Jeff Siemers Will Speak at the Oshkosh Public Library

I - Jeff Siemers - will be speaking about my historical research at the Oshkosh Public Lbirary on April 3rd at 6:30 pm.

Hope to see you there!

Joseph Smith and the Legend of the Golden Bible

The Town Hall of Palmyra, New York, Joseph Smith's hometown.

One of the great nuggets of history recorded by Electa Jones (published in 1854) was a statement made by Captain Hendrick Aupaumut (1757-1830) that the Mohican Indians - at one time - had their own Holy Book or Indian Bible. But, according to Captain Hendrick, the people became less civilized and lost their ability to read it. And so this Holy Book was "buried with a chief."

A similar legend had been recorded in 1823 by Ethan Smith, the pastor of a church in Poultney, Vermont. Smith reported a legend that came from an Indian chief who claimed that the Indians

had... a book which they had for a long time preserved. But having lost the knowledge of reading it, they concluded it would be of no further use to them; and they buried it with an Indian chief" (quoted by Lynn Glaser, Indians or Jews, 69).

Lynn Glaser's research shows that Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, knew of that particular legend.


This painting was by an unknown painter, circa 1842. The original is owned by the Community of Christ archives. It is on display at the Community of Christ headquarters in Independence Missouri. The painting was originally in the possession of Joseph Smith III (died 1914).

In his youth, Joseph Smith had a fascination with digging for artifacts. He, like other whites in western New York State, was something of an amateur antiquarian. Smith and many others were keenly interested in the many mounds in the area. Unfortunately, there wasn't any awareness back then of how disrespectful it was to mutilate or violate burial grounds - which is, of course, what the mounds were.

Anyway, the Mormon religion is based on their Holy Book, the Book of Mormon. Where did the Book of Mormon come from?

Well, if you believe Joseph Smith, he found golden plates with "Reformed Egyptian" characters on them and he was given the power to "translate" those characters. If you aren't a Mormon, it appears to be an incredible story. According to No Man Knows My History, Fawn Brodie's biography of Joseph Smith, many versions of the story of how Smith found his golden plates circulated in Palmyra, New York, his hometown. (By the way, Palmyra was about ninety miles west of New Stockbridge, home of the Mohicans from the 1780's to the 1820's.)

At least one of the accounts has Smith bringing something home and telling his family (but not showing them) that it was the golden plates. The whole family was familiar with the Indian legend of the "golden Bible" and, to some extent, this was their basis for believing Joseph's claim (Brody, page 37).

So the Indian legend that was recorded by a pastor in Vermont entered young Joseph Smith's fertile imagination and - from a non-Mormon viewpoint - he borrowed from the legend. In doing so, he started a new religion.

Is it possible that the legend of the "golden Bible" comes from the same oral thread as the Bible that Captain Hendrick Aupaumut said was "buried with a chief"? What do you think?

 

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One More Time: The Munsee Indians in Wisconsin[?]

This map is from the official site of the Delaware Tribe of Indians.

As discussed earlier, the people that I call the Stockbridge Mohicans have a number of other names. Their 1939 constitution gave them the handle "The Stockbridge-Munsee Community."

For a while I was telling my white friends that I was researching the history of the "Stockbridge-Munsee Indians." As a result, they completely missed the point that the tribe identifies mostly with being Mohican. You can be both Mohican and something else, but if you're talking to somebody, does that person (or persons) give you enough time to say "Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians? The answer is no. So you shorten the name, and "Stockbridge Mohicans" works for me.

In my research I've come across a lot of sources that say things about "the Munsees" and certainly there were still groups of Munsees that stayed together after the Lenape or Delaware Indians had been pushed out of their homeland. One of the Munsee groups that stuck together became guests of the Stockbridge Mohicans (from 1837 to 1839) at Stockbridge, Wisconsin. But many of the Munsees didn't stick together. Many generations ago, a large portion of the  Munsees had already begun to disperse across the face of Turtle Island, often marrying into other tribes.

I won't make the claim that no Munsees joined the Stockbridge Mohicans in the 1800's, of course some did. Big Deer is one. John Killsnake is another. And the Mohawk family, they were Munsees and my guess is they took on the name "Mohawk" because they had been living among Mohawks in New York before coming to Wisconsin.

But if the word "Munsee" deserves to be in the tribe's name at all - and I questioned that in Proud and Determined - it is for two reasons, 1) the Munsees and the Mohicans intermarried a lot starting at about 1670, and 2) about two hundred Wappinger Munsees moved to Stockbridge, Massachusetts during the French and Indian War. But the Mohicans didn't change the name then. The "Munsee" part of the tribe's name was added by the United States federal government in the next century - that is something for another blogpost entirely.

