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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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.