were also the means of educating children in the Indians’ moral, mechanical, and religious knowledge.²⁷ Jane told him that, certainly. Another reality coexisted with the United States itself, heretofore unknown. Ultimately no matter how charming the stories might appear to be, they demonstrated that Indians were sunk in demonology, witchcraft, and necromancy.²⁸ Something had to be done about it.

He was both greedy for the authority that he imagined this knowledge gave him and worried about what he thought it meant. He hoped that once the stories’ horrors had been widely perceived by the American public, the Protestant missionaries who seemed to be abandoning their posts in the Upper Northwest would recover their resolve and return to stamp them out.²⁹ Close to the publication of Algic Researches he had another idea. A few weeks after receiving Corn Story, he wrote to tell Jane about how important his book would be to the development of American literature. I am of opinion, wrote he, feeling quite impressed with his new plan, that American literature must be based on the mythology of the Indians. That of Greece & Rome is exhausted.… All our poetic associations—all our ideas of poetic justice must be directed to the Indian tribes, who once occupied the continent. They will become to us what the Celts & Britons are to England. And as we have no architectural ruins in our landscape, we must take the Indian Character for our fallen columns and our encrusted medals.³⁰

He wished to destroy the stories as practiced, as living things ensuring the future of Anishinaabe people, and to incorporate them into American literature as Americans incorporated Indigenous land into the United States. For this he needed them written down. He would publish more books, traditions & history, language, superstitions & antiquities, he continued in his letter to Jane. It was her responsibility to see this work through. "I … trust that all the literary leisure you can command, or further, which providence gives you, from a shattered and weakened constitution, will be devoted to enrich and encrease

[

sic

]

my stock of materials & my means of correct judgment upon this all," he wrote.³¹ What Jane knew was like the supply of copper in the ground or whitefish in the rapids, endless. But the stories stopped when she died in May 1842; none of the others wrote stories for him after that.

Nothing else like the collection of stories written by the Johnstons exists for the period or by early Indigenous writers in North America. In addition to the family anthologies after 1815, the manuscript newspaper in the 1820s, then Algic Researches in 1839, several more stories appeared in a short-lived periodical Schoolcraft published in the 1840s (the periodical was later published as a book). He reprinted a few stories in his multivolume government-sponsored compendium Historical and Statistical Information on the Indian Tribes of the United States in the 1850s. Much to Schoolcraft’s delight, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow raided Algic Researches for his narrative poem Hiawatha (1855), taking numerous stories (many of them written by William) and even the central character from it, although he found Manabozho insufficiently sonorous and went with the name of the Haudenosaunee culture hero instead. The stories then circulated, individually and collectively, in numerous revisions, rewritings, and reprintings, beginning with Schoolcraft’s The Myth of Hiawatha (1856) (a revision of Algic Researches) and his friend Cornelius Mathews’s The Indian Fairy Book: From the Original Legends (1856) (a more Indian rewriting of the same). The stories appeared in works of folklore and children’s literature through the early twentieth century and beyond.³²

The collection includes thirty-three stories by identifiable writers and sixteen so far unattributed. William wrote thirteen stories, Jane twelve, George four, Charlotte two, and Mary Holiday and Eleanor Bailly, friends of the family who were also the children of Indigenous mothers (respectively, Ojibwe and Odawa) and fur trader fathers, wrote one each. They wrote during a time of upheaval for Indigenous people in the Lake Superior region as the fur trade declined and the Americans began asserting themselves. For the Ojibwes and Odawas in northern Michigan and the eastern Upper Peninsula, that trauma was compounded by the 1836 Treaty of Washington, orchestrated by Schoolcraft for Cass, then secretary of war, through which the United States acquired land in exchange for annuities and hunting and fishing rights. Although they were eventually successful at resisting it (and lost much of their land in the effort), the threat of expulsion from their land hung over all of the bands in the region.³³ In the midst of these ongoing struggles, people agreed to let their relatives write down their stories. While their reasons for doing so were not recorded, the fact that the Johnstons were also related to the Indian agent and that, by the 1830s, the request for the story was ultimately coming from the agent himself could not have been far from anyone’s mind.

