Saint Jean de Brébeuf

Saint Jean de Brébeuf (March 25, 1593 – March 16, 1649) was a French Jesuit missionary who traveled to New France (or Canada) in 1625. There he worked primarily with the Huron for the rest of his life, except for a short time back in France in 1629-1630. He learned their language and culture.
In 1649 Brébeuf and several other missionaries were captured when an Iroquois raid took over a Huron village. Together with Huron captives, the missionaries were ritually tortured and eight were killed, martyred on March 16, 1649. Brébeuf was beatified in 1925 and canonized as a saint in the Roman Catholic Church in 1930.
Biography
Early years
Brébeuf was born 25 March 1593 in Condé-sur-Vire, Normandy, France. He became the uncle of poet Georges de Brébeuf. He joined the Society of Jesus in 1617 at the age of 24, spending the next two years under the direction of Lancelot Marin. Between 1619 and 1621, he was a teacher at the college of Rouen. He was nearly expelled from the Society because he contracted tuberculosis in 1620—an illness which prevented both studying and teaching for the traditional periods.
His record as a student was not particularly distinguished, but he was already beginning to show an aptitude for languages. Later in New France, he would become a language teacher to missionaries and French traders.(Leahey 106). Brébeuf was ordained as a priest at Pontoise in 1622.
Missionary
After three years as Steward at the College of Rouen, Brébeuf was chosen by the Provincial of France, Father Pierre Coton, to embark on the missions to New France. In June 1625 Brébeuf arrived in Quebec with Fathers Charles Lalemant and Énemond Massé, together with the lay brothers Francois Charton and Gilbert Burel. For about five months Brébeuf lived with a tribe of Montagnais, and was later assigned in 1626 to the Huron with Father Anne Nouée. Brébeuf worked mostly with the Huron, an Iroquoian-language group, as a missionary in North America. Brébeuf briefly took up residence with the Bear Tribe at Toanché. In 1629 he was recalled to France when the post was retaken by the First Nations.
In Rouen Brébeuf served as a preacher and confessor, taking his final Jesuit vows in 1630. Between 1631 and 1633, Brébeuf worked at the College of Eu in northern France as a steward, minister and confessor. He returned to New France in 1633, where he spent the rest of his life.
Along with Antoine Daniel and Ambroise Davost, Brébeuf chose Ihonatiria (Saint-Joseph I) as the centre for missionary activity with the Hurons. At the time, the Huron suffered epidemics of newly introduced Eurasian diseases contracted from the Europeans. Their death rates were high, as they had no immunity to the diseases long endemic in Europe. They blamed the Europeans for the deaths, without understanding the causes.
Called ‘Echon’ by the Hurons, Brébeuf had an ambivalent relationship with the Natives. He was personally involved with teaching and caring for the Huron, and his conversations with Huron friends left him with a good knowledge of their culture and understanding of spirituality. He learned their language and taught it to other missionaries and colonists. Fellow Jesuits such as Rageuneau describe his ease and adaptability to the Huron way of life.
His efforts to develop a complete ethnographic understanding of the Huron has been described as ‘the longest and most ambitious piece of ethnographic description in all the Jesuit relations’. Brébeuf tried to find parallels between the Huron religion and Christianity, to facilitate conversion of the Huron to the European religion. Brébeuf’s also was known by the Huron for his apparent shamanistic skills, especially in rainmaking. Brébeuf considered Huron spiritual beliefs to be ‘foolish delusions’ and was determined to convert them to Christianity. The priest did not enjoy universal popularity with the Huron, as many believed he was a sorcerer. They were ultimately instrumental in his death.
His progress as a missionary was very slow, and only in 1635 did some Huron agree to be baptized as Christians. He claimed to have made 14 converts as of 1635, and by the next year, he claimed 86. Among his important descriptions of Huron ceremonies was his detailed account in 1636 of The Huron Feast of the Dead, a mass reburial of remains of loved ones after a community moved the location of its village. It was accompanied by elaborate ritual and gift-giving. In the 1940s, an archeological excavation was made at the site Brébeuf had described, confirming many of his observations.
In 1638, Brébeuf turned over direction of the mission at Saint-Joseph I to Jerome Lalemant; he moved on to become Superior at his newly founded Saint-Joseph II. In 1640, after an unsuccessful mission into Neutral Nation territory, Brébeuf broke his collarbone. He was sent to Quebec to recover, and worked there as a mission procurator. He taught the Huron, acting as confessor and advisor to Ursulines and religious Hospitallers. On Sundays and feast days, he preached to French colonists.
Brébeuf returned to Huron Country in 1644. There was unrest, and he was killed by the Natives in 1649.
Linguistic work
Jean de Brébeuf is distinguished for his commitment to learning the Huron language. The educational rigor of the Jesuit seminaries prepared missionaries to acquire native languages. As they learned the classical and romance languages, they must have had difficulty with the very different conventions of the New World indigenous languages. would make the process extremely difficult as native languages did not follow the same conventions His study of the language was also shaped by his religious training, as the existing theological ideas tried to reconcile knowledge of world languages with accounts in the bible of the tower of Babel. This influence can be seen in his discussion of language in his accounts collected in the Jesuit Relations.
Brébeuf had a remarkable facility with language, which was one of the reasons he was chosen for the Huron mission in 1626. Linguistic data suggests that people with a strong positive attitude towards the language community often learn the language much more easily.
Brébeuf worked tirelessly to become fluent in the language and to record his findings for the benefit of other missionaries. He built on the work of Recollet Priests, but significantly advanced the study, particularly in his representations of sounds. Brébeuf was widely acknowledged to have best mastered the Native oratory style, which used metaphor, circumlocution and repetition. Learning the language was still onerous, and he wrote to warn other missionaries of the difficulties.
To explain the low number of converts to possibly disappointed audiences, Brebeuf suggested this was due to the missionaries first having to master the Huron language. His commitment to this work demonstrates he understood that mutual intelligibility was vital for communicating complex and abstract religious ideas and imperative for the future of the Jesuit missions. Also, it was so difficult a task as to consume most of the Priest’s time. Brébeuf felt his primary goal at this time was to learn the language.
With increasing proficiency in Wyandot, Brébeuf became optimistic about communicating with the Huron and advancing his missionary goals. With a greater capacity to understand Huron religious belief and to communicate Christian fundamentals, he could secure converts to Christianity. He realized the people would not give up all their traditional beliefs., though not necessarily to the exclusion of the existing spiritual landscape.
Brébeuf discovered and reported the feature of compound words in Huron, which may have been his major linguistic contribution. This breakthrough had enormous consequences for further study, becoming the foundation for all subsequent Jesuit linguistic work.
With his singular language proficiency, Brébeuf pursued projects that would contribute to the spiritual mission of the Jesuits. He translated Ledesma’s catechism from French to Huron, which was the first printed text in that language. He also compiled a dictionary of Huron words, emphasizing translation of religious phrases, such as from prayers and the Bible.
Death
Brébeuf was killed at St. Ignace in Huronia on March 16, 1649. He had been taken captive with Gabriel Lalemant when the Iroquois destroyed the Huron mission village at Sainte-Louis. The Iroquois took the priests to the occupied village of Taenhatenteron, where they subjected the French men to ritual torture. The Iroquois finally killed them. Five Jesuits: Antoine Daniel, Lalement, Charles Garnier, Noel Charbanel, and Brébeuf, were killed in this conflict. The Jesuits considered their martyrdom proof that the mission was blessed by God and would be successful.
Throughout the torture, Brébeuf was reported to have been more concerned for the fate of the others and the captive Native converts than for himself. As part of the ritual, the Iroquois drank his blood, as they wanted to absorb Brébeuf’s courage in enduring the pain. The Iroquois mocked baptism by pouring boiling water over his head. They claimed that they were hurting him so that he would be happier in Heaven, as Jesuits preached that “the more one suffers on earth, the happier he is in Heaven”.
The Jesuits Christophe Regnault and Paul Ragueneau provided the two accounts of the deaths of Jean de Brébeuf and Gabriel Lalement. According to Regnault, the Jesuits learned of the tortures and deaths from Huron refugee witnesses, who had escaped from Saint-Marie. Regnault went to see the bodies to verify the accounts, and his superior Rageuneau’s account was based on him. The main accounts of Brébeuf’s death come from the Jesuit Relations. Jesuit accounts of his torture emphasize his stoic nature and acceptance, claiming that he suffered silently without complaining.
Martyrdom was a central component of the Jesuit missionary identity. Missionaries going to Canada expected to die in the name of God; they believed this was a chance to save converts and be saved. Martyrdom was associated with holiness. Both were associated with the expansion of Christendom throughout the world.
Relics, beatification and canonization
Father Brébeuf and Lalement were together buried in a Sainte Marie cemetery after their executions. However, Brébeuf’s relics, or what was left of his body, became important objects within the Catholic space of New France. On 21 March 1649, Jesuit inspectors found the bodies of Brébeuf and Lalement and buried them. Their exhumation coincided with the 1649 withdrawal of the Jesuits from New France, and the remaining body of Brébeuf was prepared by Christophe Regnault for transportation. Regnault boiled away any remaining flesh, scraped the bones then dried them in an oven, wrapped each relic in separate silk, deposited them in two small chests, and sent them to Québec.
Brébeuf’s family later donated his skull in a silver bust, and it was held by the Québec Hôtel-Dieu nuns and the Ursuline convent from 1650 until 1925, when the relics were moved to the Québec Seminary for his beatification. These relics provided physical access to the holy influence of the saint whom they are a part, and were to be called upon for their energy and connection.
In 1652 Paul Raguenau went through the Relations and pulled out material relating to the martyrs of New France and formalized them all in a document, to be used for the foundation of canonization proceedings, entitled “Memoires touchant la mort et les vertus (des Pères Jesuits)” or the Manuscript of 1652. The religious communities in New France were impacted by the Jesuits’ martyrdom, since they saw them as imitators of previous saints in the Catholic Church. In this sense, Brébeuf in particular, and others like him, connected Catholics of New France to their parishes because it reinforced the notion that “…Canada was a land of saints”.
Any candidacy for sainthood must provide evidence of miracles from the afterlife, and Brébeuf was no exception. His appearance is said to have appeared to Catherine de Saint-Augustine at the Québec Hôtel-Dieu while she was in a state of “mystical ecstasy,” and acted as her spiritual advisor. One story exists in which Catherine de Saint-Augustine ground up part of his bone and fed it in a drink to a heretical and mortally ill man. It is said that the man was not only cured of his disease. Continuing this trend, a possessed woman was exorcised using one of his ribs, again under the care of Catherine de Saint-Augustine in 1660-61; however, the exact circumstances of this event are disputed. Brébeuf’s relics even managed to be used by nuns who were treating wounded Huguenot soldiers, who “reported that his assistance [bone slivers put in soldiers’ drinks] helped rescue these patients from heresy”. His relics became important objects both for the nuns who often used them in a medical setting, but also to those who admired what he represented for the Catholic Church in New France.
Jean de Brébeuf was canonized by Pope Pius XI on 29 June 1930, and proclaimed one of the patron saints of Canada by Pope Pius XII on 16 October 1940. A contemporary newspaper account of the canonization declares: “Brébeuf, the ‘ajax of the mission’ stands out among them [others made saints with him] because of his giant frame, a man of noble birth, of vigorous passions tamed by religion” (New York Times, 19 June 1930), solidifying both the man and his defining drive.
Modern Times
It is said that the modern name of the Native North American sport of lacrosse was first coined by Brébeuf who thought that the sticks used in the game reminded him of a bishop’s crosier (crosse in French, and with the feminine definite article, la crosse).
He is buried in the Church of St. Joseph at the reconstructed Jesuit mission of Sainte-Marie among the Hurons across Highway 12 from the Martyrs’ Shrine Catholic Church near Midland, Ontario. A plaque near the grave of Jean de Brébeuf and Gabriel Lalemant was unearthed during excavations at Ste Marie in 1954. The letters read “P. Jean de Brébeuf /brusle par les Iroquois /le 17 de mars l’an/1649” (Father Jean de Brébeuf, burned by the Iroquois, 17 March 1649.
In September, 1984, Pope John Paul II prayed over Brébeuf’s skull before saying an outdoor Mass on the grounds of the Martyrs’ Shrine. Thousands of people came to hear him speak from a platform built especially for the day.
Many Jesuit schools are named after him, such as Collège Jean-de-Brébeuf in Montreal, Brébeuf College School in Toronto and Brebeuf Jesuit Preparatory School in Indianapolis, Indiana. St. John Brebeuf Regional Secondary School in Abbotsford, British Columbia, Canada and St. Jean de Brebeuf Catholic High School in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada are also named in his honour. There is a high school St-Jean de Brebeuf Catholic High School in Vaughan, Ontario, Canada. There is also Eglise St-Jean de Brebeuf in Sudbury, Ontario. There is also an elementary school in Brampton, Ontario, Canada named after him; called St. Jean Brebeuf Roman Catholic Elementary School as well as one in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada called St. John Brebeuf Catholic School which is part of the St. John Brebeuf Catholic Parish.
The parish municipality of Brébeuf, Quebec is named after him, as is rue de Brébeuf on the Plateau Mont-Royal in Montreal.

