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JOHN TANNER
SHAW-SHAW-WA BE-NA-SE—The Falcon
New York, Published by G. & C. H. Carvill 1830
CAPTIVITY OF JOHN TANNER
This book is set in ten pointTimes Roman type, and printedin an edition of two thousandcopies. This is copy
Nº 1308
A NARRATIVE OF
THE CAPTIVITY AND ADVENTURES
OF
JOHN TANNER
(U. S. INTERPRETER AT THE SAUT DE STE. MARIE)
DURING
THIRTY YEARS RESIDENCE AMONG
THE INDIANS
IN THE
INTERIOR OF NORTH AMERICA
PREPARED FOR THE PRESS
BY EDWIN JAMES, M.D.
Editor of an Account of Major Long’s Expedition from Pittsburgh
to the Rocky Mountains
Ross & Haines, Inc.
Minneapolis, Minnesota
1956
INTRODUCTION
The story of John Tanner is the tragic and age-old storyof a man who had no country, no people, no one who understoodhim, no place to lay his head.
His Narrative, which is the story of his thirty years’ captivityamong the Ojibways, was written a few years afterhe settled once more among the civilized whites. The materialwas written down and edited by Doctor Edwin James, andJames’s foreword gives a hint of the almost insurmountabledifficulties that surrounded Tanner’s attempt to establishhimself among the whites. However, the real story of JohnTanner’s long and tragic life unraveled after the book wasprinted in 1830, for Tanner spent sixteen more years tryingto find a place for himself in white society.
Here was a man who had lived as a white boy only nineyears, had then been captured and had spent thirty yearsamong the Indians, had married an Indian woman andproduced half-breed children, had in every way—physically,mentally, emotionally, and spiritually—lived as an Indianfor so long that he forgot his own name and could no longerspeak the English language, but still was impelled by someancient hunger to try to find his own people, to be a memberof the society that had borne him.
He found it—as so many other Indian captives have foundit—impossible. Though he rejected his Indian foster peopleand settled among the whites, educated his halfbreed childrenin white schools, still he was too much Indian to change environment.His Indian characteristics made him “different.”He was distrusted by the whites. He was not prepared orequipped to make a living according to the white standard.Confused and bewildered, his white heritage constantly fightingwith his acquired Indian environmental factors, in hislater yea