It was uncommon for Indigenous writers to write down traditional narratives before the end of the nineteenth century. From the late eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth, Indigenous writers like Samson Occom (Mohegan), William Apess (Pequot), and Elias Boudinot (Cherokee) produced religious, political, and historical works arguing for equality and sovereignty against the United States’ drive to expel tribal nations west of the Mississippi. One exception was David Cusick, a Tuscarora writer who published Sketches of Ancient History of the Six Nations in 1827. Cusick organized traditional narratives of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy (Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora) into a three-part history that in form echoed Americans’ own histories: first a creation story, then a history of the Indigenous settlement of North America, then a history of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy’s formation. All of this happened hundreds of years before Columbus, Cusick repeatedly pointed out, in the process making the same argument for tribal sovereignty as other Indigenous writers at a time when land speculators were running rampant in western New York in the wake of the Erie Canal. He reprinted his book with his own woodcuts in 1828—it was sold to tourists at Niagara Falls—and it’s possible that the Johnston family’s writers read it themselves.³⁴

The Johnstons wrote the stories as literature rather than history, probably reflecting both parents’ influence and their own prior writing. While Schoolcraft was only trying to humor Jane in the moment that they wanted the same things, she and her family actually were trying to convey the intellect and fancy of Anishinaabe narrative, and Anishinaabe people, in their writing, even if it was in English. They had learned from their father that literature had aesthetic and moral dimensions through which they could show the humanity of Indigenous people. Their initial model was short fiction of the type found in periodicals and anthologies at the time; Jane especially sought out suitable forms in which to represent the stories, including allegory, origin story, and moral fairy tale. After receiving the Manabozho story, William wrote what can be read as adventure stories, including a number told by Wauchusco, an Odawa healer and Presbyterian convert living at Mackinac, who told William both mythological and historical stories.

While after her death Schoolcraft reported that Jane wrote her earlier stories from memory, it appears that especially in the case of the stories written down in the 1830s and early 1840s, all of the writers took down stories from tellers who knew what the Johnstons and Schoolcraft were doing. A pencil draft of one of Jane’s late stories shows her writing quickly, in partial sentences, as if listening to someone talk.³⁵ Charlotte asked a man named Little Salt to tell two stories in particular, which he did in a setting where he spoke, Charlotte translated, and her husband wrote the story down.³⁶ Wauchusco told William multiple stories that are so long and complex, it is difficult to believe that he could have produced an account without at least having taken notes. It seems likely that the tellers would have thought about what stories could be made accessible to outsiders and balanced the desire to protect traditional knowledge against a desire to tell white people who they were, if white people were so interested. They had good stories to tell.

Not everyone at the time may have agreed with the tellers’ decisions to speak. Protecting knowledge has been a concern for Indigenous people throughout the history of colonization and settlement to the present day.³⁷ They could choose not to speak or to manage what information they did give in order to protect it. In The Lenape and Their Legends (1885), the ethnologist Daniel Garrison Brinton (a late protégé of Schoolcraft’s) lamented that Shawnees living on the Quapaw Reservation in Indian Territory refused to allow him to hear and write down a long, probably mythical and historical, chant that they recited annually because, they told him,

"[repeating]

it to a white man would bring disasters on their nation."³⁸ Some Ojibwe tribal leaders refused to acknowledge that pictographs even existed when Schoolcraft started soliciting information on them in the later 1840s.³⁹ The teller of Story of Manahbosho (or William, or both of them) reversed a key sequence in the narrative (it differs from subsequent narrators’ versions collected by anthropologists) and denied any knowledge of Manabozho’s life before the point where their version of the story began.⁴⁰ It’s also possible that tellers or writers or both wished to preserve the stories for future Anishinaabe readers—another concern on the part of Indigenous tellers and writers that emerges in the nineteenth century.⁴¹