 

Adolphus Egerton Ryerson

Adolphus Egerton Ryerson (24 March 1803 – 19 February 1882) was a Methodist minister, educator, politician, and public education advocate in early Ontario, Canada. He was the leading opponent of the closed oligarchy that ran the province, calling it the “Family Compact.”

Methodist

He joined the Methodist Episcopal Church at 18, and was forced to leave the home by his Anglican father. Becoming an itinerant minister – or circuit rider – in the Niagara area, his life in a politically disadvantaged religion formed his tolerant views. As early as 1825 Ryerson emerged as Episcopal Methodism’s most articulate defender in the public sphere by publishing articles (at first anonymously) and later books that argued against the views of Methodism’s chief rival John Strachan and other members of the powerful Family Compact. Ryerson was also elected (by one vote) to serve as the founding editor of Canadian Methodism’s weekly denominational newspaper, the Christian Guardian, established in York, Upper Canada in 1829 and which was also Canada’s first religious newspaper. Ryerson used the paper to argue for the rights of Methodists in the province and, later, to help convince rank-and-file Methodists that a merger with British Wesleyans (effected in 1833) was in their best interest. Ryerson was castigated by the reformist press at that time for apparently abandoning the cause of reform and becoming, at least as far as they were concerned, a Tory. Ryerson resigned the editorship in 1835 only to assume it again at his brother John’s urging from 1838 to 1840. In 1840 Ryerson allowed his name to stand for re-election one last time but was soundly defeated by a vote of 50 to 1 in favour of his co-religionist Jonathan Scott.

Educator

Ryerson helped found the Upper Canada Academy in Cobourg in the 1830s. When it was incorporated in 1841 under the name Victoria College Ryerson assumed the presidency. Victoria continues to exist as part of the University of Toronto. Ryerson also fought for many secularization reforms, to keep power and influence away from any one church, particularly the Church of England in Upper Canada which had pretentions to establishment. His advocacy of Methodism contributed to the eventual sale of the Clergy Reserves—large tracts of land that had been set aside for the “maintenance of the Protestant clergy” under the Constitutional Act of 1791. “In honour of his achievements on behalf of the Methodist Church, Egerton Ryerson received a Doctor of Divinity degree from the (sic) Wesleyan University in Connecticut and served as President of the Church in Canada from 1874 to 1878.”

Such secularization also led to the widening of the school system into public hands. Governor General Sir Charles Metcalfe asked him to become Chief Superintendent of Education for Upper Canada in 1844. It is in this role that Ryerson made his historical mark.

His study of educational systems elsewhere in the Western world led to three School Acts, which would revolutionize education in Canada. His major innovations included libraries in every school, an educational journal and professional development conventions for teachers, a central textbook press using Canadian authors, and securing land grants for universities.

Ryerson’s legacy within Canada’s education system also included the hand he played in the implementation of the controversial Canadian residential school system. It was his study of Native education commissioned in 1847 by the Assistant Superintendent General of Indian Affairs that would become the model upon which Residential Schools were built.

The Normal School at St. James Square was founded in Toronto in 1847, and became the province’s foremost teacher’s academy. It also housed the Department of Education as well as the Museum of Natural History and Fine Arts, which became the Royal Ontario Museum. An agricultural laboratory on the site led to the later founding of the Ontario Agricultural College and the University of Guelph. St. James Square went through various other educational uses before it eventually became part of Ryerson University.

He was also a writer, farmer and sportsman. He retired in 1876, and died in 1882 having left an indelible mark on Canada’s education system. He is buried in Mount Pleasant Cemetery, Toronto.

Ryerson University (Toronto), Ryerson Press (McGraw-Hill Ryerson), and the Township of Ryerson in the Parry Sound District, Ontario, were named after him. As well as the small park, Ryerson Park, in the city of Owen Sound, at the northeast corner of 8th Street East and 5th Avenue East.

Nathaniel “Texas Jack” Reed

Nathaniel “Texas Jack” Reed (March 23, 1862 – January 7, 1950) was a 19th-century American outlaw responsible for many stagecoach, bank, and train robberies throughout the American Southwest during the 1880s and ’90s. He acted on his own and also led a bandit gang, operating particularly in the Rocky Mountains and Indian Territory.

Reed is claimed to have been the last survivor of the “47 most notorious outlaws” of Indian Territory. He became an evangelist in his later years, and could often be seen on the streets of Tulsa preaching against the dangers of following a “life of crime”.^[1][2] His memoirs were published in the 1930s, and are considered valuable collectors’ items (one copy was reportedly sold on the internet for $1,500 in 2007). He claimed to have ridden with the Dalton gang, Bill Doolin, Henry Starr and other outlaws and bandits of the old west. He may have also helped Cherokee Bill, a fellow outlaw from the Indian Territory, in his escape from Fort Smith during the 1880s.

As with many others of the era, Reed’s colorful stories of his almost 10-year career as an outlaw were probably exaggerated by later writers. He claimed to have ridden briefly with the Daltons, and participated in their dual bank robberies in Coffeyville in 1892, as well as in the infamous 1893 gunfight at Ingalls. However, there is no corroborating evidence that he was involved in either of those events.

Biography

Early life

Reed was born in Madison County, Arkansas. His father, Mason Henry Reed, was killed in action fighting for the Union Army during the American Civil War, probably at the Battle of Campbell’s Station on November 16, 1863. His mother was Sarah Elizabeth Prater. Reed lived with a number of relatives, including his maternal grandparents, until 1883 when, at the age of 21, he moved to the American frontier. He worked at various jobs in Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, Texas until he reached Oklahoma, where he became a ranch hand for the Tarry outfit.

During the summer of 1885, his foreman recruited him to rob a train at La Junta, Colorado. In the course of the robbery, Reed entered the passenger car firing his pistol to keep the passengers under control. He later received $6,000 for his part in the hold up. Encouraged by this success, Reed gave up working as a cowboy and became an outlaw. During the next nine years he and his gang robbed trains, stagecoaches, banks and, on one occasion, captured a large shipment of bullion in California.

Robbery at Blackstone Switch

During the early 1890s, when he was living near Muskogee, Oklahoma, Reed learned that a gold shipment was leaving Dallas, Texas on November 13, 1894. He recruited Buz Luckey, William “Will” Smith and Tom Root, and selected Blackstone Switch at Wybark as the site for the robbery. The plan was for Reed to throw the switch as the train approached then, as it entered onto a sidetrack, the gang would use dynamite to enter the express car. Root, a full-blooded Cherokee known for his size and strength, would enter the express car, break open the strong boxes, and bring out the gold. Smith would hold a gun on the engineer and fireman while Luckey stayed with the horses.

Despite their practice staged-robbery the previous day, as the Katy No. 2 approached, Reed threw the switch too early. Engineer Joseph Hotchkiss stopped the train when he saw the signal light change, far short of the siding. Reed and the others were forced to run towards the train yelling and shooting. Hotchkiss and the fireman alerted the messengers using the bell cord connected to the car and jumped off the train to hide in a small ravine nearby.

The railroad company had anticipated the possibility of a robbery, and had moved the gold to another train, putting in its place several armed messengers to guard the express car including Bud Ledbetter, Paden Tolbert, Sid Johnson, Frank Jones. When Reed and the others approached the express car, he called for the messengers to leave the car. When they refused, Reed and Root took cover behind some trees and began shooting into the car. The messengers returned fire, resulting in a gunfight that lasted for nearly an hour. Eventually one of Reed’s men was killed; Reed jumped onto the train and went through the passenger cars forcing passengers to put their valuables into a sack before he and his gang fled.

As they rode away, Reed was shot by Bud Ledbetter; the pain from his wound grew so severe that his partners were forced to leave him behind for the night. He gave them some of his loot, and kept the rest of it in a sack to use as a pillow. He lay on a blanket hiding under a rock ledge until he was found by an Indian woman, who nursed him back to health.

The American Express Company offered a reward of $250 for the arrest and conviction of each member of the gang^.  An extensive manhunt was conducted by U.S. Marshals George Crump and S. Morton Rutherford, and large groups of deputies were sent into the Indian Territory and Creek Nation. While burning the canebrakes in the Verdigris bottoms, one deputy found the burnt remains of Reed’s saddle and threatened to destroy the crops of local residents if they did not turn over Reed and his men. This was considered a legal act, authorized by “The Hanging Judge” Isaac Parker himself, but no one came forward with information. Reed was warned of the search and decided to leave the territory as soon as he was able. He arrived in Seneca, Missouri on December 9, where Bill Lawrence took care of him.

Once fully recovered from his wounds Reed returned to Arkansas in February 1895, where he stayed with his brother in Madison County. Having decided to retire from a life of crime, he wrote to Judge Isaac Parker, agreeing to testify against the man who planned the robbery in exchange for probation, although he did not participate in the proceedings. Smith managed to disappear, but U.S. Marshal Newton LaForce was successful in tracking down Luckey and Root to the latter’s home in Broken Arrow, 15 miles south of Tulsa, Oklahoma. The two fugitives were subsequently killed in a gunfight with LaForce and his men on December 4, 1894.

