3
The Second Pattern Accommodating the Wesleyans
When Great Britain and the United States began a new surge of growth in the early nineteenth century, the Indians of Canada and the Great Lakes area were prime, and vulnerable, targets. The early decades of the century gave rise to a surge of religious fervor that stirred regenerate Protestants to organize to bring the "light and life" of the Gospels to unenlightened peoples the world over. "Christians now have a great deal to do," proclaimed the missionary Sherman Hall:
They have so much to do to keep their own hearts, and they have much to do also to save sinners and give the gospel to the destitute. A few years ago Christians did (not) know so well as they do now that there were a great many millions of heathens in the world, and that they ought to send them missionaries and the bible. They know it now so well, that they cannot refuse to send the gospel to them, without neglecting a great duty and incurring much guilt.[1]
This duty extended not only to heathens of far-flung lands, but to North American Indians as well. Evangelicals moved quickly to reach those souls.
Before the late eighteenth century, the combined effect of aggressive proselytizing by Roman Catholics, colonial ethnocentrism, and interdenominational rivalry had dampened Protestant desires to establish missions in the United States. In the 1790s, however, outbursts of revivalism and religious enthusiasm radicalized the state of missionary work. Evangelical piety wed orthodoxy to produce a uniquely expansive Protestant Christianity that abandoned the pessimistic rigors of Calvinism to embrace a theology of progressivism and perfectionism.
Wesleyan Methodist Missions
One of the first expressions of this new perspective, which embraced Christianity as a dynamic force for world reform, was a systematic effort to create an organized means of spreading the faith. To this end, Protestants formed numerous missionary societies.[2] The American Society for Propagating the Gospel Among the Indians and Others in North America gained legal status in Massachusetts in 1787. The New York Missionary Society, founded in 1796, was the first interdenominational missionary organization in the United States, and the London Missionary Society extended its work to Canada in 1799. Baptists and Congregationalists soon joined the trend, giving rise in 1810 to the interdenominational American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions and in 1814 to the Baptist Board of Foreign Missions. The Methodists were relative latecomers to the field: they did not create the Missionary Society of the American Methodist Episcopal Church until 1820.[3]
Native tactics for dealing with renewed missionary sorties varied both with the ebb and flow of proselytization and according to individual community circumstances. Among Canadian peoples, a fluctuating pattern of resistance and accommo-
dation took shape during the nineteenth century. Although the stupefying logistics of penetrating the vast Canadian interior prevented missionaries from making notable inroads in many areas, some native groups in Canada were spurred by economic exigencies or material incentives into contact with the preachers. The responses of these Northern Ojibwa and Cree suggest yet another permutation of gender dynamics within communities.
The contrast in women's and men's attitudes toward Christianity that plagued some of the Jesuit missions had abated by the 1800s. Thereafter, many groups—in particular those near Hudson's Bay Company posts, the St. Lawrence, or the northern shores of the Great Lakes—vociferously opposed initial attempts to convert them, only later to decide that Christianity and "civilization" might help eclipse starvation or invasion by white settlers. Indeed, we find that male shamans and headmen who at first led the opposition often became trusted neophytes, linchpins of the missionary operation. Women, however, are curiously absent from the record. They did not torch missionary homes or fulminate hostilities; indeed, women kept their distance from missionaries. Although they converted infrequently, by the same token it was only on rare occasion that they publicly advocated traditional ways.
The years 1830 to 1870 in Canada appear to have been a transitional phase in Indian-missionary relations. The shift within native communities from often intense opposition to acceptance and even manipulation of Christianity reflected a group's recognition that it was losing the option of continuing independent of white contact. Yet simultaneously, missionaries' relatively few numbers limited their impact and authority in most areas and did not force traditionalists, female or male, into open defense of older ways.