Anyway, Robert Grumet's The Munsee Indians gives us a lot of insight into the consequences of the Munsees being mixed-in with various other tribes.

The need to choose one's nationality after marriage made things even more difficult for Munsees living in multicultural communities after 1767.... Decisions to adopt spouse's nationalities played major roles in turning many Munsee family names into surnames later primarily found in other Indian communities. The Munsee Nimham family name, for example, gradually became the prominent Oneida Ninham surname after Munsee Nimham men loosened from the ties of their matrilineages adopted the nationalities of their Oneida wives (pages 274-275).

Probably another family that is in a similar situation is the Metoxens. Maybe you know some other examples?

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A Review of Stockbridge Past and Present

Yesterday I wrote - and posted to the Amazon website - a book review for Electa Jones' 1854 book Stockbridge, Past and Present, or, Records of an Old Mission Station.

With no further adieu, here it is:

This book has been very valuable to historians. It contains quite a few valuable nuggets of history that otherwise would not have been recorded. As such, it has been cited in a number of histories of the Stockbridge Mohican Indians.

In the preface, EWB Canning states "The author laid no claims to profound erudition. She was a plain, sensible woman."
That may be a somewhat euphemistic way to describe Electa Jones' work to modern readers. It might be more accurate to say that she was neither a particularly good author, nor a particularly reliable historian.

It may not be fair to compare Ms. Jones's book with more recent works whose authors had the benefit of a lot more sources, both primary and secondary. Nevertheless, you, as a reader are deciding what you want to read next, so the comparison is apt.

The first thing a prospective reader of this book should know is the author's biases. She was an English-speaking, white Calvinist from the 19th century (1800's). While it would be inexact to say she was a Puritan (true Puritanism was confined to an earlier period), that word may describe her better than any other. It is one thing to have an opinion, but Ms. Jones has no conception of an audience that is not Calvinist. When she states that the Stockbridge Indians' Emigrant Party left Stockbridge, Wisconsin for new lands in present-day Kansas in 1839, a significant point (to her) seems to be that "they started [left] on the Sabbath," and therefore, their leaving was no loss to the tribe. This comes across as judgemental to the modern reader who doesn't think of travelling on Sunday as a sin.

The second thing to keep in mind is that the author accepted some things uncritically from her sources. To put it simply, Ms. Jones didn't have the luxury to follow the Stockbridge Indians to their settlements in New York or Wisconsin. She still manages to include quite a few anecdotes about the tribe after they left Massachusetts, but they cannot be relied on. Fortunately, historians have other sources available that either corroborate or discredit some of these post-Massachusetts anecdotes.

There are other issues. The book isn't organized into much of a narrative. It is largely non-chronological, tending to be organized instead around topics. Typos and/or misspellings are a problem - as is antiquated language. Sometimes Ms. Jones' writing simply lacks clarity.

If you want to read a good book about the Stockbridge Indians in Massachusetts, Patrick Frazier's The Mohicans of Stockbridge (1993) is undoubtedly the best. My own Proud and Determined covers the Stockbridge Mohicans history from 1734 to 2014. I would recommend Stockbridge, Past and Present to you if you are a serious historian. But if you want to read one "good" book about the Stockbridge Indians, this isn't the one.

By the way, Stockbridge Past and Present is available free as an e-book from Google books.

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Disambiguation of Lenape/Delaware/Mahican/River Indians

On page twelve of The Munsee Indians, A History, Robert Grumet states

The idea that cultures are...organizations of [internal] diversity is important... People identified as Munsees in one context and Mahicans [his spelling] in another did not suddenly become members of different cultures. Neither did references to people by different names necessarily suggest confusion or disorganization. Names used like this can reflect what may be called situational identity. Different names identifying the same people in different situations serve as markers of social flexibility that can allow a person to function as a Munsee in one context and a Mahican in another.

There was always cultural change, but that change accelerated after white contact. Grumet says that the fact that the Munsees were "enduring people" means that all the specifics of their lives changed. And with that change, it sometimes becomes harder to keep track of who is who. While Gromet says all the different names doesn't necessarily suggest confusion, I think that there is a lot of confusion about different names - I know for a fact that they aren't used with consistency.