Later years

Despite Parker’s promise of immunity, Reed was convicted and sentenced to serve five years in prison. However, he served less than one, as shortly before his own death Parker granted Reed his parole, in November 1896. Reed subsequently carried his signed parole from Judge Parker around with him, along with a letter signed by Ledbetter acknowledging that Ledbetter had shot him.

After his release Reed became an evangelist, preaching the rewards of living a respectable, law-abiding life. He also toured the country with a series of Wild West shows. His memoirs, The Life of Texas Jack, were published in 1936, and 35,000 copies of several published pamphlets and dime novels describing his life as an outlaw were sold before his death at home in Tulsa, Oklahoma, at the age of 87. He was buried in St. Paul, Arkansas.

 

Sarojini Naidu

Sarojini Naidu (February 13, 1879 – March 2, 1949), known as Bharatiya Kokila (The Nightingale of India), was a child prodigy, freedom fighter, and poet. Naidu was the first Indian woman to become the President of the Indian National Congress and the first woman to become the governor of an Indian state, the large state of Uttar Pradesh (fourth largest in India). As such, she led the way for women in Indian politics although her name is not as widely known as that of India’s female Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi. In 1925, when she headed a very large political organization in India, no European woman (apart from Annie Besant, the first woman President of the Congress) had held a similar position of leadership. She was active in the Indian Independence Movement, joining Mahatma Gandhi in the Salt March to Dandi, and then leading the Dharasana Satyagraha after the arrests of Gandhi, Abbas Tyabji, and Kasturba Gandhi. She took part in several delegations to visit the British authorities, three times in London where she was with Gandhi at the Round Table Talks in 1931. She also visited Africa and the USA promoting India’s independence struggle. She was also a wife and a mother. Her birthday is celebrated as “Women’s Day” in India. She is remembered as a champion of women’s rights, of Hindu-Muslim unity (writing a biography of Muhammad Jinnah) and as a close colleague and friend of M. K. Gandhi.

Biography

Sarojini Naidu was born in Hyderabad, India as the eldest daughter of scientist, philosopher, and educator Aghornath Chattopadhyaya, and Varada Sundari Devi, a Bengali poetess. Her father was the founder of the Nizam College, Hyderabad and also the first member of the Indian National Congress in Hyderabad with his friend Mulla Abdul Qayyum. Chattopadhyaya’s family heritage was of the Brahman class, originally from Bengal. He was later dismissed from his position as Principal and even banished in retaliation for his political activities. Sarojini Naidu learned to speak Urdu, Telugu, English, Persian and Bengali. Her favorite poet was P.B. Shelley.

She attained national fame for entering Madras University at the age of twelve. At sixteen, she traveled to England to study first at King’s College London and subsequently at Girton College, Cambridge. While in England, she identified with the Suffragette movement. Also in England, she was encouraged by the poets Arthur Simon and Edmond Gausse to explore Indian themes in her writing, such as India’s landscape, her temples and her people. Her first book of poetry, The Golden Threshold, appeared in 1905. Other volumes followed. Her poems featured everyday scenes of Indian life, often drawn from the streets and markets, thus snake charmers and beggars and bangle sellers populate her poetry. It was in 1905 that she joined the Indian National Congress in protest over the Partition of Benga. She was a strong supporter of women’s rights, a champion of education for all and of Hindu-Muslim unity.

In the Freedom struggle

She joined the Indian independence movement, in the wake of the aftermath of partition of Bengal in 1905. During 1903-17 Sarojini came into contact with Gopal Krishna Gokhale, Rabindranath Tagore, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Annie Besant, C. P. Ramaswami Iyer, Mohandas Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru.

From 1915 to 1918 she lectured all over India on welfare of youth, dignity of labour, women’s emancipation and nationalism. She helped to establish the Women’s Indian Association (WIA) (1917) to campaign for the female franchise. That year, on December 15, she led a delegation of women to meet the British Secretary of State for India who was visiting India, demanding women’s rights and the vote. Women, the delegation told the Minister, were awakening to their civic responsibilities. She spoke on women’s rights at the special session of the Indian National Congress which met in Bombay in August, 1918. In May, 1918 she accompanied Annie Besant, President of the WIA, to present the case for the women’s vote to the Joint Select Committee considering Indian constitutional reforms in London, where they told the MPs that Indian women were “strong and united and ready to reform society.”

After meeting Jawaharlal Nehru in 1916, she also took up the cause of the indigo workers of chappel head.

In March 1919, the British government passed the Rowlatt Act by which the possession of seditious documents was deemed illegal. Mohandas Gandhi organized the Non-Cooperation Movement to protest and Naidu was the first to join the movement which the government worked to suppress.

In July 1919, Naidu became the Home Rule League’s ambassador to England where the Government of India Act (1919) was being passed, which did create an Legislative Assembly but with a small membership of 93 elected delegates (with 42 appointed and an upper house of 34 elected and 26 appointed members). It did not grant women the vote. In July 1920 she returned to India and on August 1 Mahatma Gandhi declared the Non-Cooperation Movement. In January 1924, she was one of the two Indian National Congress delegates at the East African Indian Congress. She traveled in East and South Africa as an advocate of the needs of the scattered Indian communities.

President of the Congress

In 1925 Naidu was elected as the first Indian woman to serve as President of the Indian National Congress, eight years after Anie Bessant had been elected. This was a powerful position. It is doubtful if any other woman has achieved such an important political post at this point, apart from regnant Queens.

Naidu visited New York in October 1928 to promote the cause of India’s independence. While there, she also expressed concern regarding the unjust treatment of the African-Americans and the Amerindians. Upon her return to India she became a member of Congress Working Committee.

On January 26, 1930, the National Congress proclaimed its independence from the British Empire. On May 5, Mohandas Gandhi was arrested. Naidu was arrested shortly thereafter and was in jail for several months. She, along with Gandhi, was released on January 31, 1931. Later that year, they were again arrested. Naidu was eventually released due to her poor health and Gandhi was released in 1933. In 1931, she participated in the Round Table Summit in London, along with Gandhiji and Pundit Malaviyaji. In 1942, she was arrested during the “Quit India” protest and stayed in jail for 21 months with Gandhiji. Naidu shared a warm relationship with Mohandas Gandhi, even calling him “Mickey Mouse.”

At the Asian Relations Conference of March 1947, Naidu presided over the Steering Committee.

In Post-Independence India

On August 15, 1947, with the independence of India, Naidu became the Governor of Uttar Pradesh, India’s first woman governor and she died in office in 1949.

Poetry, writings and quotes

In 1905, the first volume of her collection of poems was published as The Golden Threshold. Two more volumes were published: The Bird of Time (1912) and The Broken Wing in (1917).

Her poetry had beautiful words that could also be sung. Her collection of poems. Later, “The Magic of Sring,” “Silver Tears,” and “The Feather of the Dawn” among others were published.

Naidu writes:

Once in the dream of a night I stood

Lone in the light of a magical wood,

Soul-deep in visions that poppy-like sprang;

And spirits of Truth were the birds that sang,

And spirits of Love were the stars that glowed,

And spirits of Peace were the streams that flowed

In that magical wood in the land of sleep.

(Excerpt from Song of a Dream)

Naidu said, “When there is oppression, the only self-respecting thing is to rise and say this shall cease today, because my right is justice.” Naidu adds, “If you are stronger, you have to help the weaker boy or girl both in play and in the work.”

In 1916, Naidu published the first biography of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Muhammad Jinnah: An Ambassador of Unity.

Legacy

Naidu’s election as first woman leader of the Indian National Congress and as the first Governor of a state pioneered women’s entry into Indian politics. Subsequently, India has had a woman Prime Minister and a woman President. Her role in the freedom struggle may have been less important than that of M. K. Gandhi, who in many respects was her mentor but her leadership of the movement during the Mahatmas’ imprisonment represents a far from insignificant contribution. She is remembered, too, for her sense of humor once famously commenting that it “cost a lot to keep Gandhi poor” and was well-known for calling herself a “Governess.” Several of her books are still in print. The Hunger Project has an annual essay prize for best journalistic reporting on women in local democracy in her honor. There is a Sarojini Naidu Centre for Women Studies at the Jamia Millia Islamia in Delhi and a Sarojini Naidu Centre for Women’s Studies at the Dr. D. Swaminadhan Research Foundation in Hyderabad, both named in her honor. According to Encyclopedia Britannica, she is “judged by many the greatest” of Indian “women poets.”

Family

At the age of 17, while still in England, she met Dr. Muthyala Govindarajulu Naidu and fell in love with him. He was from Andhra Pradesh. Her marriage was a very happy one. They were married in Madras in 1898. They had four children: Jayasurya, Padmaja, Randheer, and Leelamani. Despite the fact that Govindarajulu was a non-Brahman, her parents were happy to bless the marriage (rare at this time).

Naidu’s brother, Virendranath Chattopadhyaya, was also a noted Indian activist. During World War I Virendranath was instrumental in founding the Berlin Committee and was one of the leading figures of the Hindu German Conspiracy, a plot to ferment an anti-British, pro German revolt in India. He later became committed to Communism, traveling to Soviet Russia where he is believed to have been executed on Joseph Stalin’s orders in 1937. Another brother, Harindranath, was an actor.

Queen Liliuokalani of Hawaii

Queen Liliuokalani of Hawaii (September 2, 1838 – November 11, 1917), originally named Lydia Kamakaeha, also known as Lydia Kamakaeha Paki, had the royal name of Liliuokalani given to her by her brother, King Kalakaua when he declared her his heir apparent. Later, after she was deposed, she was required to revert back to her Christian married name, Lydia K. Dominis.

Although her reign was only two years, it would prove to be eventful. She was the last monarch of the Kingdom of Hawaii as Hawaii was then known. Her reign marked an important crossroads for Hawaii when it was annexed and later made a territory and then granted statehood. Although Queen Liliuokalani strongly resisted these developments, her actions would prove to be important in setting the direction of growth that the newly sewn seeds of democracy would take.

Early life

Hawaii’s last sovereign queen was born on September 2, 1838, in Honolulu. She was born to High Chief Caesar Kapa’akea and High Chiefess Keohokalole. Her Christian name given at her baptism was “Lydia.” She became a hanai child when she was offered to High Chief Paki and H.C. Konia (a grand daughter of King Kamehameha I). Hanai is a tradition whereby a child is adopted into a royal family in order to secure a higher rank for that child. The hanai tradition also served to bond the families of chiefs to one another.^[1] Liliuokalani’s childhood years were spent studying and playing with Bernice Pauahi, the Paki’s natural daughter, who she considered her hanai sister. Liliuokalani was educated at the Royal School, a boarding school run by Christian missionaries. Although she was unhappy about leaving home, she excelled in her studies and became fluent in English. She also demonstrated a gift for piano and singing—talents that would be important to her throughout life. She enjoyed studying the Greek myths because she could easily relate them to her own knowledge of Hawaiian legends.