Understanding Schoolcraft to have been the writer, scholars have in the past dismissed the stories as they were published in Algic Researches as inauthentic because of their literary qualities.⁴² But compared with versions taken down by Canadian, US, and Indigenous anthropologists, folklorists, and historians, all of the writers represented the common plots, figures, and relationships in the stories they wrote.⁴³ Like David Cusick, the Johnston writers chose suitable forms through which to represent traditional narratives to a white audience that could be presumed to be skeptical of if not hostile to the idea of Indigenous humanity. The written narratives are a representation of traditional knowledge, taken out of its dynamic community setting; their content was interpretable by Anishinaabe readers who knew what they were looking at, but something entirely unknown to white readers. The Johnston writers didn’t explain to those readers who the figures in the stories were or what the stories meant to Anishinaabe people, or even apparently to Schoolcraft himself. Revealing secret knowledge was not the point. For the white readers of the Johnstons’ stories, their form and the literary style in which they were written made the content not necessarily interpretable but recognizable. The stories were beautiful or charming or fantastic, like stories told by other people, including white people.

In light of how Indigenous people were represented, that made the stories subversive just by having been written down. Indians, according to Schoolcraft in Algic Researches and the vast majority of westerners at the time, existed so completely in the hunter state as to have no relish for any other kind of labour, looking with an inward and deep contempt on the arts of husbandry and mechanics. Their rejection of regular labor meant that they had little knowledge of numbers, and none of letters, and they therefore failed in comprehensive views, deep reaching foresight, and powers of generalization.⁴⁴ Indians were incapable of reason, acting only on the basis of manners and customs; they could have no history, no political society, no art. They merely roamed over the landscape, entirely unattached to it.

These ideas about Indians—about savages—were necessary to Western capitalist societies. Capitalism’s power came from its continuous incorporation of frontiers and their resources, and in order to justify taking those frontiers, Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore write, capitalists posited as an organizing principle a conceptual dichotomy between Nature and Society (that dichotomy wasn’t new, they point out, but the fact that it had become an organizing principle was). Capitalists imagined Nature as an empty space of resources waiting to be exploited and themselves as the only Society fit to do that exploiting. Everyone other than themselves was on the Nature side of the divide, little more than animals, like machines, unthinking potential resources, naturally without political status and rightfully exploitable.⁴⁵ Capitalists emptied the natural world of its owners, its stories, its histories, and its consciousnesses, the other-than-human persons integral to Indigenous life. They claimed all the consciousness for themselves—only they thought, or loved, or had free will.

The Johnstons’ stories represented proliferating consciousnesses in the form of the spirits in a radically different but contemporaneous reality, where the natural and the supernatural were interwoven, as Blackfeet scholar Roslyn LaPier writes.⁴⁶ The relation of human beings to the natural and spirit world was also recognizable to white readers even if the story and the figures in it were unfamiliar. Schoolcraft readily perceived that Anishinaabe spirits violated Christian notions of bodily integrity and the superiority of human beings to the rest of creation. The spirits and the stories that they inhabited were also a problem for a capitalist society whether or not Schoolcraft was fully conscious of that to which he was reacting. They were evidence of Indigenous identification with the land, their knowledge about it, and their claim on it. Schoolcraft also understood because Jane told him that the stories were the lifeblood of the people, the means of their continuity as Anishinaabe. The connection between the people and the land had to be broken—hence Schoolcraft’s desire for missionaries to destroy the stories on the one hand and for American literature to incorporate them on the other.

The Johnston writers made recognizable to white readers the humanity of Anishinaabe people in the art and morality of Anishinaabe narrative but also in the depiction of the different reality that the people inhabited, which was as beautiful and compelling as the Anishinaabe language itself. Schoolcraft so fully depended on what Jane and his relatives told him and was so used to writing down the facts they reported to him or copying over what they had given him that he persistently recorded their ideas in his published work. Just as persistently he would backtrack and try to deny the point in the same piece, as if he’d belatedly realized what he’d done to validate it. Sometimes he observed that the stories recalled Ovid’s Metamorphoses (a disreputable book in the period for its transformations of humans to animals, but classical nonetheless), and often they recalled The Arabian Nights (also largely disreputable in the period for its magic and subject to the same kind of ethnographic cleansing to which Schoolcraft subjected Indigenous stories but still widely popular).⁴⁷ Sometimes the stories and what Jane and the family had to say about them left him—and others—carried away, and they struggled to recover themselves.

