This is an excerpt taken from the historical novel, "Isaac McCoy & the American Indians," written by Carol Layman and published in 2003. For extended excerpts, information on the author and ordering information follow this link to the Isaac McCoy website:

Isaac McCoy & the American Indians



Author Introduction .


Isaac McCoy (1784-1846), a frontier Baptist preacher in southern Indiana Territory after the War of 1812, witnessed daily the deteriorating condition of local Indians. His increasing defense of their rights put him in some tense situations. In 1817, he realized his call to minister to the natives.

He established his initial station near present-day Terre Haute, where his was the first white family to settle. A lack of help forced him to hire two non-believers as assistants.

The McCoys moved to Fort Wayne, in northeastern Indiana. Here Isaac almost abandoned the work after an Indian attacked his eight-year-old daughter. An agnostic agent persuaded him to remain.

Because the Indians were absent on hunting expeditions a good part of the year, the mission station quickly became a boarding school. Isaac's helpmate wife, Christiana, was away only while giving birth in white settlements.

In a continuous effort to get away from the negative effects of white immigration, the McCoys left Indiana in 1822.

During the next six years, Isaac operated two stations simultaneously in Michigan Territory. The first, named Carey and located near present-day Niles, grew to resemble a village. The second, Thomas, sat at present-day Grand Rapids.

The following chapter from the biographical novel Isaac McCoy and the American Indians takes place while the McCoys are located in Michigan Territory, before they moved to the West. At this time their older children are being schooled in diverse places. The two older boys attend Columbian College, founded by the Baptists in Washington, D. C. It is now George Washington University. Isaac McCoy narrates.



Isaac McCoy & the American Indians - Excerpt .

Isaac McCoy . Kansas State Historical Society, Copy and Reuse Restrictions Apply
List of Indian Scholars at the Carey Mission School September 9, 1827 . Kansas State Historical Society, Copy and Reuse Restrictions Apply

Our oldest daughter, Delilah, age "fifteen and three quarters," was home with us that summer. Her presence was especially helpful when Carey became overrun with various illnesses. By mid-July, my office area had been turned into a sick room. I was there at my writing desk doing some paper-work while she was over at the dining table penning a letter to her older brothers at Columbian. To entertain her younger sisters, she read her words aloud as she wrote. Soon, instead of concentrating on my own work, I found myself listening to her and imagining the boys' reaction to the letter.

"Mother is ironing in my place while I write," she was saying. "Someone is working in the kitchen with Old George, who has a new trumpet to awaken us at four in the morning. Nancy and I love the pocketbooks Josephus sent. Little Isaac is fat and ugly just like his brother Rice used to be. Somebody is starching, somebody is stacking wheat, somebody is grinding. The new gristmill, powered by four horses, was finished last week.

"We have a neighbor who feels as big as a governor. He has a horse and gig and is taking girls a riding. He looks like a Cincinnati dandy in his too-big Wellington boots and his too-tight nankeen pantaloons. All our men are invited to a raising on Saturday. We milk forty cows. Mr. Daily thinks nobody can do it without him.

"Father is in his office busily engaged as usual, with the ill lying all about him. He requested that I not say anything about his old bombazette coat, but I shall. The back is almost gone, the skirt is hanging in rags, and were it not for the lining, I fear it would not hang very long at. . . ."

"Delilah," I interrupted, and she finished her letter in whispers.

William Polke left Carey on July 21. The prayer of the mission family that evening, the mission family so in need of helpers, was that brother and sister Polke should be blessed with happy and tranquil lives.

Our son John Calvin unexpectedly came home from Troy, Ohio, at the end of the month. "Some people are trying to destroy the whole town!" he announced.

"How?" we asked.

"With fire, but I don't know why." He said the valuable row of houses directly across the street from Mr. John's store, where he slept, were destroyed. "While the men were trying to save the stable, a dwelling in another part of town was torched. Corbly and other men, two at a time, are patrolling the town every night from dark till daybreak. Sometimes," Calvin said, his half-boy, half-man voice cracking, "almost all the men are out, carrying weapons of death. I volunteered to walk with them at night, but instead they sent me home."