Reign

On September 16, 1862, at the age of 24, she married John Owen Dominis, who became Governor of Oahu and Maui. They had no children together but later she was given three hanai children. When her younger brother Prince William Pitt Leleiohoku died, Liluokalani was made heir apparent by her older brother, then the reigning king, thus becoming “Princess Liliuokalani,” a role that she took seriously. Her own heir apparent for several years was her niece Victoria Kaiulani, although Kaiulani ended up predeceasing her. In 1877 she visited all of the Hawaiian islands including the leper colony on Molokai where Father Damien lived and worked with those suffering from the highly contagious disease of leprosy. In 1881 she was credited with helping to contain a small pox epidemic on the island of Oahu by ordering government ministers to stop travel between the islands.

She served as regent when her brother, King Kalākaua was away on royal business and in that same year she served as an interpreter when she visited Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee with the Hawaiian royal delegation. It was while in England, that the seeds were sewn for the controversial Bayonet Constitution which would limit the power of the monarchy in Hawaii. There were many residents of Hawaii who wished to see a monarchy that was more similar to a Constitutional Monarchy, one that gave less power to reigning heads of state and more authority to a cabinet and legislature. Liluokalani did not agree with her brother’s signing of this agreement after his visit to England and later would attempt to reverse its affects.

When King Kalakaua suddently died, Liliuokalani inherited the throne and was coronated on January 17, 1891. Seven months later her husband, who had been very supportive companion, died as well.

Bayonet Constitution and the sugar trade

Shortly after she gained power she tried to abrogate the “Bayonet Constitution” and draft a new constitution that would restore power to the monarchy. In her new constitution she stipulated that only naturalized or native male Hawaiians could vote. Many Hawaiian subjects, both European and Native, viewed this as a threat to progress.

Additionally, the McKinley Act, which eliminated foreign tariffs, created havoc with Hawaii’s favored status in regards to the sugar industry. The Reciprocity Agreement, a free trade agreement between Hawaii and the United States, helped create a profitable and monopolistic sugar market for Hawaii. Now other countries shared the same tax free privilege and could compete more readily with Hawaii. The struggling economy in Hawaii bolstered the idea of annexation. A group of businessmen and government leaders who supported annexation formed the Committee of Safety. To accomplish their goals they conspired in secret to overthrow the Queen. On January 17, 1893, aided by John L. Stevens, the American minister in Hawaii, who ordered troops from the U.S.S. Boston ashore, the Queen was deposed and a new provisional government was established.

Republic of Hawaii is established

President Grover Cleveland, who was sympathetic with the Queen, commissioned the Blount Report. Aided by its findings he concluded that the overthrow of Liliuokalani was done illegally. On November 16, 1893 he offered to give the throne back to Liliuokalani if she would grant amnesty to everyone involved (She initially refused). The United States House of Representatives agreed with the President but the Senate did not support him. While this process was underway representatives from Hawaii’s new provisional government continued to lobby the federal government for annexation.

Congress responded to President Cleveland’s appeals with another investigation and submitted the Morgan Report, compiled by the United States Senate on February 26, 1894. This report exonerated both Minister Stevens and the U.S. troops from any responsibility for the overthrow. On July 4, 1894, the Republic of Hawaii was proclaimed and Sanford B. Dole became its first president (In 1900 he would become Hawaii’s territorial governor). The Republic of Hawaii was recognized immediately by the United States government, although Walter Q. Gresham, Cleveland’s Secretary of State, remained antagonistic towards the new government.

Abdication

Liliuokalani was arrested on January 16, 1895 (several days after a failed rebellion by Robert Wilcox) when firearms were found in the gardens of her home. She denied any involvement or prior knowledge of the firearms. She was sentenced to five years of hard labor in prison and fined $5000, but the sentence was commuted to imprisonment in an upstairs bedroom of Iolani Palace.

After eight months she abdicated her throne in return for the release of her jailed supporters. Failing to regain her throne after her appeals to the American government, she unsuccessfully entered claims against the federal government totaling $450,000 for property and other losses, and made personal claim to the crown lands. The territorial legislature of Hawaii finally voted her an annual pension of $4,000 and permitted her to receive the income from a sugar plantation of 6,000 acres (24 km²). She went home to Washington Place, where she lived as a private citizen until her death in 1917. She died due to complications from a stroke. She was 79 years old. She is interred at the Manuma’ala Royal Mausoleum in Nu’uanu.

Annexation

On July 7, 1898 President William McKinley signed the Annexation Treaty. Liliuokalani visited Washington D.C. to protest, even though it seemed that annexation was inevitable. Although ordered to revert to the name of Lydia Dominis, she was still regarded as “Queen” by the people of Hawaii. She and her supporters refused to attend Annexation Day on August 12th of that year.

Hawaii was annexed at the same time as Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, the former colonies of Spain taken over by the U.S. after the Spanish-American War. Cuba, however, where the precipitating event of the war occurred (the explosion of the battleship USS Maine in Havana), was never annexed by the United States.

In 1900, under President Theodore Roosevelt, Hawaii became an official Territory of the United States. In 1959, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed a bill granting Hawaii statehood. Hawaii formally became the 50th state of the Union on August 21, 1959. In 1993, 100 years after the overthrow, President Bill Clinton sighed a Congressional resolution (Public Law 103-150) in which the United States government formally apologized to the Native Hawaiian people.

Legacy

In 1897 Liliuokalani wrote Hawaii’s Story by Hawaii’s Queen, in which she gives her account of Hawaiian history including the overthrow of the monarchy.

Queen Lili`uokalani was a talented musician and accomplished composer. She wrote approximately 165 songs, including Ke Aloha O Ka Haku — The Queen’s Prayer, which was written during her imprisonment. Her best known composition was the popular and lasting favorite Aloha `Oe. Additionally, she translated many Hawaiian stories into English.

Before her death she established a trust fund for orphaned Hawaiian children. The social service agency, “Queen Liliuokalani’s Children Center,” which is still in existence today, was created by her trust to help orphaned and economically disadvantaged Hawaiian children.

 

Maud Leonora Menten

Maud Leonora Menten (March 20, 1879 – July 26, 1960) was a Canadian physician-scientist who made significant contributions to enzyme kinetics and histochemistry. Her name is associated with the famous Michaelis–Menten equation in biochemistry.

Maud Menten was born in Port Lambton, Ontario and studied medicine at the University of Toronto (B.A. 1904, M.B. 1907, M.D. 1911). She was among the first women in Canada to earn a medical doctorate. She completed her thesis work at University of Chicago. At that time women were not allowed to do research in Canada, so she decided to do research in other countries such as the United States and Germany.

In 1912 she moved to Berlin where she worked with Leonor Michaelis and co-authored their paper in Biochemische Zeitschrift (1913;49:333–369) which showed that the rate of an enzyme-catalyzed reaction is proportional to the amount of the enzyme-substrate complex. This relationship between reaction rate and enzyme-substrate concentration is known as the Michaelis-Menten equation. After studying with Michaelis in Germany she entered graduate school at the University of Chicago where she obtained her PhD in 1916. Her dissertation was titled “The Alkalinity of the Blood in Malignancy and Other Pathological Conditions; Together with Observations on the Relation of the Alkalinity of the Blood to Barometric Pressure”. Menten worked as a pathologist at the University of Pittsburgh (1923–1950) and as a research fellow at the British Columbia Medical Research Institute (1951–1953).

Early life

Little is known about her parents and childhood other than that the Menten family moved to Harrison Mills, where Maud’s mother worked as a postmistress. After completing secondary school, Menten attended the University of Toronto where she earned a bachelor of arts degree in 1904 and a master’s degree in physiology in 1907. While earning her graduate degree, she worked as a demonstrator in the university’s physiology lab.

A talented student, Menten was appointed a fellow at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York City in 1907. There, she studied the effect of radium bromide on cancerous tumors in rats. Menten and two other scientists published the results of their experiment, producing the institute’s first monograph. After a year at the Institute, Menten worked as an intern at the New York Infirmary for Women and Children. She returned to Canada and began studies at the University of Toronto a year later. In 1911 she became one of the first Canadian women to receive a doctor of medicine degree.

Work

Her most famous work was on enzyme kinetics together with Michaelis, based on earlier findings of Victor Henri. This resulted in the Michaelis–Menten equations. Menten also invented the azo-dye coupling reaction for alkaline phosphatase, which is still used in histochemistry. She characterised bacterial toxins from B. paratyphosus, Streptococcus scarlatina and Salmonella ssp. and conducted the first electrophoretic separation of proteins in 1944. She worked on the properties of hemoglobin, regulation of blood sugar level, and kidney function. She wrote or co-wrote about 100 research papers.

Personal Life and Aside Work

Despite suffering from arthritis she was also an accomplished musician and painter; there were several exhibitions of her paintings.

Skloot portrays Menten as a petite dynamo of a woman who wore “Paris hats, blue dresses with stained-glass hues, and Buster Brown shoes.” She drove a Model T Ford through the University of Pittsburgh area for some 32 years and enjoyed many adventurous and artistic hobbies. She played the clarinet, painted paintings worthy of art exhibitions, climbed mountains, went on an Arctic expedition, and enjoyed astronomy. She also mastered several languages, including Russian, French, German, Italian, and at least one Native-American language. Although Menten did most of her research in the United States, she retained her Canadian citizenship throughout her life. After her retirement from the University of Pittsburgh in 1950, she returned to Canada where she continued to do cancer research at the British Columbia Medical Research Institute. Poor health forced Menten’s retirement in 1955, and she died July 20, 1960, at the age of 81, in Leamington, Ontario.

Throughout her career Menten was affiliated with many scientific societies, and in 1998 she was inducted into the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame. She was also honored at the University of Toronto with a plaque and at the University of Pittsburgh with memorial lectures and a named chair.

At Menten’s death, colleagues Aaron H. Stock and Anna-Mary Carpenter honored the Canadian biochemist in an obituary in Nature: “Menten was untiring in her efforts on behalf of sick children. She was an inspiring teacher who stimulated medical students, resident physicians and research associates to their best efforts. She will long be remembered by her associates for her keen mind, for a certain dignity of manner, for unobtrusive modesty, for her wit, and above all for her enthusiasm for research.”

 

Emily Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake)

 

Emily Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake) (March 10, 1861 – March 7, 1913), who is commonly known as E. Pauline Johnson or just Pauline Johnson, was a Canadian writer and performer. Pauline Johnson is often remembered for her poems that celebrate her aboriginal heritage at a time when little social advantage attached to such an association. One such poem is the frequently anthologized “The Song my Paddle Sings.” Pauline Johnson’s writings and performances have been rediscovered by a number of literary, feminist, and post colonial critics who appreciate her importance as a New Woman and figure of resistance to dominant ideas about race, gender, Native Rights, and Canada. Furthermore, the increase in First Nations literary activity during the 1980s and 1990s prompted writers and scholars to investigate Native oral and written literary history, a history to which Johnson made a significant contribution.