Americans had one story about Indians that they told, over and over again. The story was that a fight to the death raged between savagery and civilization, in the present moment and all around, in every way. It was a conflict in which civilization must and would prevail, even if it was ever ongoing.⁴⁸ An expression of the Nature/Society split, the story became a prominent feature of US discourse by the late eighteenth century. In part it adapted Scottish Enlightenment historiography that posited four stages through which human societies progressed (or didn’t): hunting and gathering; pastoral or nomadic; agricultural; and, finally, mercantile, from the most primitive to the most advanced.⁴⁹ The story’s adaptation of that history read the existence of Indigenous people in North America as a usurping of that order that had to be righted, where the beginning and the end were locked in a battle for the future. By the time Schoolcraft turned up at Sault Ste. Marie to study the locals the better to manage their demise, the story of savagery and civilization permeated US society; it was the frame through which he and most other Americans understood themselves and the world in which they lived.

The story was about who was virtuous and who wasn’t, who owned land and who could have no claim to it, who was a human being and who was not. The story may be understood as a founding myth of white supremacy in the United States: it wasn’t only Indigenous people who were savages. Robert Parkinson, a historian, has recently documented American revolutionary leaders’ conscious and widespread deployment of the story, featuring Indigenous people but also enslaved African Americans and Hessian foreigners, as a means of maintaining support for their rebellion after 1775.⁵⁰ The story is enshrined in the climax of the Declaration of Independence’s litany of George III’s crimes against civilized society: he has … endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.⁵¹ You had to kill the savage before he killed you.

The story had evolved by the early nineteenth century, picking up important details along the way. In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Ireland—a test ground for the expansion of capitalist markets and further English imperial ventures—English colonists at first followed international law and either leased land from Irish owners or claimed it through military conquest; when the Irish landowners resisted their encroachment, in addition to introducing more violent means of control the English began to justify their dispossession of Indigenous inhabitants by arguing that the Irish were savages who didn’t use the land properly.⁵² Although the idea that unoccupied land could be taken if it wasn’t being used properly was not unheard of at the time, the innovation that English capitalists introduced was to argue that any land, occupied or not, that wasn’t being improved in the sense of being used to participate in the market and produce a profit, was waste and could be taken by someone who would make it profitable. In this way, these early capitalists argued, they weren’t taking land from people but rather giving something back to the community by making the land productive.⁵³

The argument about improvement denied other ways of claiming land, by commoners in the English countryside, the Irish in Ireland, and North American Indigenous people.⁵⁴ While the customary land use rights of English commoners are not equivalent to Anshinaabe stories, they do perform a similar function with respect to establishing history on and claims to land. The idea that savages didn’t improve the land—as Schoolcraft wrote in 1839, Indians existed so completely in the hunter state as to have no relish for any other kind of labour—was essential to the process of redefining property rights in favor of capitalist expansion in North America as in Ireland.⁵⁵ The process was given an early theoretical treatment in John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government (1690), which explicitly brought Indigenous North Americans into capitalism’s effort to redefine property rights by using them as the model for savages in the state of nature.⁵⁶ Locke was well versed in colonial affairs as secretary to Lord Shaftesbury and the lords proprietor of the Carolina colony, in which capacity he’d written the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina in 1669. He amassed a collection of books on the topics of America and colonization, regularly questioned English settlers about their experiences, and wrote on the theory and administration of the North American colonies.⁵⁷ In his theory of property he defined the savage state as that which preceded both the ownership of land and the existence of government, establishing that savages could have no claim on the land by definition.

