This week we’re visiting my parents in north-central Minnesota. Monday morning I went down to the dock in front of their house to take some photos. This is one of them.

This is in Ojibwe country. The Ojibwe language was once the lingua franca of the Great Lakes region, and is still much spoken in this part of Minnesota. Two hundred years ago it was a good language for travelers to know.

I’ve been blogging about Shelby and Logan counties, Ohio. I haven’t gotten to writing about this part yet, but on September 26 my ride was going to take me to one of the places where Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa (the Shawnee prophet) had kept a large village as the center of their revival movement, before it eventually moved to Tippecanoe. (But here’s a blog article about a previous visit to the place.)

Tecumseh himself had in 1811 carried their message from that village to places as far south as modern Montgomery, Alabama, and brought followers back with him to their home base. That is probably the most famous of the missionary journeys of their movement, but it was not the only one.

A few years earlier missionaries had reached northern Minnesota, too. Looking at the above photo had reminded me of how John Tanner had told about it in his autobiography, “The Falcon.” So last night I found my mother’s copy and started to re-read it.

When a young boy, Tanner had been captured from his home in Kentucky, across from the mouth of the Great Miami River, the same river I had been riding along back in September. He eventually ended up living as an Ojibwe in northern Minnesota and Dakota.

My mother’s copy of the book has an introduction by Louise Erdrich, who says the story is “probably one of the very few in the captivity genre that appeals strongly to Native Americans.”

It must be longer than I thought since I had read this book. It must have been before I had started to learn a tiny bit of the Ojibwe language myself, becaue I now find that at least a partial meaning of a number of the names jumps out at me. I don’t remember having that kind of experience when I read this book before. It seems, then, that it would now be worth re-reading the whole thing.

But I skipped to chapter 9, because that’s the one where Tanner tells of his encounter with an emissary of the Shawnee prophet. He says,

It was while I was living here at Great Wood River that news came of a great man among the Shawneese, who had been favoured by a revelation of the mind and will of the Great Spirit. I was hunting in the prairie, at a great distance from my lodge, when I saw a stranger approaching….

Where the Great Wood River is, I don’t know. I presume it’s somewhere to the northwest of where my parents live, perhaps closer to Pembina on the Red River.

The stranger brought the revival message from the Shawnee prophet. I wonder if it was someone who had learned from the Prophet at that village on Stony Creek in Shelby county, Ohio. Could have been, I suppose. Or maybe he had been with the Prophet even before that.

Tanner was a skeptic but kept most of his “infidelity” to himself. He concludes this episode by writing:

The influence of the Shawnee prophet was very sensibly and painfully felt by the remotest Ojibbeways of whom I had any knowledge, but it was not the common impression among them that his doctrines had any tendency to unite them in the accomplishment of any human purpose. For two or three years drunkenness was much less frequent than formerly, war was less thought of, and the entire aspect of affairs among them was somewhat changed by the influence of one man. But gradually the impression was obliterated, medicine bags, flints, and steels, were resumed, dogs were raised, women and children were beaten as before, and the Shawnee prophet was despised. At this day he is looked upon by the Indians as an imposter and a bad man. After the excitement of this affair had somewhat subsided, and the messengers had left us to visit remoter bands…

I’m often impressed by the way Native peoples got around. It’s about a thousand miles by car from Stony Creek in Ohio to my parent’s home in Minnesota. The Prophet’s messengers travelled even further to the northwest, to where John Tanner’s people encountered them. Then they left “to visit remoter bands.”