Family history

In 1758, Pauline Johnson’s great-grandfather, Dan Hansen was baptized by Jacob Tekahionwake Johnson on the encouragement of Sir William Johnson, superintendent of Indian Affairs for the northern district of the American colonies. Jacob Tekahionwake Johnson eventually moved north from his home in the Mohawk River Valley, which is now New York State, to the newly designated Six Nations territory. One of his sons, John Smoke Johnson, had a talent for oratory, spoke English, and demonstrated his patriotism to the crown during the War of 1812. As a result of these abilities and actions, John Smoke Johnson was made a Pine Tree Chief upon the request of the British government. Although John Smoke Johnson’s title could not be inherited, his wife Helen Martin descended from a founding family of the Six Nations; thus, it was through her lineage and insistence that George Johnson became a chief.

George Johnson inherited his father’s gift for languages and began his career as a church translator on the Six Nations reserve. This position introduced him to Emily Howells, the sister-in-law of the Anglican missionary he assisted. News of the couple’s interracial marriage in 1853 displeased the Johnson and Howells families. However, the birth of George and Emily’s first child reconciled the Johnson family relations. In his later roles as a government interpreter and hereditary Chief, George Johnson developed a reputation as a talented mediator between Native and European interests. George Johnson also made enemies through his efforts to stop illegal trading of reserve timber for whiskey and suffered a series of violent physical attacks at the hands of Native and non-Native men involved in this traffic. George Johnson’s health was substantially weakened by these attacks, which contributed to his death from a fever in 1884.

Pauline’s mother, Emily Howells was born to a well-established British family who left England for North America in 1832, the same year as literary sisters Susanna Moodie and Catherine Parr Traill crossed the Atlantic. Henry Howells, Emily Howells’ father, was raised as a Quaker and was interested in joining the American movement to abolish slavery. He moved his family to a number of American cities, establishing schools to gain an income, before settling in Eaglewood, New Jersey. Emily Howells’ mother, Mary Best, died when Emily was five. Her father remarried twice and fathered a total of twenty-four children, who, contrary to what his educational endeavors and abolitionist agenda suggest, he treated cruelly.

Henry Howells, like a growing number of people living in the northern United States, displayed Christian outrage at the practice of slavery, which he cultivated in his children by admonishing them to “pray for the blacks and to pity the poor Indians. Nevertheless, his compassion did not preclude the view that his own race was superior to others.” When Emily Howells moved to Six Nations at age twenty-one to help care for her sister’s growing family and fell in love with George Johnson, she gained a more realistic understanding of Native peoples and her father’s beliefs.

Emily Pauline Johnson was born in Chiefswood, the family home built by her father on the Six Nations Indian Reserve outside of Brantford, Ontario, in 1861. Pauline Johnson was the youngest of four children born to George Henry Martin Johnson (1816 – 1884), a Mohawk, and Emily Susanna Howells Johnson (1824-1898), an English woman.

Her mother, Emily Howells was the first cousin of American author William Dean Howells, who disparaged Pauline Johnson’s poetic abilities. Emily Howells’ dramatic life and relationships are explored in a series of articles written by Pauline Johnson for The Mother’s Magazine, which were later reprinted in The Moccasin Maker (1913).

Early life and education

The Johnsons enjoyed a high standard of living, their family and home were well known, and Chiefswood was visited by important guests such as Alexander Graham Bell, Homer Watson, and Lady and Lord Dufferin.

Emily and George Johnson encouraged their four children, who were born on Native land and were thus wards of the British government, to respect, and gain knowledge of, both the Mohawk and the English aspects of their heritage. Although Emily Johnson fostered cultural pride, she also instilled inhibitions in her children and insisted that they behave perfectly to prevent rejection. John Smoke Johnson was an important presence in the lives of his grandchildren, especially Pauline. He spent much time telling them stories in the Mohawk tongue that they learned to comprehend but not to speak. Pauline Johnson believed that she inherited her talent for elocution from her grandfather and, near her time of death, she expressed regret that she had not discovered more of her grandfather’s knowledge.

As the youngest of her siblings and being a sickly child, Pauline Johnson was not forced to attend Brantford’s Mohawk Institute, one of Canada’s first residential schools, like her oldest brothers were required to. Instead, her education was for the most part informal, deriving from her mother, a series of non-Native governesses, a few years at the small school on the reserve, and self-directed reading in Chiefswood’s library. There she became familiar with literary works by Byron, Tennyson, Keats, Browning, and Milton. She especially enjoyed reading tales about the nobility of Native peoples such as Longfellow’s epic poem The Song of Hiawatha and John Richardson’s Wacousta. At age 14, Johnson was sent to attend Brantford Central Collegiate with her brother Allen and she graduated in 1877. Even according to the standards of her time, Johnson’s formal education was limited and throughout her life, and she worried that her lack of education would prevent her from achieving her high literary aspirations.

Shortly after George Johnson’s death in 1884, the family rented out Chiefswood and Pauline Johnson moved with her mother and sister to a modest home in Brantford, Ontario.

Literary and stage career

During the 1880s Pauline Johnson wrote, performed in amateur theatre productions, and enjoyed the Canadian outdoors, particularly by canoe. Johnson’s first full-length poem, “My Little Jean,” a sentimental piece written for her friend Jean Morton, first appeared in the New York publication Gems of Poetry in 1883 and the production, printing, and performance of Johnson’s poetry increased steadily afterwards. In 1885, she traveled to Buffalo, New York to attend a ceremony in honor of Iroquois leader Sagoyewatha, also known as Red Jacket, and wrote a poem which relays her admiration for the renowned orator and voices pleas to reconcile feuds between British and Native peoples. At a Brantford ceremony held in October 1886 in honor of Mohawk leader Joseph Brant, Johnson presented her poem “Ode to Brant,” which expresses the importance of brotherhood between Native and European immigrants while ultimately endorsing British authority. This performance generated a long article in the Toronto Globe and increased interest in Johnson’s poetry and ancestry.

Throughout the remainder of the 1880s, Johnson established herself as a Canadian writer and cultivated an audience amongst those who read her poetry in periodicals such as Globe, The Week, and Saturday Night. Johnson contributed to the critical mass of Canadian authors who were constructing a distinct national literature. The inclusion of two of her poems in W.D. Lighthall’s Songs from the Great Dominion (1889) signaled her membership amongst Canada’s important authors. In her early literary works, Johnson drew lightly from her Mohawk heritage, and instead lyricized Canadian life, landscapes, and love in a post-Romantic mode reflective of the literary interests she shared with her mother.

In 1892, Johnson recited her poem A Cry from an Indian Wife, a work based on the battle of Cut Knife Creek during the Riel Rebellion, at a Canadian Authors Evening arranged by the Young Men’s Liberal Club. The success of this performance initiated Johnson’s 15 year stage career and encouraged perceptions of her as a girl (although she was 31 at the time of this performance), a beauty, and an exotic Aboriginal elocutionist. After her first recital season, Johnson decided to emphasize the Native aspects of her literature and performance by assembling and donning a feminine Native costume. Johnson’s decision to develop this stage persona, and the popularity it inspired, indicates that the audiences she encountered in Canada, England, and the United States were educated to recognize representations of Native peoples on stage and were entertained by such productions.

Johnson’s complete textual output is difficult to establish as much of her large body of work was published in periodicals. Her first volume of poetry, The White Wampum, was published in London in 1895, and followed by Canadian Born in 1903. The contents of these volumes, along with some additional poems, were published as Flint and Feather in 1912. This volume has been reprinted many times, becoming one of the best-selling titles of Canadian poetry. Since the 1917 edition, Flint and Feather has been misleadingly subtitled “The Complete Poems of E. Pauline Johnson.”

After retiring from the stage in August 1909, Johnson moved to Vancouver, British Columbia and continued her writing. She created a series of articles for the Daily Province based on stories related by her friend Chief Joe Capilano of the Squamish people of North Vancouver. In 1911, to support the ill and poor Johnson, a group of friends organized the publication of these stories under the title Legends of Vancouver. They remain classics of that city’s literature. The Shagganappi (1913) and The Moccasin Maker (1913), posthumous publications, are collections of selected periodical stories Johnson penned on a number of sentimental, didactic, and biographical topics. Veronica Strong-Boag and Carole Gerson provide a provisional chronological list of Johnson’s numerous and diverse writings in their text Paddling Her Own Canoe: The Times and Texts of E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake) (2000).

Johnson died of breast cancer in Vancouver, British Columbia on March 7, 1913. Her funeral (the largest in Vancouver up to that time), was held on what would have been her 52nd birthday and her ashes are buried near Siwash Rock in Vancouver’s Stanley Park. In Legends of Vancouver, Johnson relates a Squamish legend of how a man was transformed into Siwash Rock “as an indestructible monument to Clean Fatherhood.” In another story, she relates the history of Deadman’s Island, a small islet off Stanley Park, that explains its name. In a small poem in the same book, Johnson coins the name Lost Lagoon to describe one of her favorite areas in the park because it seemed to disappear when the water emptied at low tide. Although Lost Lagoon has since been transformed into a permanent, fresh water lake, Johnson’s name for it remains.

Criticism and legacy

Despite the acclaim she received from contemporaries, Pauline Johnson’s reputation significantly declined in the decades between 1913 and 1961. In 1961, on the centenary of her birth, Johnson was celebrated with the issuing of a commemorative stamp bearing her image, “rendering her the first woman (other than the Queen), the first author, and the first aboriginal Canadian to be thus honored.” Despite recognition as an important Canadian figure, a number of biographers and literary critics deride Johnson’s literary contributions and contend that her abilities as a performer, whether in her signature Native or evening dress, largely contributed to the reputation her work received during her lifetime.

Also, W. J. Keith wrote: “Pauline Johnson’s life was more interesting than her writing … with ambitions as a poet, she produced little or nothing of value in the eyes of critics who emphasize style rather than content.”

Margaret Atwood admits that she did not examine literature written by Native authors in Survival, her seminal text on Canadian literature, and states that upon its publication in 1973, she could not find any such works. She questions, “Why did I overlook Pauline Johnson? Perhaps because, being half-white, she somehow didn’t rate as the real thing, even among Natives; although she is undergoing reclamation today.” Atwood’s commentary indicates that questions regarding the validity of Johnson’s claims to Aboriginal identity have contributed to her critical neglect.

As Atwood suggests, in recent years, Pauline Johnson’s writings and performances have been rediscovered by a number of literary, feminist, and post colonial critics who appreciate her importance as a New Woman and figure of resistance to dominant ideas about race, gender, Native Rights, and Canada. Furthermore, the increase in First Nations literary activity during the 1980s and 1990s prompted writers and scholars to investigate Native oral and written literary history, a history to which Johnson made a significant contribution.

In addition to her commemoration on a stamp, at least four Canadian schools are named in Johnson’s honor.

