Читать книгу A Narrative of the Captivity and Adventures of John Tanner. U.S. Interpreter at the Saut de Ste. Marie онлайн

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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.