Little Turtle and Austin E. Quinney: Native Dairy Pioneers Whose Cows were Killed

Little Turtle was a great war chief for the Miami Indians. After beating the rather small and unorganized armies of the United States twice in the 1790's, he became a leader of his people in peace. As a result, Little Turtle had the opportunity to do some traveling and meet some famous white Americans. In fact, George Washington took a liking to the Miami chief and invited him to stay at his house over the winter of 1796-1797. Other friends encouraged Little Turtle to move to Philadelphia permanently. However, Turtle knew he did not have a skillset that he could use to make a living in the city, so he returned to his own people.


This artist's rendering of Little Turtle is historically correct in that he wore a bear claw necklace and George Washington gave him a large medal that had his own likeness engraved on one side and Little Turtle's on the other.

But when he returned, Little Turtle wasn't the same old Indian that he'd been before. Not all the changes can be touched on here, but one thing that is important is that Little Turtle developed such a taste for milk that he brought a cow back with him to Indian Country. He even got his wife to make butter!

These kinds of anecdotes can be amusing to us in the 21st century. But serious historical analysis takes it farther.  In "Three Men from Three Rivers" (a chapter out of The Boundaries Between Us), Donald Graff writes about how frontier whites and Indians managed to slide between the two racial identities. Graff observed that cow ownership was a prime example of Little Turtle's "Americanization":

[H]is first cow, a flagrantly Euro-American symbol, was maliciously killed. Publicly, Little Turtle expressed a belief that the cow had been diseased, but the message sent by its death was as clear then as it is today.

Not all of Little Turtle's tribesmen agreed that peace was the way to go. Not all of them were proud of the fact that he had been "pal-ing around" with people like George Washington. And so they made a political statement by killing his cow. As a chief, Little Turtle knew his power was based on his approval rating, so he let it go. He wasn't going to be baited. Making a stink over what had happened could lead to other arguments that might ultimately strip him of whatever political power he still had with his own people.

Fast forward to Stockbridge, Wisconsin Territory in 1838. A similar thing happened to Austin E. Quinney's cow. This is from my own book, Proud and Determined:

When one of Austin E. Quinney's cows died, he alleged that it was killed "in a clandestine manner" by Thomas Hendrick. Witnesses were called and the case proceeded according to the new [tribal] constitution. It could not have seemed fair to Hendrick that one of the judges was the plaintiff's cousin, John W. Quinney. He and the other judge ruled in favor of Austin E. Quinney.

So the shoe was on the other foot. Not only were the "civilized" Stockbridge Mohicans in favor of adopting the agricultural practices of white Americans, but their leaders were willing and able to protect livestock with a written constitution and a court system that was similar to that of the whites. As I mentioned in my previous post, Thomas Hendrick - the one who allegedly killed Quinney's cow - was a leader of the more tradional Emigrant Party Stockbridges. They made use of the treaty of 1839 to leave the tribe and move to the Delaware Tract in present-day Kansas.

Sadly (but unavoidably, it seems) the Quinneys and other more "civilized" Indians were glad to see them go.



 
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