Following the Jesuits' decline in Canada, natives in the interior had little contact with any missionaries until the early nineteenth century, when, in 1818, Roman Catholics established a mission at Pembina on the Red River above the HBC's Fort Douglas. The moment seemed ripe—within three years 267 métis had converted, and many settled near Pembina to farm. The mission's heyday, however, proved brief. In 1823, the company
closed Fort Douglas after discovering that it stood in American territory, and local Ojibwa and métis soon claimed the deserted fortress.[4] Missionaries made occasional visits, hoping to bolster the converts' faith, but Major Stephen Long, head of a U.S. War Department expedition that stopped at Pembina in 1823, reported that native women had apparently undermined the priests' efforts. As he put it, métis offspring, "educated by their Indian mothers, have imbibed the roving, unsettled, and indolent habits of Indians."[5] The fur trader Alexander Henry (the younger), who worked out of Pembina in 1801–3 and 1806–8, had found Ojibwa women in the area to be strong-willed and independent, and commented that he had been "vexed at having been obligated to fight with the women" to get their furs in trade.[6]
Long's evocative description of a female convert suggests that native ways may well have seemed a safer course to follow. The expedition was camped at the confluence of the Assiniboin and Red rivers when, in the course of an afternoon, the unsettling sight of a woman haphazardly paddling a canoe and mournfully singing to herself captured their attention. Intrigued, they pressed the residents for information:
She was a half-breed, whose insanity was supposed to have sprung from a religious melancholy. Being one of those whom the missionaries had converted, she had become very pious, but her intellect was too frail for the doctrines which had been taught to her; in endeavoring to become familiar with them, she had been gradually affected with a malady, which at that time seemed incurable.[7]
Despite the Pembina mission's many problems, news of its initial spectacular success quickly excited Protestant interest in the area. By the 1820s, the Church Missionary Society (of Great Britain) and the Genessee and Canada conferences of the American Methodist Episcopal Church had organized several missions to the Upper Great Lakes.[8] John West's 1820–23 tour of the Canadas for the Church Missionary Society prompted him to publish his travel journal to encourage mission support. "We live in a day when the most distant parts of the earth are opening as the sphere of missionary labors," he reminded his English audience. "The state of the heathen world is becoming
better known, and the sympathy of British Christians has been awakened in zealous endeavors to evangelize and soothe its sorrows."[9]
In the 1830s, the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society (WMMS) of London opened several missions in Upper Canada and, by invitation, throughout the territory of the Hudson's Bay Company. Although the WMMS missions eventually suffered the common problems of inadequate funding and preparation, it was the first Protestant mission project in North America with both commercial backing and missionaries decently prepared for life in the wilderness. In most areas the WMMS did not draw a large following, but it did elicit positive responses owing to its extensive organization, its ties to the HBC, and economic and environmental changes that made Indians increasingly dependent on the fur trade.
