The book itself has been both praised and condemned. The charge is made that he gives himself the benefit of all doubts, but this, remember, means doubts from the “civilized” point of view. It rather seems that from the Indian point of view he was quite honest. He did not equivocate over the fact that he had been spending his nights in Mis-kwa-bun-o-kwa’s teepee before he married her, nor is he in any manner boastful. He seems honest enough about his drinking; for a long time he did not drink at all, but later on he took it up to a certain extent. Likewise he tells in Indian fashion—the usual word is “stoical”—about sending a little slave girl into the cold without a blanket because she had allowed his tent to burn down. Actually stoicism implies the control of feelings, but it was not that with Tanner. He had no feeling about the matter; the girl had caused them suffering; therefore she was sent away. The element of punishment was not as large as the element of self-protection—which was why Tanner took the girl’s blanket from her: he and the surviving boy would need it to keep warm. In a country where all one’s resources are called on to maintain existence, there is not, biologically speaking, much encouragement to sentiment.
The Narrative has the full ring of truth and sincerity if one remembers that this was, to all effect, an Indian speaking. His viewpoint was Indian, his philosophy was Indian, and the Narrative is not to be judged from “civilized” point of view, either as of 1830 or as of 1956. And if anyone doubts Tanner’s innate decency, he has only to read Tanner’s matter-of-fact relation of homosexuality among the Ojibways to realize that here was a man truly sophisticated (in that he pointed no finger of reprehension) but also truly conventional, for while he did not cast aspersions on those who practiced it, neither did he want anything to do with it himself.
From various accounts of his life it is possible to reconstruct a tentative time-table of John Tanner’s career.
He was born about 1780, and captured by Shawnees in 1789. He was married in 1800, and returned home to Kentucky about 1817. About 1818 he must have gone back to his Indian family; in 1819 his brother found him in Canada. In 1820 he left Selkirk Settlement, with his wife and three children, for Kentucky again; another child was born enroute, and his wife stayed at Mackinac, Michigan, while he went on to Kentucky, where one daughter, Mary, died. In 1823 he returned to the Red River to get his wife and two other daughters. On this occasion he apparently was not successful, for his wife hired an Indian to shoot him, and she then ran off with the Indian, while his daughters disappeared.
Sometime in the next few years, however, he must have effected a reconciliation, for his wife lived with him several years and produced two more children. In 1828 he moved from Mackinac to Sault Ste. Marie. In 1830 Martha, his daughter, was taken from him. In 1832 the mother left Mackinac for good.
These are the facts as deduced from his various biographers. Perhaps, however, they did not trouble to read the Narrative, for still other facts appear:
He mentions a child who died of measles (this could have been Mary); he confirms that one son was thoroughly Indian and chose to remain with the Ojibways; he mentions a child who died in 1821, 80 miles from Grand Prairie (this might have been Mary); he tells us that (probably about 1810) he had left his first wife and had taken another, by whom he had three children; this second wife was the one who would not go to Mackinac, it would seem. He also reveals the great trouble caused by his second mother-in-law, for she was often on the scene, and his wife deserted him in company with his mother-in-law; his wife returned a year later (sometime before 1814), and he says she “laughed” as she resumed her place in his household.
It is worth noting that no bitterness or resentment appears in the Narrative against either his wife, his mother-in-law, or the medicine man who seems to have had much undue influence in his domestic troubles. It is significant too that during the winter when his wife was gone, he took care of his children, hunting meat by day, repairing their clothing by night, and he says casually that during that winter he slept very short hours because of his many duties.
Probably in the early 1840’s, in a last desperate attempt to secure acceptance as a white, he married a white woman of Detroit. She bore him one child, but left him because of what to her were squalor and brutality; eventually she was granted a divorce by the legislature. In 1846, perhaps not too long after his wife left him, he disappeared about the time of James Schoolcraft’s murder. There never has been a word from him since, and, as far as known, no human eye ever again saw him as a living man.
He was dis-enamored of his first wife before he married her, and his life after he returned to civilization with his second wife was most unhappy, she wanting to return to her people, he determined to remain with his. She wanted him to marry her in Mackinac according to white customs, she being a Roman Catholic by that time, but his Indian upbringing asserted itself and he refused. Presumably she went back to Red River and was swallowed up in the anonymity of Indian records, which except for unusual happenings were kept only as long as they could be heard from the mouth of one living; three generations were the usual extent.