That summer Robert Simerwell, Johnston Lykins, and I alternately made tours of several days' duration among the Indian villages. We were treated respectfully, but could see that the whiskey was pulling the Indians down faster than we could build them up. Settlements of white people in our neighborhood were now multiplying rapidly.

In August, Gosa brought down a message about trouble at the Thomas station on Grand River. The smith and the laborers, two brothers named Mettiz, were requesting permission to abandon that station because of widespread intoxication. Local Ottawas had returned from Detroit two weeks earlier and had been drinking ever since. Gosa had taken his family and sought refuge in the smith's house. The whole lot remained watchful all night. "We were afraid they would break open the house," Gosa told me.

In his letter, Charles Mettiz said the drunk Indians had shot one of our oxen, but it was not seriously hurt. Somebody stabbed Gosa's cow with a fishing spear and it had to be killed. Mettiz said Gosa fought with the man and the man shot at Gosa, who ran "half bent" toward the man and disarmed him. Then this Indian's friends came and took the gun back. "Some sober Indians told us not to come out of our houses until the others sobered up," Mettiz wrote. "I do not want to stay here much longer."

Gosa also carried a message from the Ottawas themselves, who were afraid the mission would be abandoned. They promised better manners in the future. Their excuse was that their young men had been told the missionaries would rob them of their annuities and would induce white settlement. Confined to my room with illness, I sent word to the Ottawas that I would visit them as soon as able.

Noaquett and I, and a Frenchman, eventually went to Thomas, driving five head of cattle in front of us. As soon as we arrived, I instructed the work hands to begin construction of more log buildings so the Indians could see promises come true.

During our stay at Thomas, Noaquett and I also visited some Ottawas thirty miles away. We had scarcely pitched our tent in their neighborhood before all the men and some boys gathered at our camp for conversation. No company ever was more pleasant and friendly. They smoked and we talked until late in the night.

On Sunday, Noonday and all the inhabitants of his village assembled and listened to preaching with remarkable decorum and attention. In the afternoon I went to Chief Blackskin's village. We had not met before. He affectionately invited me to his house, one of many bark huts sitting close together.

Noaquett and I waited at Blackskin's house while he gathered his people. In glancing around, my attention was arrested by a small, soot-blackened kettle hanging on a crane shoved to the side of a smoldering fireplace. Upon stepping closer and seeing its interior, I spotted copper showing between blotches of stuck-on food. I took it off the crane and turned it over. Yes, something was etched on the bottom. I grabbed a handful of weeds, sat down on a peeled-log bench, and began polishing the area around the scratches. The still-blackened letters became easily discernable. By now Noaquett was curious as to why I was smiling.

"This says 'McCoy,'" I said. "Josephus scratched it on here when he was a little boy." I put it back on the crane. "It was at our house for a while."

Blackskin was cautious in summoning his people, assuring them this would not be a council. At the end he did not voice any objections to my proposals, but I knew that to an Indian, saying nothing is a polite way of saying no. The next day, however, when I went to Noonday's village, some of Blackskin's people were there. They and other Ottawas expressed a high opinion of our efforts.

The Ottawas were eager to begin farming. They listened to me so attentively, no matter of what I spoke, I was deeply impressed with their potential. Yet I was filled with regret because I knew the improvements here - everywhere in Michigan Territory - would be temporary at best.

Before I left Grand River, Noonday and Blackskin approached me and told me they wanted a school. Noonday said, "We are both growing old. Before our deaths, we desire very much to see our children enjoying the advantages we hope will be made through your means."
My return to Carey coincided with that of a packet of mail, some of which appeared to have traveled all over the United States before reaching us. We opened the letters from our sons at Columbian first. Rice said the enrollment was up to 120 and the facilities were being doubled in size at a cost of over $15,000, despite rumors the college was already in bankruptcy. "Each boy," he wrote, "has several rows of potatoes he hoes in his leisure hours. We can take two books out of the library every Wednesday. We have the opportunity of reading the history of any part of the world."