Mary Jemison

Mary Jemison (1743 – 1833) was an American frontier girl who was kidnapped by French and Shawnee raiders, living out her life among the people of the Seneca Nation and later coming to know white settlers in New York, to whom she told her fascinating story.

Mary’s Shawnee captors murdered her parents and several siblings, and then sold her to two Seneca women, who adopted her. She married twice and had eight children and numerous grandchildren. Her Seneca clan eventually settled in New York, where she came to own land and lived her later years among the white settlers there. She told her story to writer James Seaver in 1824, who published her story in a book and made her famous.

Jemison’s story provided insights into the grave suffering of captives among the Native Americans and also into the lives of the Indians in general, and their women in particular. She is buried at Letchworth State Park on the grounds of a Seneca Council House, where a memorial to her is located and historical documents related to her life are kept. Mary Jemison’s remains were relocated there by William Pryor Letchworth (for whom the park is named) and rededicated in 1872.

Early life

Mary Jemison was born to Thomas and Jane Erwin Jemison aboard the ship William and Mary, in the fall of 1743, while en route from Northern Ireland to America. Upon their arrival, the couple and children, John, Thomas, Betsey, and Mary, their youngest, joined other Scots-Irish immigrants and headed west from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to what was then the western frontier (now central Pennsylvania). There, they squatted on territory that was under the authority of the Iroquois Confederacy. Mary’s parents had two more sons, Matthew and Robert.

During the time the Jemisons were establishing their home in the frontier, the French and Indian War was raging. One morning in 1758, a raiding party consisting of six Shawnee Native Americans and four Frenchmen captured Mary, her parents, and siblings except her two older brothers, who hid in a barn and escaped to live with relatives.

On the route to Fort Duquesne—where the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers meet to create the Ohio River in modern-day Pittsburgh—an even greater tragedy struck. Mary’s mother, father, Betsey, Matthew, and Robert, plus a neighbor woman and her two children, were killed in horrible ways and also scalped. Only Mary and a neighbor boy, young Davy Wheelock, were spared. Once the party reached the Fort, Mary was sold to two Seneca Indians, who took her down the Ohio river. The Senecas adopted Mary, giving her the name Corn Tassel, then later “little woman of great courage.”

Life with Native Americans

Mary told her biographer James Seaver of her horrific kidnapping experience and how she watched her captors dry her parents’ scalps on hoops by the fire. She suffered hunger and exhaustion on the long trek into the wilderness and finally was sold to the two Seneca sisters to replace their brother, who had died in battle against George Washington. She was later nearly taken back by settlers at the fort, but her new “family” spirited her away.

Mary reported that her new sisters treated her as if she was their actual sister. She quickly began to learn the language and to love them for their kind and protective treatment of her.

Mary was 17 when she was married to Sheninjee. Her husband’s kindness won her heart and she reported that she truly loved him. Concerned that the end of the war would mean the return of captives and thus the loss of his young wife, Sheninjee took Mary on a difficult 700-mile journey to the Sehgahunda Valley along the Genesee River in New York. Although Mary reached this destination, her husband did not. He had left her with his brothers in order to hunt along the way, took ill, and died.

Now a widow, Mary was taken in by Sheninjee’s clan and made her home at Little Beard’s Town (present-day Cuylerville, New York). The stark life, simple food, and limited possessions showed the extreme suffering of the Native Americans in time of war and famine. She suffered in many ways but grew in strength and wisdom and lived for the sake of her children.

Mary related that the Indian women worked together as a team without a strong hierarchy but “elected” a leader for each work effort. The women helped complete each other’s jobs, shared food, and exchanged stories as they worked. She said that no one felt “different” from the others, even herself as a white woman, but that all were part of a familial group. Men and women did separate jobs. She said that the women had some influence over the men as individuals, but the men, especially the leaders of the tribe or clan, made all the community-level decisions that affected the women.

While she was still young, the local Seneca chief wanted to ransom Mary to the whites, but her brother-in-law threated to kill her before he would allow her to be ransomed. Her sister then told her to hide in the woods with her baby and only return when it was safe. She reported being terrified during this ordeal. The chief indeed came to ransom her for money which Mary believed would have been spent on whiskey, but her brother’s determination and her sister’s help saved her, and she was able to live with her husband’s family afterward until she remarried.

There, she was later married to another Seneca chief named Hiakatoo and had six more children. Her new husband was a leader in the Cherry Valley massacre during the American Revolutionary War, in which British and Seneca Native Americans attacked the fort and village of Cherry Hill in eastern New York on November 11, 1778. When revolutionary General John Sullivan’s army retaliated and destroyed her town, Mary was then required to move to the Gardeau Flats near Castile, New York.

Mary also told Seaver the terrible story of how her son, John, killed his brother and cousin in a jealous rage and then died a violent death himself. Despite having her heart broken in these and other ways throughout her life, she was remembered by those who knew her, both Native American and white, as as a constantly generous, and kind woman.

Later life

Much of the land at Little Beard’s Town was sold by the Senecas to white settlers in 1797. By 1823, most of the remainder of the land was sold, except for a two-acre tract reserved for Mary’s use. She owned the largest herd of cattle in the region due to a 1797 tribal grant which made her one of the largest landowners. Her land title was confirmed by the state in 1817, at which time she became a naturalized U.S. citizen. Known locally as the “White Woman of the Genesee,” Mary lived on the tract until she sold it in 1831, and moved to the Buffalo Creek Reservation with her family. She was noted for her generosity and cheerfulness, and was said to be physically vigorous well into her 80s.

A writer named H.A. Dudley published a report, in 1893, describing his meeting Mary Jemison when visiting with his aunt, Mary called his aunt “the woman who had hair just like my mother’s.”

The old woman (Mary) would stroke the auburn tresses, and sit down on her low and well-worn rocking chair and croon over her reflections of the mother who charged her, when ruthlessly separated in the woods of Pennsylvania, not to forget the name of her childhood, nor the prayers she had taught her in the pioneer home which had that day been burned to the ground.

At that first visit, Dudley reported, Mary was small in height—another report described her as four and a half feet tall—and dressed in Indian clothing with moccasins, pantaletts or buckskin, petticoats, and an overgarment for her body with shoulders. She also wore a blanket when she went outside.

At this time, Mary lived with her daughter, Polly, her sons, Tom and John, and perhaps some others. However, the boys would disappear as soon as any white visitors came and not return until the guests left. Polly would stay doing work around the house while the visitors talked, but she seemed “relieved” when they left.

When white friends came to visit on Sundays, Mary, normally reserved, would sometimes open up and talk about her life. She reported that she had tried once to go back and live among white people but could not. Her mixed-race children would not be accepted and she had grown accustomed to the style and habits of the Indians. She said she was just “too old now to learn again the ways of the whites.” She also loved her beautiful acres, which were her home, so she stayed where she was with the Native Americans.

By 1830, only white farmers remained in the area. They reportedly looked with “envious eyes” on her rich bottom lands, which were underused by her family. She was said to be “white woman enough to own her own land, but too much of an Indian to work it profitably.” She then decided to move with the Indians to the reservation near Buffalo, New York. So she sold her pleasant home and went with her tribe to the reservation.

Another account of Mary came through businessman William Pryor Letchworth who asked local resident, William B. Munson, to describe the woman he had known as a young man. His account appeared in Doty’s History of Livingston County.

The “White Woman” was quite intelligent, sociable, and communicative, but grave and serious after the manner of the Indians with whom her life from early childhood had been spent… Mentioning to her upon one occasion that I had read the history of her life, and that it had interested me very much, “Ah, yes!” she replied, “but I did not tell them, who wrote it down, half of what it was.” It was thought at that time that she withheld information the Indians feared might stir up against them the prejudices of the white people.

The descendants of a man who knew her, Truman Stone, tell of a time of famine, when their great-grandfather went looking for grain. He walked 25 miles and found that no one had enough to sell. When he finally met Mary Jemison she gave it freely and refused to take any money from him. He reported that she fed him some Native American cake made of cracked corn with a little salt added and baked in a kettle. “After the cake was done, she broke a goose egg into the kettle and fried it… she invited me to eat, which I did, and it was the best dinner I ever ate.”

Mary lived the rest of her life with the people of the Seneca Nation near Buffalo until she died on September 19, 1833. She was initially buried on the Buffalo Creek Reservation, but in 1874, this land was about to be sold with little concern for the graves there. Her grandchildren approached businessman Letchworth to see if her bones could be moved. He invited them to bring the bones of their grandmother to his Glen Iris estate. Her remains were placed in a new walnut coffin and brought by train by her grandchildren. She was re-interred at this location, which is now Letchworth State Park in present day Castile, New York.

Ceremonies for her reportedly blended both the Seneca and Christian ways. Dehgewanus (Mary) was buried on the bluff above the Middle Falls. A bronze statue of her, created in 1910, now marks her grave. Historical documents concerning her life story are kept in the library at Letchworth State Park.

Seaver’s biography

Mary Jemison’s story is told in a classic “captivity narrative,” J.E. Seaver’s Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison (1824; latest ed. 1967), considered by most scholars to be a reasonably accurate account. She spent a good deal of time telling her story to Seaver, who worked on it from 1823 to 24. It was enormously popular and eventually had 30 editions. In it, she related the extreme suffering during her capture and subsequent travels in the wild and the horrific torture and suffering of other captives. Yet she also told of kindness and love from her Seneca “family” and also of her second husband.

According to Seaver, when setters moved into the Genessee valley seeking good farmland, “She was the protectoress of the homeless fugitive, and made welcome the weary wanderer. Many still live to commemorate her benevolence towards them, when prisoners during the war, and to ascribe their deliverance to the mediation of The White Woman.”

Seaver writes that the Peace of 1783 brought an end to the hostilities between the Native Americans and European settlers, which allowed many captive whites to return to their friends and families. Stories began to spread about the horrific experiences these survivors had endured and the sad demise of many of their friends and families. It was this situation that led him to interview Mary Jemison.

He describes Jemison as,

speak[ing] English plainly and distinctly, with a little of the Irish emphasis, and has the use of words so well as to render herself intelligible on any subject with which she is acquainted. Her recollection and memory exceeded my expectation. It cannot be reasonably supposed that a person of her age has kept the events of seventy years in so complete a chain as to be able to assign to each its proper time and place; she, however, made her recital with as few obvious mistakes as might be found in that of a person of fifty.

He adds, “Her ideas of religion, correspond in every respect with those of the great mass of the Senecas. She applauds virtue, and despises vice. She believes in a future state, in which the good will be happy, and the bad miserable; and that the acquisition of that happiness, depends primarily upon human volition, and the consequent good deeds of the happy recipient of blessedness. The doctrines taught in the Christian religion, she is a stranger to.”

Her children

• A girl who lived two days, 1761
• Thomas Jemison, son of her first husband, Sheninjee; named after her beloved father, died young of fever
• John, born in 1766, son of Hiokatoo; killed in 1817
• Nancy, first daughter to Hiokatoo, born in 1773, died in 1839
• Betsey, date uncertain but presumed after Nancy but before Polly; died in 1839
• Polly, born late in 1778 or early in 1779; died 1839.
• Jane, born in 1782, died in 1897
• Jesse, born in 1784 or 1785; killed by his half-brother, John, in 1812

(No reason is given for the deaths of three daughters within three months of each other. It is likely, however, that they died of an epidemic on the Buffalo Creek Reservation.)