During this period, native subsistence patterns and social relations suffered major upheavals as a result of HBC manipulation of market demands. The 1821 merger of the Hudson's Bay and North West companies had given the HBC a monopoly on the fur trade in Canada. The company's animal conservation policies, combined with large game scarcity, compelled Indians to settle on permanent family territories and to shift their subsistence base to small game and fish. Forced to locate near company posts for access to firearms and food during times of famine, by the 1840s many Ojibwa and Cree found that the HBC played a central role in their lives.[10]
When the hymn-singing, HBC-backed Wesleyans debarked in 1833, native society was particularly susceptible to their appeal, and so the earliest years of missions to Ojibwa and Cree in Upper Canada seemed quite promising. This favorable situation was due largely to the earlier proselytizing by Kahkewak-wonaby (Peter Jones), son of a Welsh surveyor and an Ojibwa woman, educated in English schools. In 1825, two years after his own conversion to Methodism, Jones became an exhorter, or lay preacher. One of his first moves was to convince members of his own Mississauga (Eastern Ojibwa) band to join in the rousing camp meetings at Grand River. Within four years, at the request of relatives, he had established a mission at Snake and Yellowhead islands on Lake Simcoe.[11]
North American Methodist missions had been under the auspices of the Methodist Episcopal Church of the United States, an arrangement made by the American and British churches in 1820 (without the consent of Canadian Methodists).[12] When American Methodists turned their Indian missions in Canada over to the recently formed Canada Conference in 1824, British Wesleyans declared that the 1820 agreement was void and claimed that the way was now clear for British evangelizing. In response, the Canada Conference hurried to open new Indian missions; it also sent Peter Jones and George Ryerson, a white Canadian minister, to tour England in 1831 and muster support.[13] The conference's hopes were dashed, however, when the government of Upper Canada revised its Indian Department policies and, in 1832, invited the British Wesleyans to begin work among Canadian Indians. To avoid intrachurch conflict, British and Canadians merged forces in Canada, and in 1833 the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society of London took over the Canadian Indian missions.[14]
The arrival of Thomas Turner at St. Clair at the southern tip of Lake Huron that year signaled the beginning of WMMS missionary efforts in Upper Canada along the St. Lawrence River and eastern Great Lakes.[15] Initially, Turner felt himself a failure. Charging that the adults drank too much to allow conversion, he suggested to the society that it would be more productive to concentrate on the children—"the rising generation."[16] By January 1834, however, his spirits had lifted. "A short time ago a circumstance occured here which led me to hope that the prejudices of the Indians are in some degree wearing off," Turner informed society secretary Robert Alder in London. "Trivial indeed it may appear to many, but to a missionary living among pure pagans as these Indians are, even such an incident is not without interest." The occasion was the funeral of a young man who had drowned during an epileptic seizure. When Wawanosh, the local band's spokesperson, asked Turner to pray before they lowered the coffin, the minister at first demurred, afraid the others would stop him. Finally, "as I soon observed that the other Chiefs, and nearly all the men who were present joined with Waywaynosh in his request I consented, and during prayer both men and women were silent
and attentive."[17] Turner was sure that the men's insistence on Christian prayers gave new life to his work.
Turner and his successors, like the Jesuits, focused their energies on wooing men into the fold. While they did not discount the value of female souls, it was male conversions that brought the thrill of success. In 1835 Joseph Stinson, general superintendent of missions, could report to the secretary of the WMMS that "there is amongst our Indians an increasing number of sensible, pious, enterprising young men, who are exerting themselves to promote the spiritual interests of their red brethren in the wilderness." Many of the most important men, the old "Pow Wows," he exulted, were "now as zealous in forwarding as they were formerly in opposing the work of the Lord."[18] The missionaries marshaled their examples: one man converted and immediately abandoned his medicine bundle; Sault, a shaman from the River St. Clair band and "one of the most wicked men in the tribe," assured Stinson that upon converting he "bade farewell to my master, the Devil and broke [my] whiskey bottle as a token."[19] Old Shuctahgun, a Midewiwin shaman from St. Clair, eagerly embraced Christianity and exhorted his band to accept the new religion. The Grand River mission boasted more than a hundred members in the society, including some "truly pious and happy" females.[20]