In the beginning, Locke famously wrote, all the world was America, a state of nature unimproved by regular labor and thus an empty waste. The wild Indian lived the state of nature, where the products of the spontaneous hand of Nature—a phrase associated forever afterward with Indigenous people in North America—were possessed in common by all. Natural man had a property in whatever he could take from the spontaneous hand of Nature in order to subsist; natural law held that he could take as long as there is enough, and as good left in common for others.⁵⁸ Once proto-civilized man decided to cultivate the soil through regular labor to produce a surplus for market, he needed to protect the land he worked through positive laws that established ownership. This required government to administer laws, which were formed when property owners consented to be governed. Consent for enclosure of commonly held land was not required, Locke reasoned, first, because God "commanded

[man]

to subdue the Earth, i.e., improve it for the benefit of Life, and, second, because there was still enough, and as good left." Those who protested his reasoning disputed God’s will.⁵⁹

Locke told a story about capitalists acting in everyone’s best interests. He insisted that natural men would not be adversely affected by the taking of their land because if they had been affected, he would have had to find some means of incorporating their consent into his theory.⁶⁰ Luckily, theoretical Indians didn’t desire to engage in commercial agriculture, they didn’t own land, and they didn’t form governments. The spontaneous productions of Nature were all that theoretical Indians wanted or needed; they chased animals through the woods or ate whatever fell off the trees and knocked them on the head, perfectly satisfied.

Locke’s theory didn’t have much practical effect in North America for about a hundred years. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, English settlers bought land from Indigenous people or claimed it as a result of war. They made treaties with Indian nations to secure land but more often to establish political and diplomatic relations during a time of ongoing power struggles within and between colonies and among European and Indigenous nations.⁶¹ At the conclusion of the Seven Years War, Britain attempted to control American settlers’ encroachment on Indigenous land through the Royal Proclamation of 1763, which established the Crown as the sole authority for treating with Indigenous nations, outlawed land speculation, and set a boundary between the colonies and the Indigenous nations of the West that colonists were not to cross. It became one of the precipitators of the revolution.⁶² Immediately after the revolution Americans tried to assert their authority over Indigenous nations by claiming that the British surrender had automatically transferred title to Indigenous land to the US government. This initial belligerence didn’t work, mainly because the United States had neither the money nor the military power to enforce their claims, and so a new policy was instituted, based on the recognition of Indigenous ownership and sovereignty in both previously made treaties (the United States claimed authority as successor to Britain) and newly made treaties with Indigenous nations.

The fact that the legitimacy of the US government itself was at stake in the early years of its existence reinforced the significance of the treaties. Secretary of War Henry Knox outlined the issue in his report to the first Congress, in 1789, in which he argued that Indians’ land could not be taken from them unless by their free consent, or by the right of conquest in the case of a just war. Any other means of dispossessing them of their land (through subterfuge, for example) would be a gross violation of the fundamental law of nature, and of that distributive justice which is the glory of a nation. While Knox conceded that the United States didn’t have the capacity to advance a conquest of Indigenous nations, he argued that it wouldn’t engage in aggressive empire-building anyway because the blood and injustice of a system of coercion and oppression … would stain the character of the nation … beyond all pecuniary calculation. Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and George Washington, all of whom speculated in Indigenous land, made the same argument.⁶³ The United States bought Indian land through treaties to which Indians freely consented, they said, because of its high moral and political ideals, which stood in heroic contrast to British tyranny. The obligations of policy, humanity, and justice, together with that respect every nation sacredly owes its own reputation, united in requiring a noble, liberal, and disinterested administration of Indian affairs, Knox concluded with a flourish.⁶⁴

Treaties complicated capitalist expansion in the United States. They are contracts, and contracts with inferiors aren’t valid, and thus Indians couldn’t be inferiors; since contracts required the free will of the parties involved, Indians exercised free will.⁶⁵ If consent was required for a treaty to be legitimate, refusal to consent was implied. Locke dispensed with the consent of theoretical Indians by claiming that they would be unaffected by losing their land, but the Americans hung their legitimacy on that consent because they had no other good option at the time. To put this in terms of the Nature/Society split, treaties conceded that Indigenous people lived in the same Society (and at the same time) as property-owning capitalists; Americans needed to send them back to Nature—and the past—in order to erase their political status and claim supremacy over the land for themselves. The threat to Americans was that Indigenous nations would adapt to the US presence while maintaining their political autonomy and control of land. In response to the threat, Americans simultaneously claimed superior moral virtue for themselves, did everything they could to undermine Indigenous consent, and insisted on the inherent savagery of Indians.