The English names for these children reflect their white family history, but the children also had Seneca names. According to treaty documents, Thomas, for example, was known to the Senecas as Teahdowaingqua.

Legacy

Mary Jemison’s tale gave important insights into the suffering of white captives taken by Native Americans. Her story, as told to James Seaver, showed the life of the Indians in the Northeast of the United States and added much information about the culture, beliefs and practices of the Senecas and other tribes.

Her story has also been used in women’s studies to highlight the lives of women, especially Indian women, of the time.

She was known as “Dehgewanus, The White Woman of the Genesee.” A granite marker was erected in the 1880s at her grave site in Lechtworth State Park, and the statue was dedicated in 1910. Artifacts, documents, and primary sources are kept in the Letchworth State Park Historical library.

 

Sally Hemings

Sally Hemings (c. 1773 – 1835) was an American slave owned by Thomas Jefferson, believed to be the mother of several children belonging to him. She was also reportedly the illegitimate half-sister of Jefferson’s deceased wife, Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson.

After attending Jefferson and his daughters in Paris, she returned with him to Monticello in 1789, where, from 1795 to 1808, she bore five children who lived into adulthood. Rumors and newspaper reports about her relationship with Jefferson became an issue in American politics in the early 1800s. Hemings’ son, Madison, published a memoir (1873) in which he claimed the he and his siblings were all fathered by Jefferson. Jefferson’s legitimate children and grandchildren denied the claim, affirming that the Hemings children were the offspring of a nephew of Jefferson.

Reportedly, some of Sally Hemings’ children, all of whom were light skinned and able to pass for being Caucasian, were allowed to leave Monticello without being pursued as runaway slaves. The rest were later freed. Sally herself remained in slavery until after Jefferson’s death in 1826. She then lived with her children in Charlottesville until she deceased in 1835. While some of her children disappeared from the historical record, a number of her living descendants are still known.

 

Until the late twentieth century, historians tended to dismiss the allegation of Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemings, but the controversy re-emerged in the late 1960s. DNA tests confirmed that a male in Jefferson’s line, not one of the suggested nephews, was the father of at least one of Sally Hemings’ children. Although circumstantial, evidence points to Jefferson.

Early life

Sally Hemings’s mother, Betty Hemings, was the daughter of the English Captain Hemings and an enslaved African woman. Sally’s family was owned by Jefferson’s father-in-law, John Wayles, who died in 1773, leaving nearly all members of the Hemings family to his daughter Martha Jefferson. Several sources assert that Wayles was Sally Heming’s father, making her and Martha Jefferson half-sisters. Martha Jefferson died in 1782, leaving the Hemings family to her husband, Thomas. The Hemings family was at the top of the slave “hierarchy” at Monticello indicating a special relationship to their owner, possibly of kinship.

With his wife deceased, Thomas Jefferson took up residence in Paris as the American envoy to France in 1784. In 1787, Jefferson sent for his second daughter, nine-year-old Maria (Polly). He asked that the slave Isabel, an older woman, be sent as a companion for Polly, but because Isabel was pregnant, the teen-aged Sally Hemings accompanied her instead. Stopping in London, Polly and Sally were met by John and Abigail Adams. Mrs. Adams expressed doubt concerning Sally’s abilities, describing her as needing “more care than the child, and… wholly incapable of looking properly after her, without some superior to direct her.”

Sally remained in France for 26 months, where her brother James, who had accompanied Jefferson to France in 1784, was learning to be a chef. Both Sally and James received wages while in France. There is no record of where Sally stayed. She may have stayed with Jefferson and her brother at the Hotel de Langoque or at the convent where Polly and her sister Martha were schooled. In either case, Jefferson and his retinue, including his daughters, spent weekends together at his villa. The convent’s bills do not seem to have included a boarding charge for Sally. Documentation does show that Jefferson purchased clothing for her, probably because she needed to accompany Martha to formal events.

Since slavery was illegal in France, under French law, both Sally and James could have petitioned to be released from Jefferson’s ownership. According to her son Madison, Sally later indicated that she was aware that she could be free in France. He reported that she became pregnant by Jefferson and agreed to return to the United States as a slave only on the condition that Jefferson would agree to free her children, and that Jefferson agreed.

Children

Hemings did return to the U.S. with Jefferson in 1789. She seems to have lived most of the rest of her life at Monticello, and later in nearby Charlottesville, where she moved after Jefferson’s death.

Some observers have noted inconsistencies in Jefferson’s records regarding Hemings, including the fact that Jefferson did not note the father’s name for Sally’s children, although for some slaves’ births he did note the father. According to Jefferson’s records, she had six children:

• Harriet Hemings (I) (October 5, 1795-December 7, 1797)
• Beverly Hemings (a male, possibly born William Beverly Hemings) (April 1, 1798-after 1873)
• unnamed daughter (possibly named Thenia after Hemings’s sister Thenia) (born in 1799 and died in infancy)
• Harriet Hemings (II) (May 22, 1801-after 1863)
• Madison Hemings (possibly born James Madison Hemings) (January 19, 1805-1877)
• Eston Hemings (possibly born Thomas Eston Hemings) (May 21, 1808-1856)

According to the 1873 recollections of her son Madison, she also bore a child in 1790, conceived in France, who died soon after. According to controversial newspaper accounts and oral tradition this son was named Thomas.

Sally Hemings’ duties included being a nursemaid-companion, lady’s maid, chambermaid and seamstress. It is not known whether she was literate, and she left no known writings. She reportedly looked nearly white in appearance and had “straight hair down her back.” Jefferson’s grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, described her as “light colored and decidedly good looking.” As an adult, she may have lived in a room in Monticello’s “South Dependencies,” a wing of the mansion which was accessible to the main house through a covered passageway.

Sally Hemings never married. While she worked at Monticello, she was able to have her children nearby. According to her son Madison, they “were permitted to stay about the ‘great house,’ and only required to do such light work as going on errands.” Madison reported that Jefferson was a kind man, but was “not in the habit” of showing fatherly affection to him and his siblings.

At age 14, the Hemings children began their training, the brothers in carpentry and Harriet as a spinner and weaver. Beverly, Madison, and Eston all learned to play the fiddle. In 1819 or 1820, a Jefferson granddaughter invited a friend to come to Monticello to “dance after Beverley’s music” at the South Pavilion.

Beverly left the plantation in 1822, but was not pursued. Harriet followed in the same year. According to the plantation overseer Edmund Bacon, he gave her $50 and put her on a stagecoach, presumably to join her brother Beverly or another relative.

Later life

In Jefferson’s references to Sally Hemings in his records, nothing distinguishes her as receiving special treatment. However, her extended family does appear to have been especially favored. Out of the hundreds of slaves he owned, Jefferson freed only two during his lifetime, Madison and Eston Hemings. He freed five additional slaves in his will, all from the Hemings family. He also seems to have allowed Harriet and Beverly to “escape” with his tacit consent. Jefferson also successfully petitioned the Virginia legislature to allow Hemings’ sons Eston and Madison to remain in Virginia after they were free, an exception to a Virginia law requiring that freed slaves must leave within a year. Sally Hemings herself was never officially freed, although analysts point out that such an act would have certainly drawn scrutiny.

When appraisers arrived at Monticello after Jefferson’s death to evaluate his estate, they described 56-year-old Sally Hemings as “an old woman worth $50.” Jefferson’s legitimate daughter, Martha Randolph, then apparently gave Hemings her “time,” a type of informal freedom which would allow her to continue to live in Virginia, where she lived out the rest of her life in Charlottesville with her sons. Researchers believe she was buried at a site in downtown Charlottesville, which now lies beneath a parking lot.

Controversy over her children

Prior to 1802, vague insinuations had been published in the Washington Federalist newspaper regarding Jefferson’s alleged involvement with slaves. James T. Callender, a muckraking political journalist and former supporter of Jefferson, published a claim in the Richmond Recorder that Jefferson was the father of five children by Sally Hemings, including a son named Thomas. However, Callender had never visited Monticello and relied on second-hand information.

While the rumors promoted by Callender were unable to defeat Jefferson politically, they were a lasting source of concern in posterity, and for his friends and family, some of whom believed the rumors and some not. Jefferson’s grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, later admitted that Sally’s children resembled Jefferson “so closely that it was plain that they had his blood in their veins.” John Adams wrote: “Callender and Sally will be remembered as long as Jefferson, as blots in his character. The story of the latter is a natural and almost unavoidable consequence of that foul Contagion in the human Character, Negro Slavery…”

Madison Hemings claimed in an 1873 memoir, edited by Samuel Wetmore, publisher of the Ohio newspaper, The Pike County Republican, that Thomas Jefferson was his father, as well as the father of all of Sally’s children. He also revealed that his brothers and sister had passed into white society, successfully concealing their slave origins. Critics propose that the 1873 memoir had numerous factual errors and based more on Callender’s articles that facts known personally to Madison Hemings. Some skeptics have also asserted that Madison’s memoir exhibits a vocabulary unlikely to be used by a former slave, betraying the hand of the editor Samuel Wetmore—a Republican partisan and abolitionist.

Descendants of Thomas Woodson, a “free colored” man, published claims that he was Sally Hemings’s son by Thomas Jefferson, conceived in France and born at Monticello in 1790. He was thus supposedly the “President Tom” of Callender’s articles. However, DNA testing of five descendants of Woodson showed no relation to Jefferson.

Jefferson’s comments

Thomas Jefferson himself never commented publicly on the issue, though some of his remarks have been interpreted as indirect denials or as a reason for his not liberating his own slaves. In his Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson confessed to a physical aversion towards dark-skinned Africans; however, according to the pseudo-scientific calculus of race to which he subscribed, the children of Sally Hemings, who was three-quarters white, would be both legally and by “blood,” white.

In 1816, Jefferson wrote to George Logan that to deny something publicly increases the attention given to it. “I should have fancied myself half guilty, had I condescended to put pen to paper in refutation of their falsehoods, or drawn them respect by any notice from myself.” Ten years later Jefferson wrote to Henry Lee saying, “There is not a truth existing which I fear or would wish unknown to the whole world.”

Other claims

Monticello’s overseer Edmund Bacon, whose recollections were transcribed by Reverend Hamilton Wilcox Pierson in 1862, in the book, The Private Life of Thomas Jefferson, said that Sally Hemings’ daughter, presumably Harriet, was not Jefferson’s. However, Pierson censored the name of the supposed father: “He (Jefferson) freed one girl some years before he died, and there was a great deal of talk about it. She was nearly as white as anybody, and very beautiful. People said he freed her because she was his own daughter. She was not his daughter, she was ______’s daughter. I know that. I have seen him come out of her mother’s room many a morning when I went up to Monticello very early.” Skeptics of Bacon’s testimony point out that Bacon’s employment at Monticello commenced in 1806, five years after the birth of Harriet, and that he did not live at the “big house.”