The Arvid E. Miller Museum had a sign (maybe they still do) that listed many names and claimed they were all different names for the same tribe. I'd qualify that by saying that they were all legitimate names for the people now known - according to their most recent constitution - as "The Stockbridge-Munsee Community." That is not quite the same as saying all the names on the sign referred to exactly the same people in exactly the same context.

One of the names on the sign was "River Indians." According to Patrick Frazier, the River Indians included "the Mohicans and the Indians at Schaghticoke"(see page 6 of The Mohicans of Stockbridge).

Let's try another one. This is according to Grumet: "Today, many writers regard Lenape as the most appropriate term to use when talking about Delaware-speaking people." But he adds that "Lenape" is too broad of a term to be used in everyday language by the people themselves.

Wikipedia has pages where they "disambiguate" names that refer to more than one thing. Although I've made some attempt to disambugate the eastern Algonquian Indians here in this post, at some point, this disambugation becomes a fool's errand. We have to accept that the rapid change over the first 100 or 200 years of white contact resulted in complexity which, in turn, resulted in some confusion over names.

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The Origin of the Lost Tribes Theory

I've written here about the lost tribes theory before. According to the lost tribes theory, American Indians are somehow the descendants of the ten lost tribes of Israel.
Of course I don't have exact numbers, but suffice it to say that some form of the lost tribes theory was accepted in much of Europe and the English-speaking world in the 1600's and 1700's.

How did the lost tribes theory originate?

Lynn Glaser sets out to answer that and other questions in his introduction to a reprint of a book that promoted the lost tribes theory in 1650.

The book has been made available via Google books:
Indians or Jews?: An Introduction to a Reprint of Manasseh Ben Israel's The Hope of Israel

Glasser's summary of many years' history makes sense to me.

...the Romans destroyed Jerusalem and scattered the Jews of Palestine, and...two heretical offshoots of Judaism, Christainity and Islam, waxed great and became the dominant religions of Europe and the Middle East. Presently hostility among Christians, Muslims, and Jews was whipped up by their respective priesthoods. Being the fewest, the Jews suffered the most in strife, and soon began to wish that there were a powerful Jewish state somewhere to which they could go for refuge, or which could at least give them some protection. The wish was father of the thought, with the result that by the seventh century [the 600's], rumors circulated about a mighty Jewish kingdom in the East.

In other words, explorers were looking for the lost tribes of Israel long before they became aware of the Western Hemisphere. On page 58 Glaser writes

As missionaries and travellers covered more ground they constantly were uncovering new people with strange customs which needed explaining and announced that they had discovered the Ten Lost Tribes. The Jewish Encyclopedia devotes three pages of small print to listing them.

So it wasn't just Indians. There was a list three pages long of ethnic groups believed to be descendants of the ten lost tribes of Israel.

And it all started hundreds of years before European explorers found their way to Turtle Island.

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Volney Describes Native Drunkenness

A bust of Constantin-François Chassebœuf de La Giraudais - comte Volney -  

Artist: Philippe Dessante

 

 

An important part of what we know about the great Miami war chief Little Turtle and his son-in-law, William Wells, is based on interviews they had with the frenchman Constantin Francois Chassebouef comte de Volney. Volney is the one that told the world about how Little Turtle's cow was killed and he also wrote up a short Miami dictionary. That and more was part of a larger book with a title that says nothing of the Miamis:

A View of the Soil and Climate of the United States of America

It was translated into English by a C.B. Brown who added some of his own remarks. The English edition was published in Philadelphia in 1804 and a facsimile of that edition came out in 1968 (thanks to the Hafner Publishing Company of New York).

Anyway Volney was not required back then to be politically correct in his observations of the unfortunate Indians. He was staying at Vincennes, a center of commerce for "Weeaws, Payories, Sawkies, Pyankishaws, and Miamis, all living near the head of the Wabash"(page 352). After describing what they wore, Volney continues (page 354) with his observations on the devastating effects of alcohol on the Natives:

Men and women roamed all day about the town, merely to get rum, for which they eagerly exchanged their peltry, their toys, their clothes, and at length, when they had parted with their all, they offered their prayers and entreaties, never ceasing to drink till they had lost their senses....

Sometimes tragical scenes ensue: they become mad or stupid, and falling in the dust or mud, lie a senseless log till next day. We found them in the streets by the dozens in the morning, wallowing in the filth with the pigs. It was rare for a day to pass without a deadly quarrel, by which about ten men lose their lives yearly.

 

It goes without saying that the rum was produced by whites and sold by white traders.

Meanwhile, a lot of missionaries did what little they could to keep alcohol out of Indian Country.
 


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