This was indeed a dramatic reversal of initial reactions. When, for example, the superintendent of Indians suggested a mission settlement on Walpole Island, the local band had responded that the Great Spirit wanted them as they were and would have given them books if it wanted natives to have them. "Is it just and prudent that we who have held so long after the customs and traditions of our forefathers, should all at once jump at another kind of religion that is so different from ours?" Paghegezhegwaish and Sharlow asked. "No, we will never be so foolish as this. We will never venture to run such a great risk. Who knows but what the Munadoo (gods) would be angry with us for abandoning our old ways."[21]
But exuberant Methodist preaching apparently soon swayed them: "No sooner did they feel the power of the Spirit of God resting upon them, than they began to desire to improve in their temporal ambitions." At Credit, Grape Island, Rice Lake,
St. Clair, and other sites, Ojibwa rapidly converted and settled into permanent villages.[22] From Sault Ste. Marie, James Evans claimed that several chiefs seemed quite taken by Methodism. "I think we have a good prospect for the Sault," he wrote Stinson from Hayward's Sound. "The old chief has visited us and complains of not having any missionary or teacher." Evans also rejoiced in an auspicious harvest of souls: "We yesterday Baptized six men one woman and three children."[23] Several months later, Evans, writing to his family from Mishe-begwadoong, regaled them with more news of the Sault's bright future:
Yesterday the head chief of the tribe, a fine looking fellow, arrived and we were highly gratified in seeing him leading all his people to our wiggewaum in the evening in order to hear of the "good way." . . . I am anxiously looking for their return in the spring as the Chief informs us that his people will desire to be instructed and that they will do anything which God's servants direct them to do.[24]
The mission drew not only chiefs, but supposedly unsalvageable men, even windigos, as well. "We had in our congregation last Sunday an Indian cannibal," Evans told his wife and daughter. "It is well known that he and an old woman (a witch looking character) killed and eat two Frenchmen about two years ago, he is a sour savage looking fellow and looks as though he could eat anything. He however declared his intention to strive to serve the Great Spirit and acknowledged that he has been a very wicked man."[25] The missionaries conceded that the men felt forced by circumstances to accept Christianity: "It is useless for us to go on in our old ways any longer," Stinson quoted them as saying; "we shall all have to become Christians."[26] In this spirit, one Ojibwa delegation solicited the WMMS for a missionary, presenting a letter signed by sixty-five members of their village: "We Indians living at Salt Springs on the Grand River, have been considering what we should do now. Our minds are that we should ask Mr. Stinson to send us a Missionary, because we wish to be English Methodists. These are our own thoughts, and to show Mr. Stinson what we wish, we have signed our names to this paper."[27]
Viewing such requests as auguries of victory, the Wesleyans increased their activity during the late 1830s. Under their guidance approximately one thousand Ojibwa had established settled communities and "applied themselves with success to the arts of civilized life" by 1837. Although the natives were not particularly apt farmers or artisans, the missionaries contended that, nevertheless, they were moving along the path to civilization. "The Christian Indian is learning to appreciate the advantages connected with a fixed habitation. He has a home , and a domestic Altar on which 'Prayer is daily set forth as incense.' He has a sanctuary in which he worships . . . and a School for the instruction of his children."[28]
Schools figured prominently in the Upper Canada missions: by removing children from "their imperfectly civilized parents," Methodists planned to set Indian youth firmly on the road to Christianity and away from barbarism. Robert Alder, WMMS secretary, envisioned a system that initiated children into the practical joys of civilization. In particular, he emphasized the need to inculcate girls with the domestic values of nineteenth-century British womanhood, so that they could bring future generations of the race with them. "The Boys would be instructed in a knowledge of useful mechanical arts; and what is greatly to be desired, as being of immense importance in its influence on the future improvement of the Indians, the female portion of the children would be well instructed, not merely in reading and writing, but in the performance of domestic duties."[29]
The WMMS soon started a farm and industrial school at Alderville at Rice Lake (Ontario) in 1837. The school was small, with twelve to fifteen pupils, the schedule rigorous, and the girls' training relentless in focus:
They rise during the winter at five o'clock: and in summer at one half past four . The girls proceed to milk the cows: then prepare the breakfast: attend family prayers; and hear a lecture, or exposition on a portion of the Scriptures—the singing, and all the exercises are in English. The girls then set the cheese; and do housework—at nine a.m. they go into school—at noon dinner and at half-past one p.m.: school recommenses: then as above mentioned, needle-
work—school closes at half-past four p.m. . At five, supper—at six, milking the cows prayers at eight p.m. : at half-past eight, they retire to rest.[30]
The schoolmasters did not record the children's response to this experience, but one can imagine that daily submission to such rigid schedules, combined with removal from their mothers and fathers, was a grueling ordeal for many.
