This map outlines the migrations of the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians. Click on the image to enlarge it.[/caption]Above is my best visual representation of the Stockbridge Mohicans' "Trail of Tears," and the only reason that I put that in quotation marks is because the phrase has long been associated with removals of the southeastern Native nations. If you've read my book, Proud and Determined, you already know that the people now known as the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians endured many, many years of hard times. And their migrations were an essential part of those hard times.
Many of the migrations don't have an exact date, instead, they happened over a range of years. Below is a summary of the Trail of Tears of the Stockbridge Mohicans:
The tribe started leaving Massachusetts in 1785 and that move was two-thirds complete by 1787. They made a treaty with the Menominees and Ho-Chunk (sometimes known as the Winnebago Indians) in 1821 and another one in 1822 (which will be the subject of an upcoming blogpost). One band, led by John Metoxen, left New Stockbridge, New York in 1818, but, by the time they reached their destination, Indiana's White River, they were told that the land had been sold by the Delaware, Miami and other tribes.
Although the Metoxen band did their best to establish farms on the White River for about four years, they could not stay and in 1822 they headed up to Detroit. There they met up with about twenty of their tribesmen who had taken a steamship, the Walk-in-the-Water, from Buffalo. This larger band landed in Green Bay and made their way up the Fox River, settling Statesburg, which is now the south part of Kaukauna, Wisconsin. The long migration had really only started in 1822. Several bands made their own separate moves from New Stockbridge, New York to Statesburg between 1822 and 1829.
The treaties that were made in 1821 and 1822 were not well-thought-out and, understandably, the Menominee Indians put up a protest against them. For quite a few years the United States tried to get the Menominees and the New York Indians to make some kind of agreement or compromise regarding the two sloppily created treaties. The end result was that the Stockbridges had to move again. Their next home was on the east shore of Lake Winnebago, not particularly far south of Statesburg.
The move from Statesburg to their next settlement, known as Stockbridge, Wisconsin was made in 1834 and 1835. A number of sources will confirm this, the one that I have to share with you now is from the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, or ABCFM, the ABCFM received very detailed reports from Rev. Cutting Marsh, several times a year (we get the ABCFM's report here via Roger Nichols' biography of Rev. Cutting Marsh).
It goes without saying that each time Indians were told that they would have to move it was a disincentive for clearing land for farming. Unfortunately, in this brief summary, there is little space to go into any detail other than the "wheres" and "whens" of each move.
Something I intentionally left out of the map was the 1839 departure of less than one hundred Indians from Stockbridge, Wisconsin to what is now Kansas. This "Emmigrant Party," was made up of members of the Hendrick family, the Konkapot family and the Brotherton Delawares, a group of Natives who sold their reservation in New Jersey and moved to New Stockbridge, New York in 1802 (or, possibly 1803).
Two townships were purchased from the Menominees and those two twonships became the Stockbridge Mohicans' reservation per an 1856 treaty. The Citizen Party began moving to the Shawano County Reservation within months of having thedetails worked out. On the other hand, many of the Indian Party Stockbridges protested the tereaty of 1856, some of them not moving until 1860. In fact, given that the soil of the new reservation was poor for farming, many Indians would be "absentees" from the rez for many years.
Arguably, the tribe still had more moving to do. But, for the sake of simplicity, I'll just say that the current reservation of the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians exists on the same two townships in Shawano County that the Citizen Party started moving to in 1856.
My thanks to Bart Putzer from Bart Putzer Design, for creating the graphics for the map in this post.
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April 17, 2014 - Note: I want to acknowledge here that the Stockbridge-Munsee Historical Committee has their own map - which I have seen but didn't use as a source. (They also used the title "....Trail of Tears.") If their map shows the same places, routes and dates (and I really don't know if it does or not), it only means that my research agrees with theirs.
[…] 2. A Map of the Stockbridge Mohicans’ “Trail of Tears” […]
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