Continually protesting their own beneficent intentions, US officials worked hard to break down Indigenous polities in order to coerce Indigenous people into selling land—they thought about it, tried different strategies, and gave each other advice on the topic.⁶⁶ Their methods included entrapping Indigenous people in debt to fur-trading houses so that they would sell land to pay it off and redefining legal relations with Indian nations in state and federal courts.⁶⁷ Americans applied the threat of violence, if not violence itself, whenever they had the means and opportunity.⁶⁸ And they told, in every conceivable setting, ad infinitum, the heroic story of civilization’s conflict with savagery, which by the end of the eighteenth century incorporated the Lockean conceptions of property and the origin of government that denied the existence of Indigenous political society in the first instance. The story told Americans that what they were doing—anything they did—was natural and right.

That the savage story exemplifies the Nature/Society split, defining Indigenous people as animals and the land as a resource rightfully owned and exploited by white men, can be seen in the writing of a man named Hugh Henry Brackenridge, a Presbyterian minister who served as George Washington’s chaplain during the revolution. Brackenridge brought Locke’s theorizing to the late eighteenth-century North American frontier, reprinting one article setting out his argument against the Indian right of the soil over thirty years as a newspaper publisher, lawyer, and judge. He even wrote a poem about it. Indians were animals, he wrote in Thoughts on Indian Treaties, comparing them to foxes, ducks, geese, cows, raccoons, otters, and dogs. Talk of their rights was absurd. He denounced philosophers … ignorant as bears who talk like girls that read romances … about the goodness of a savage / And how ’tis us excite to ravage and eastern block-heads who talk of simple human nature / And think a savage a good creature. General Knox should leave off Indians and only stick to war. "Were it with me to manage these

[Indians],"

Brackenridge wrote,

Instead of ever making peace,

Would kill them every mother’s son

Because the work is then well done

And there’s an end of blood and burning,

And parents for their offspring mourning,

The devils gone where they should dwell,

In some very hottest place of hell.⁶⁹

Brackenridge made his case one last time in his book Law Miscellanies: An Introduction to the Study of Law (Philadelphia, 1815).⁷⁰ It was plain that man was superior to the animals, Brackenridge began, because he had "the power to subdue them, and this evidence is sufficient for power gives dominion, and is the ultima ratio of it.⁷¹ Superior men naturally dominated inferior ones, and superior men were obviously such as cultivate the earth; because it is ameliorated or made more productive by the skill and labour of such. After all, God commanded man to be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth, and subdue it, and in this He could only have meant regular labor in commercial agriculture, since that was the most efficient way of being fruitful and multiplying.⁷² Savages refused regular labor; without regular labor the powers of genius are inactive, the arts and sciences remain unknown, and man continues to be an animal differing in nothing but in shape from the beasts of prey that roam upon the mountain. Savages were therefore not human; for it is abhorrent from the way of life which God and nature points out as the life of man."⁷³

Savages impeded white men from doing what God commanded. They were immoral. All of the preceding being the case, the entire continent of North America may … on the first discovery of the coast, by any civilized European nation, be considered as, the greater part of it, a vacant country and liable to become the property of those who should take the trouble to possess it.⁷⁴

For most of his life (he died in 1816) Brackenridge was an enraged westerner shouting at other enraged westerners, but as the years went by a wider range of people accepted the ideas he espoused because Americans’ desire for land was unceasing and Indigenous people kept resisting. By 1823, when the US Supreme Court ruled in Johnson v. McIntosh that Europeans had full title to and ownership of all of North America from the moment they laid eyes on it because they were Christians and Indians were not, arguments of the type Brackenridge employed had done their work of normalizing what had once been absurd.⁷⁵ By the 1830s many politicians and intellectuals represented treaties as mainly proof of Americans’ disinterested benevolence: they bought the land because they cared about the poor savages crippled by their inability to live in the modern world. Even the chief justice of the Supreme Court was known to drop a tear or two. Americans didn’t have the ability to subdue all the Indigenous people that they wanted to in the early nineteenth century, but what they did have in their own minds was the authority to do whatever they needed to do to get what they wanted because morally the land was already theirs. Their job was to wrest it away from usurping savages.

