Anne F. Hyde - Born of Lakes and Plains: Mixed-Descent Peoples and the Making of the American West

BORN OF LAKES AND PLAINS

Mixed-Descent Peoples and the Making of the American West

Anne F. Hyde

CONTENTS

T HE P EOPLES OF N ORTH A MERICA , 1600

T HIS BOOK is about Indigenous Americans and the new peoples with whom they traded, fought, and made families. Those traders and settlers came mainly from Europe but also from Latin America and Africa. Race and language have thorny histories. Every term that describes racial mixing can hurt, especially words appearing in the historical record and in federal, state, and territorial law. For the people I track through the past, Ive chosen mixed-descent because it avoids the language of blood or race. It suggests how families draw different past heritages together.

Words linked to race science and eugenics, like mixed-breed and half-breed, only appear when quoted from the historical record. Metis, mixed-race, mixed-blood, or mixed-ancestry appear in the book but lightly.

As Europeans, Euro-Americans, European immigrants, and Latin Americans evolved into U.S. residents, they lumped themselves together into a category they called White, to distinguish themselves from Blacks or Native Americans. Whites lumped all Indigenous people together as Indians or Natives, terms still used today to describe Indigenous peoples collectively. When Indigenous people reclaimed governments, language, and landa process still unfoldingthey used American Indian and Native American as collective terms with power. Along with specific tribal names, this book uses Indian, Native, and Indigenous interchangeably. I never put racial terms, Native languages, or names in quotes unless, of course, Im quoting someone in the past who used those words.

I N THE winter of 1790, a courtship blossomed between an Irish fur trader and an Ojibwe woman on a lonely island off Lake Superiors southern shore, a place haunted by Ojibwe ghosts. The eight children born to this couple would negotiate treaties, send sons to die in the Civil War, and publish poetry in Ojibwe and English.

Cree uncles and fathers, living and hunting north of Winnipeg in the 1770s, allowed a Swiss immigrant to marry into their band. The child of that union, Cree and Swiss, chose to marry two different men in a life that took her from the dry plains of the Canadian Shield to the Douglas fir forests of the Pacific Northwest.

A mixed Otoe-American family welcomed a baby during a summer fur trade rendezvous. Born in 1832 amid thousands of hunters, traders, and their families gathered high in the Rocky Mountains, that daughter later sued the Otoe and U.S. nations for the right to homestead on the Great Plains.

These family stories are scenes in a long-hidden history of Native Americans and Europeans mixing blood and blending families. It begins in 1600 with the fur trade on the Great Lakes and Hudsons Bay, extends through the colonial violence of the eighteenth century, carries on through the hacksaw of nineteenth-century U.S. expansion to the Pacific Coast and the Native response, and ends in the twentieth century in a new Indian Country, on reservations and in cities across the U.S. West and Canada.

At the heart of this book are acts personal and passionate, violent and loving, familiar and familial. When warm bodies lay close in winter, they created new hearts beating by summer. Too often only one body was willing and the other was captive, raped, or abandoned. But sex has stunning generative power, and that power to make kin, blend villages, and build clans anchors this account of mixed-descent families and how war, trade, and love extended them across North America.

A narrative of our past with shared blood at its heart puts Indigenous people at the center of the history and fills in a dimension missing in other accounts. Generations of scholars have now shown the astonishing violence that European conquerors, U.S. officials, armies, missionaries, and encroaching settlers visited on Native peoples. But if we understand early America only as a tale of unending violence, we miss the families and relationships that enabled Native peoples to survive into the present. Indigenous people were not simply victims. Mixing heritage and blending families was often a Native choice. They showed creativity and resourcefulness in using family making to secure their lives and heritage.

T O TRACK this American tale, I chose five mixed-descent families as guides. Whether they lived on Canadian lakes, in summer bison-hunting camps on the Plains, or around reservation schoolhouses, these families show the deep and varied roots of mixed-heritage history. They were not average folkthey had the status to create and preserve a trove of letters, account books, photographs, deeds, diaries, invoices, bills, memoirs, poems, and drawings. The McKays married Crees, Chinooks, and Cayuses from what is now Canada, Washington, and Idaho. In search of fur, and guided by Cree explorers, Alexander McKay would find the Arctic Sea and, accompanied by his Cree-Scots son Thomas, sail around the tip of South America. Crane clan Ojibwes made families with Johnstons and Schoolcrafts in Michigan, New York, and Ontario. Ozhaguscodaywayquay, married to John Johnston, would prevent U.S. diplomats from being killed when they insulted Ojibwe leaders in 1820. Her future son-in-law, Henry Schoolcraft, was part of that nearly fatal mission. He would become an architect of the U.S. Indian policy that replaced fur trading with Indian removal in the 1830s.

Farther west and south, young fur traders Andrew Drips and Lucien Fontenelle worked in Otoe and Omaha villages along the Platte and Missouri rivers. They succeeded by marrying Native women. By the 1830s, along with their wives, Macompemay and Mehubane, Drips and Fontenelle supplied a new fur trade in the Rocky Mountains. The Hairy Rope Cheyennes convinced St. Louisans William and Charles Bent to open a trading post on the U.S.-Mexico border. A diplomatic marriage between William Bent and three Cheyenne sisters allowed that fort to stand for decades, part of a Great Peace orchestrated by southern Plains Native nations. The records that all these families left behind show the fear, love, and hate swirling around them but also reveal how people managed to recover and rebuild, again and againa fuller, truer version of frontier life.

I also chose these families because they experienced violence and heartbreak. The Johnstons Michigan business and home were burned to the ground by U.S. troops in 1812. The Cheyenne Bents lost dozens of family members at the Sand Creek and Washita massacres in the 1860s but made new lives on dry plains in Oklahoma. Louise Drips lost her land in Nebraska and sought help from Dakota relations on the Great Sioux Reservation. She didnt survive, but seven of her eleven children did. Sometimes people and records disappear entirely, because war and migration made life so chaotic, or because people chose to disappear. This history ends early in the twentieth century because detailed census records end after 1940, and families protected decisions made by those still living.