Rice and Josephus had witnessed the launching of a ship at the Navy Yard. "It is the one that is to convey Lafayette to France. The president named her Brandywine as a token of respect to the general, that being the place where he first shed blood in the American cause of liberty. The evening of his arrival rockets were set off and citizens illuminated their houses as brightly as they could. At the main college building we lit the eastern, southern, and western fronts several hundred candles coming on at the same time. Then, at ten o'clock, all the candles were extinguished as suddenly as we had lighted them."

Having seen the high location of that building, I could imagine the spectacle it presented.

And what an education our sons were getting. They were allowed to hear debates in Congress and arguments in the Supreme Court. They had attended the inauguration of John Quincy Adams. "Because of the crowd, we were unable to get close enough to see him."

"Listen to this, Christiana," I said, "The boys have been to the president's house."

"The president of the college or the United States?"

"Let's see. Rice says, 'On the fourth of July most of the students went to the president's levee. It is customary for the president of the United States to give it on that day.'"

"President Adams!" Christiana squealed, clutching her throat.

I continued reading Rice's letter aloud. "'It was our first time in the Big House. It's a superb building to view the outside, but nothing to compare with the magnificence of the interior. People stood on chairs to look over the heads of others and see it.'"

"They were inside the president's house?" Christiana gasped.

"They met President Adams." I said, raising my hand. "Listen. 'My brother and myself were introduced to the president. It was amusing to see the gaping rustics crowding to see a man who, like themselves, was dressed in domestic manufactures. His dress is as plain as anyone's. He looks very little like the chief magistrate of the greatest nation on earth.'"

Rice wanted an Ohio newspaper so he could read the western news. He said there was no truth to the rumor that Henry Clay and Andrew Jackson had fought a duel. "But it is true that President Adams takes his baths in the Potomac. We saw him."

Letters from Josephus were included in the packet and they were much neater now. In one letter dated December 16, 1824, he told us about the first commencement of Columbian College, in the liberal arts and science departments only. "It was held in Dr. Laurie's meeting house on F Street, between Fourteenth and Fifteenth, a Presbyterian church that seats over six hundred. The procession formed at the college at nine-thirty in the morning. When we arrived at the church, we underclassmen formed a double line through which the dignitaries passed.

"General Lafayette and suite attended. He is a tiny old man and wears a powdered wig. President Adams, the members of the Cabinet, and several members of Congress were there, too. The United States Marine Band provided the music."

According to the program Josephus sent, all three members of the graduating class spoke. Four underclassmen gave speeches also. Some of the speech titles were quite intriguing: "The Superiority of Grecian over Roman Literature," "Timoleon and Washington," "The Influence of Mathematics on the Mind," and "The Philosophy of the Active Powers of Man."

The next letter told of Josephus and Rice attending another of Mrs. Adams's levees and taking glasses of lemonade. "President Adams was there. People of both sexes and all classes were mixing together," Josephus wrote. "We shook hands with Lafayette. His departure, I expect, will be very splendid and I expect we shall watch it." Josephus also sent a note to his little sisters saying he was reading a lot and studying French, Latin, and Greek. He included a line of Greek to show them what he was learning. "And I expect I will be something pretty considerable by the time you see me next."

Christiana groaned. "Josephus expects a lot, doesn't he?"

According to Josephus's letter, the boys were boarding off campus this summer, near a creek they swam in every day. "Delilah spoke of your milking a good many cows, which makes me almost wish I was there. We have seldom tasted milk since we came to Washington City."

---

At Chebass's request, I went to Chicago in October with him, Topenebe, and some other Potawatomis to collect their annuities. We slept five nights in the wilderness, finding very little game on the way. Once again I was struck by the extreme poverty of the Indians, and of the changing times.