Two of Jefferson’s grandchildren claimed the Hemings children had been fathered by one of Jefferson’s nephews, either Samuel or Peter Carr, who had been raised at Monticello and were the sons of Jefferson’s sister Martha.

Jefferson’s granddaughter Ellen Randolph Coolidge wrote in a letter now at the University of Virginia archives of her grandfather:

His apartments had no private entrance not perfectly accessible and visible to all the household. No female domestic ever entered his chambers except at hours when he was known not to be there and none could have entered without being exposed to the public gaze.

Coolidge’s recollection, however, is factually incorrect. In 1802-3, when Coolidge was six years old and living elsewhere, two hidden entrances to Jefferson’s suite were built: An underground passageway used primarily by slaves, and two “porticles” which were built to screen two exterior entrances to Jefferson’s study from public view. Anyone using these entrances would not be viewed from the parlor, the sitting room, dining room, and both first floor entrances.

Jefferson’s daughter, Martha Jefferson Randolph insisted that “Mr. Jefferson and Sally Hemings could not have met—were far distant from each other—for 15 months prior to the birth” of the child who most resembled Jefferson. However, no documentary evidence supports the assertion that either Jefferson or Hemings were absent for any length of time from Monticello in the relevant period.

Former Monticello slave Isaac Jefferson related in his memoirs that Jefferson’s brother Randolph “was a mighty simple man: Used to come out among black people, play the fiddle and dance half the night.” This is often cited as evidence supporting paternity by Randolph. However, Isaac left Monticello in 1797, and his account most likely refers to events of the early 1780s when Randolph was a young man.

Academic debate

Through most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, biographers of Jefferson dismissed suggestions that he had fathered children by a slave, if they mentioned the issue at all. In 1968, however Winthrop Jordan treated the Hemings-Jefferson link as plausible in his book White Over Black, noting that Jefferson was at Monticello every time Sally Hemings became pregnant. Fawn M. Brodie’s 1974 biography of Jefferson assembled additional evidence about the Hemings family and the timing of Hemings’ pregnancies, although some critics strongly objected to Brodie’s psychoanalytic approach to Jefferson. Dumas Malone, Douglass Adair, Virginius Dabney, and other authors produced rebuttals to Brodie’s argument, pointing to the Jefferson family’s statements about the Carr brothers. While fictional portrayals of the relationship such as the novels Sally Hemings by Barbara Chase-Riboud and Arc d’X by Steve Erickson and the Merchant-Ivory film Jefferson in Paris reached large audiences and persuaded many, most mainstream historians continued to assert that there was insufficient evidence to conclude that Jefferson had a sexual relationship with any slave.

In 1997, law professor Annette Gordon-Reed published an examination of the arguments and available evidence, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy. She pointed out that most historians had used double standards to evaluate the evidence for and against the statements of Madison Hemings. For example, Hemings’ statement about his father was labeled unreliable “oral history” while the oral tales passed down by the Jefferson family were treated as trustworthy, even though they contradicted each other and the documentary record. Historians also accepted statements about Sally’s father being John Wayles based on little concrete evidence, but insisted on much more proof about Sally’s children by Jefferson.

Gordon-Reed did not argue that documentary records proved Madison Hemings’ claim, only that authors had unfairly dismissed it. She suggested that a conclusive answer might lie in developing more evidence through DNA analysis.

DNA testing

Relevant results were published in the November 5, 1998 issue of the British scientific journal Nature. The study compared the Y chromosomal haplotypes of four groups of men who were descendants of 1) Thomas Jefferson’s grandfather 2) Thomas Woodson 3) Madison Hemings’s brother Eston, and 4) John Carr, the grandfather of the Carr brothers.

The study’s major findings were that the Y chromosome of the Jefferson family did match that of Eston Hemings’ family, but did not match those of the Woodson and Carr families. The implications for the paternity question were not conclusive about whether Thomas Jefferson was the father, but strongly tended to disprove the contention of the Jefferson grandchildren that Sally Hemings’s children had been fathered by one of the Carr brothers. The Woodson family’s claim to have been descended from Jefferson was also disproven. On the other hand, Eston Hemings was undoubtedly the son of “a” Jefferson.

Other reports

Following the Nature article, the controversy continued to grow, and in 2000 and 2001 two major studies of the Jefferson-Hemings allegations were released. Both studies drew from a range of sources, including both scientific and historical, to arrive at their conclusions.

In January 2000, a group of specialists from the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which owns and operates Monticello, published a study on the controversy initiated soon after the Nature paper. Their near-unanimous report stated that “although paternity cannot be established with absolute certainty, our evaluation of the best evidence available suggests the strong likelihood that Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings had a relationship over time that led to the birth of one, and perhaps all, of the known children of Sally Hemings.” This view is now given to visitors at Monticello by tour guides.

Later in 2000, the newly-formed Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society, whose stated purpose is to “further the honor and integrity of Thomas Jefferson,” created a “Jefferson-Hemings Scholars Commission” composed of 13 noted conservative scholars to examine the paternity question. On April 12, 2001, the commission issued a report which concluded that “the Jefferson-Hemings allegation is by no means proven,” noting that the likely alternative is that Randolph Jefferson, Thomas’s younger brother, was the father of Eston and that 25 possible male Jeffersons lived in Virginia at the time, and eight of those lived close to or at Monticello. Dissenting from the majority opinion, Paul Rahe wrote that he considered “it somewhat more likely than not that Thomas Jefferson was the father of Eston Hemings.” He added: “There is … one thing that we do know, and it is damning enough. Despite the distaste he expressed for the propensity of slaveholders and their relatives to abuse their power, Jefferson either engaged in such abuse himself or tolerated it on the part of one or more members of his extended family.”

The current consensus among American historians appears to have undergone a sea-change. Once, most scholars dismissed the idea that Jefferson fathered Hemings’s children without examining the evidence closely. Today most historians agree that the story is more likely than not.

Legacy

Three of Hemings’s children chose to pass as white. Two of them managed to effectively disappear from the historical record.

Eston Hemings moved to Ohio where, according to census records, he lived as a “mulatto,” then moved to Wisconsin, changed his name to “Eston H. Jefferson” and lived as a white man. Madison Hemings, who also moved to Ohio, was the only child who did not choose to live as a white person.

A good deal is known about Madison’s and Eston’s families. Both achieved some success in life, were respected by their contemporaries, and had children who repeated their success. They worked as carpenters, and Madison had a small farm. Eston became a professional musician and bandleader, “a master of the violin, and an accomplished ‘caller’ of dances.” A neighbor described him as “quiet, unobtrusive, polite and decidedly intelligent; he was soon very well and favorably known to all classes of our citizens, for his personal appearance and gentlemanly manners attracted everybody’s attention to him.”

Sons of both Madison and Eston served in the American Civil War. Madison’s son, Thomas Eston Hemings, spent time at the Andersonville POW camp, and later died in a camp in Meridian, Mississippi. According to a Hemings descendant, his brother, James, attempted to cross Union lines and enlist in the Confederate army to rescue him. Later, James was rumored to have moved to Colorado; like others in the family, he disappeared.

Eston’s son John Wayles Jefferson wrote frequently for newspapers and published letters about his war experiences. He was proprietor of a hotel in Madison, Wisconsin. Ultimately he became a wealthy cotton broker in Tennessee.

Eston’s son Beverly Jefferson was, according to his 1908 obituary, “a likable character at the Wisconsin capital, and a familiar of statesmen for half a century.” He had operated a hotel with his brother, then built a successful horse-drawn “omnibus” business.

Some of Madison Hemings’ children and grandchildren who remained in Ohio suffered from the limited opportunities for blacks at that time, working as laborers, and servants or small farmers. William Hemings, Madison’s last known male-line descendant, died in 1910, unmarried, in a veteran’s hospital. Frederick Madison Roberts (1879-1952)—Sally Hemings’ great-grandson and Madison’s grandson—was the first person of known African American ancestry elected to public office on the West Coast. He served in the California State Assembly from 1919 to 1934.

 

John “Jack” McCall

John “Jack” McCall (1852 or 1853–March 3, 1877), also known as “Crooked Nose Jack” or “Broken Nose Jack”, was the murderer of Old West legend Wild Bill Hickok, shooting him from behind while he played poker at Nuttal & Mann’s Saloon in Deadwood, Dakota Territory on August 2, 1876.

Early life

Many of the details of McCall’s life are unknown. He was born in the early 1850s in Jefferson County, Kentucky. McCall was raised in Kentucky with three sisters, and eventually drifted west to become a buffalo hunter. By 1876, he was living in a gold mining camp outside Deadwood, under the alias “Bill Sutherland”.

Murder of Hickok

Background

McCall was drinking at the bar at Nuttal & Mann’s saloon in Deadwood on August 1, 1876. When one of the players dropped out of a card game, which included “Wild Bill” Hickok, the inebriated McCall quickly took his place. McCall lost hand after hand, and was soon broke. Hickok offered McCall money to buy breakfast and advised him not to play again until he could cover his losses. Though McCall accepted the money, he reportedly felt insulted.

The killing of Hickok

On August 2, a poker game was once again underway at the saloon, but this time Hickok, in contrast to his normal habit of sitting in a corner to protect his back, had his back to the door. A resentful and drunken McCall shot Hickok in the back of the head with a single-action .45-caliber revolver, shouting “Damn you! Take that!” Hickok died instantly with no chance of defending himself. McCall ran from the saloon and attempted to steal a horse to make his escape, but fell from the excited animal. The fleeing McCall was soon apprehended, found hiding in the back of a local butcher shop.

First trial

An impromptu court was called to order with the prosecution, defense, and jury made up of local miners and businessmen. On trial the next day in McDaniel’s Theater, McCall now claimed his actions were in retribution for Hickok having previously killed his brother in Abilene, Kansas. McCall was found innocent after two hours. The verdict brought the Black Hills Pioneer to editorialize:

“Should it ever be our misfortune to kill a man… we would simply ask that our trial may take place in some of the mining camps of these hills.”

Second trial

Fearing for his safety, McCall soon left the area and headed into Wyoming Territory, where he repeatedly bragged about the details of how he had killed Hickok in a “fair” gunfight. But the Wyoming authorities refused to recognize the result of McCall’s acquittal on the grounds that the court in Deadwood had no legal jurisdiction. Because Deadwood was not under a legally constituted law enforcement or court system, Wyoming officials argued that McCall could be tried again. Agreeing, the federal court in Yankton, Dakota Territory, declared that double jeopardy did not apply, and set a date for a retrial.

McCall was tried again in Yankton for Hickok’s murder, and was quickly found guilty. After almost three months in jail, he was hung on March 1, 1877, aged 24. He was buried in the Catholic cemetery. The cemetery was moved in 1881, when McCall’s body was exhumed and found to have the noose still around his neck. The killing of Hickok and the capture of McCall is reenacted every summer evening in Deadwood. McCall was the first person to be executed by federal officials in the Dakota Territory.