The story of savagery and civilization taught Americans how to think about Indigenous people but also about themselves. It was personal. If every Indian was the embodiment of savagery, every white person was the embodiment of civilization and furthermore doing God’s work. Indians who resisted, who behaved as if they were sovereign, not only disobeyed God’s commands; they were a grievous insult to Americans’ own moral virtue. Americans were deeply fearful of Indians. Fear of tomahawks and scalping knives hid a more profound fear. As the Declaration of Independence had it, savages wanted to violate your women and murder your children; they wanted to destroy your future, which was the future of civilization itself. It’s no wonder that fear of savages left some Americans unhinged; the story they told about themselves promised an epic battle between good and evil, a potential resolution of which would always be their own annihilation.⁷⁶

When the Americans arrived in the Lake Superior region like their European predecessors, they wanted to know whether or not Manabozho was Christian (not especially) and where the copper was (most people weren’t saying). The extent of what Indigenous people knew and thought about was shocking to those who inquired. Early in his study of Ojibwemowin, Schoolcraft breathlessly wrote to Cass that these Indians might have as many as a thousand words.⁷⁷ The stories were a complete surprise. The Americans sought to alienate that knowledge from Indigenous humanity because capitalism required them to take possession of the land by emptying it of Indigenous meaning. It required them to dehumanize Indigenous people and turn them into savages. This was Schoolcraft’s job, even his purpose in life as he saw it. Publishing books and making treaties were of a piece. Eventually he decided that Jane and her family were savages too.

Anishinaabe scholars have turned to stories about the cannibal monster Windigo to think about how communities are confronted with and manage both internal and external threats.⁷⁸ Traditionally a Windigo was a giant, male or female, emaciated, decaying, and always hungry, that ripped its victims to pieces as it devoured them. The more it ate, the hungrier it got.⁷⁹ Windigos literally and figuratively suck the life out of people to satisfy their own appetites, Anishinaabe legal scholar John Borrows writes. In the present, they might even consume entire environments through their greed, lust, and desire for money, power, or prestige.⁸⁰ Eating up Indigenous land required eating up Indigenous knowledge. Schoolcraft wanted to snatch the thoughts right out of Indigenous skulls. He acted like a Windigo, never satisfied, always wanting more, taking everything he could get.

The children of Ozhaawshkodewikwe and John Johnston didn’t know what they faced at the beginning. When Schoolcraft appeared Jane and her family treated him like any of the other white people who wanted them to explain their relatives; they humored him and gave him charming stories. After some time it seemed that their charming stories might convince Americans that their relatives were human beings, not savages, and they wrote more. Then Schoolcraft began to insist that the stories were evil and that God willed that the savages must die. He was difficult to manage, to say the least. They ignored him when possible, manipulated him when they saw an opening, placated him when necessary. They kept writing. The stories got more strange, more full of majic. They kept on saying what he didn’t want to hear and writing what he didn’t want to know. In the end they weren’t writing for him at all.

PART I

Chapter 1

This Vain and Transitory World

In the summer of 1814, after having surrendered Mackinac Island two years previously, the Americans returned, although they at first went looking for the British fur trade depot in Georgian Bay, several hundred miles to the east. This gave Lt. Col. Robert McDouall, the commander at Mackinac, time to call for help, and for the second time John Johnston armed a party of his workers. He, Jane, and the rest made their way down the St. Mary’s River, luckily by a seldom-used route, because by the time they left, the Americans had returned from Georgian Bay and sent their men to the Sault to attack the trade outposts on both sides of the river.¹ Ozhaawshkodewikwe and the children, and everyone else in the village except for George and John Holiday, the Johnstons’ clerk, fled to the woods, warned by Ojibwes who’d escaped the Americans. They took George and Holiday prisoner and plundered the family home and storehouses, taking even the women’s and children’s clothes that they found, then trashed the villagers’ gardens, killed their horses and cattle, and burned what was left.² When the expedition returned to Mackinac on 26 July, the Americans had five ships, ten gunboats, 400 sailors, and about a thousand troops, both regular and militia, to begin their assault. About ninety British soldiers, fifty militia, and fifty Indigenous warriors waited on the island in two forts, one on a cliff overlooking the village harbor on the south