The number gathered in the Chicago council room was greater than the population of the whole town, which was still a hamlet of fewer than fifty souls. Topenebe and Chebass were among forty chiefs in attendance. An appalling number of traders waited outside, ready to give the Indians goods for their money or money for their goods, neither at an advantage to the natives. Some traders, clutching lists of real or invented debts, were ready to pounce on particular chiefs when the proceedings ended.

Inside the council house, the silver dollars were counted first and laid out on large tables in piles. A loud voice called forward each principal chief to receive one of these piles. Upon accepting his money, every chief was detained by the agent's secretary, who held up a pen. Expecting these chiefs to take the pen and inscribe the customary X to the document, I was surprised when the first one touched his finger to the tip. Each one did this, then touched a place on the document pointed out to him by the secretary. One chief, after receiving his dollars, gathered his heads of families around him and threw each a coin until his supply was exhausted. After the coins were distributed, tools were given to the Indians-tools of inferior quality.

I conversed with many chiefs I had never met. Quite a few gave me the hand of friendship. One said, "Brother, we join our hands; our hearts also are united." At the invitation of the agent, I addressed the Indians on the subject of missions. I told them of my hopes that the Indians would someday fill their own pulpits and teach their own schools. I preached there on October 9, 1825, afterwards being told mine was the first sermon delivered in English at or near Chicago.

I carried home a poor little outcast boy, a full Potawatomi about ten, who rode behind me on my horse. He would be named Richard Clements. The next month a white man brought his two children to us; their Indian mother had died. The boy, Jean Baptiste, was less than four years old and the girl, Charlotte, was only seventeen months. The father's name was Jerome Claremont, but he signed his name with an X.

Seventy scholars were now enrolled at Carey-fifty males and twenty females. The girls kept the spinning wheel humming and the loom shuttle flying. They manufactured 208 yards of cloth that year. Fourteen Indian children had advanced to the study of arithmetic; and during the last year four boys completed their courses and left the mission. Two became blacksmith apprentices and one a shoemaker's apprentice.

The Carey station was now a full village. It included six dwellings, most of them two-story, a dining hall, store-house, school-house, smithy, stable, wash house, milk house, sheep house, meat house, the grist mill, and two other outbuildings for livestock. By Christmas, we had a two-story building at the Thomas station, twenty by twenty-eight feet. Thomas station also included a kitchen building, a schoolhouse and three small cabins.

Still firm in my conviction that qualified Indians could be more useful among their people than could white men of equal training, I had written to the board in July. I had supposed that because Columbian College was under the management of the mission board, it would be the ideal place to send some of the more promising Indian boys graduating from Carey.

In an impassioned appeal, I had asked admission for only seven boys, baptized Christian boys who had expressed a strong desire to be useful to their less fortunate brothers. "If all cannot obtain situations in your excellent institution, can you not make room for some of them? But how can we separate them? To which of the seven must we say you cannot go? My heart, my eyes, are affected by this thought. I persuade myself that a secret whisper says Heaven will smile upon this our humble petition to you. We will not say we offer them to you; they are your own pupils, fruit of your own labors, a gift of God. To us is reserved only the pleasure of reporting them ready to be promoted by your charities. The boys are willing and eager to go."

Receiving no answer, I took matters into my own hands, writing to several colleges and theological institutions in the East. From Professor Daniel Hascall of the Baptist Literary and Theological Seminary at Hamilton, New York, I received an answer that five of the boys could find board, clothing, and tuition there. They would stay for three years, studying English grammar, arithmetic, geography, history, rhetoric, natural and moral philosophy, logic, astronomy, composition, and declamation. New Jersey's college at Princeton offered room for two boys, and Rebecca Blaine, our generous supporter in Washington, Pennsylvania, wanted to take in two Indian girls for education.
I wrote and told her we would send our two Betsys after we had the Indian boys situated in their schools. "Betsy Ash is half-Potawatomi, dark-skinned, child-like, and small for her seventeen years. She was one of the first children to join us when we moved to Fort Wayne. Her father, now dead, was a white man who had been captured by Potawatomis. Her mother earns money helping with the laundry here. Both Betsy Ash and her mother speak English well.

"Betsy Plummer's parents were both dead before she came to us at age twelve in 1819, at our first station. She is one quarter Miami but looks to be white, is fair-headed. Now eighteen, she speaks English only, but has picked up some Potawatomi."

---

I finally heard from Luther Rice. The issue of sending the boys to Columbian was "before the board," he said. He encouraged me to bring them on. "I am considering educating my namesake myself."

"I guess we'd better start calling Noaquett 'Luther Rice,' Christiana said. She was correct; we hadn't been doing that, and he hadn't been calling himself that, either.

Because Christiana and I attached so much importance to the education of these youths, we believed others would view the subject in the same light. We proceeded with our plans in the faith that funds would be forthcoming. No money lay at Carey to buy the boys suitable clothing or to pay traveling expenses. I sent a message to Detroit requesting overdue government payments, but the government sent back word that the money was not ready for delivery.

Not long before our departure, I received another letter from the Luther Rice in the East, asking me to write to all the men I knew in Congress and solicit $20,000 for furnishing the new edifice at Columbian. "More scrap paper," I said, and handed it to Christiana.
On January 16, 1826, I departed Carey with Noaquett-Luther Rice, that is and eight other Indian boys who comprised quite a mixture of skin color and background.

Peter Langlois (Kenozahqua) was tall, dark complected, and half-Miami, the son of a French trader. He was twenty-one now and had finished our school before we left Fort Wayne. I had sent him a letter about furthering his education in the East and he appeared on our threshold not long after receiving it. He said his father had offered him his own business, but the business included selling whiskey to the Indians, and Peter didn't like that. He said, "If I return to my Father's, I know I shall be gone. I cannot return to that place again." Peter stayed on at Carey while we planned our trip.

Joseph Bourassa was half-Ottawa, but we had found him among the Potawatomis. He was now seventeen, his complexion fair, and his appearance still boyish. Ottawa was his main language, but he spoke Potawatomi, French and English well. He could read, write, and was good in arithmetic.

John Saline was only thirteen, small, and fair. His mother was Chippewa but lived with the Potawatomis. His French trader father was dead. John's main language was Potawatomi, but he could speak broken English and read and write.

John Jones I expected to be successful in life. Even now, at age seventeen, a determined look rested in his eyes. Born in Canada, John Jones was the son of an English officer and a Chippewa woman. His Indian heritage was clearly evident in his features and dark skin. When John was quite young he was taken to live on the island of Mackinac with his sister and her blacksmith husband. While still small, John often went aboard vessels stopped at the island.

A Captain Conner took a fancy to little John and asked him if he wanted to go to Detroit. Without getting his sister's permission, John sailed away at the age of ten. Living in the Irishman's family, John learned the English and French languages and forgot his own. The captain became a drunkard a few years after his wife died. He threw John out of the house and John took a job at a brickyard. Not long after that he came to Carey, where in two years he learned to converse in Ottawa and Potawatomi.

Nuko was a full Potawatomi, age fourteen and dark-skinned. His English name was Andrew Fuller. He read and wrote imperfect English. He often led in prayer at Carey.

I derived a special pleasure in seeing Charles Dick with our group. He had been our very first Indian scholar; now he was going to school in the East.

The remaining two boys were the Beaubien brothers, Charles and Madore, eighteen and sixteen. They were the older sons of General Jean Baptiste Beaubien, a Frenchman who ran John Jacob Astor's Chicago trading-post. Madore favored their Potawatomi mother's side of the family more than Charles did. They both spoke French, Potawatomi, and English plainly, and read and wrote tolerably. Their father had sent two horses for their trip, and $80 for clothing.

After some inner debate, and discussions with Christiana and others at Carey, I told the boys the truth. "I still haven't heard from the board." We left home hoping to borrow the necessary money in Ohio.

Image Credits: Kansas Historical Society ~