Despite the program's strictness, however, the Indian Industrial School was popular with local Ojibwa. In 1848, they voted to put part of their annuities toward its support, in the not unsubstantial amount of £345.12.8. By the following year twenty-six students were enrolled, and the Ojibwa granted deed to two hundred acres to the school.[31] Christian and "wild" Indians alike—increasingly "aliens and outcasts in those regions over which their fathers bore undisputed sway"—obligingly sent their children to schools for instruction.[32]
The WMMS's next move was to send James Evans, Thomas Hurlburt, and two native preachers, Shawdais (John Sunday) and Pahtahsega (Peter Jacobs), on an exploratory journey into the northwest interior of Canada. Their errand resulted in an unprecedented collaboration of the WMMS with the Hudson's Bay Company, targeting Indians between Hudson Bay and the Rocky Mountains.[33] The HBC traditionally had prohibited its employees or others in its territory from instructing Indians in religion, under pain of dismissal.[34] In 1839, however, the company decided that Christianity would benefit both Indians and the HBC, and so it reversed its antievangelization policy.
By this time, the land and people between Churchill River and James Bay had been exhausted by alien diseases, overhunting, and famine. As early as 1820, John West observed that the Swampy Cree at York Factory seemed worn out and suffering.[35] Indians from the York Factory area had begun to migrate to the more hospitable environment and higher wages of Red River. It was the company's hope that conversion would persuade them (particularly the Home Guard Cree who provisioned the HBC) to remain instead near their traditional northern hunting grounds. Roman Catholics and Anglicans, however, disregarded the company's desires and contentiously encouraged converts to relocate near their Red River missions.
Drawn by the work-discipline theology of the Wesleyans, the HBC directors determined that Methodism could best convince natives to remain in the area and trap more regularly and efficiently.[36] The company therefore offered travel and maintenance to WMMS missionaries coming into the country from England and granted them rank equivalent to wintering partner, or commissioned officer.[37]
The WMMS seized the opportunity, and in 1840 James Evans and three young British ministers ventured into the vast expanse of the Canadian northwest, covering all together a territory more than fifteen hundred miles across. Evans installed himself at Norway House on Lake Winnipeg, George Barnley at Moose Fort on James Bay, William Mason on Lac la Pluie (called Rainy Lake by the British), and Robert Rundle at Rocky Mountain House in present-day Alberta. The following year Thomas Hurlburt, Pahtahsega (hereafter referred to by his WMMS signature, Peter Jacobs) and Shahwahnegezhik (Henry E. Steinhauer), an Ojibwa lay preacher from the Credit mission, joined the HBC territory missions.[38]
The missionaries set up shop within or just outside the HBC posts; as agreed, the company provided accommodations in its own quarters, with the promise of a separate establishment when feasible. The ministers found, however, that fulfillment of this pledge could require a great deal of prodding.[39] Housing soon became an issue, since the Wesleyans, like most nineteenth-century Protestant missionaries, believed that their own family lives must provide models of Christian domesticity for heathens. This required, of course, not only that they be married, but also that their mates be present and adequate to the rigors of life in the bush. James Evans's brother, Ephraim, set forth the requisite attributes of a married woman missionary: "The wives should be of the right stamp. Not nervous timid creatures who dare not let their husbands go from home—nor ladies unaccustomed to practical housekeeping. They must be willing to put up with much inconvenience, and to look for their reward in a world from which they shall see the future fruits of cheerful endurance of hardship."[40]
Clearly these were to be women of character and determination who would be helpmeets to their spouses in and out of
chapel and classroom. Moreover, the very responsibilities of their daily lives would guide Indian females toward Christian womanhood.[41] Some women, such as those married to George Barnley and Henry Steinhauer, or Eliza Field Jones, an Englishwoman married to Peter Jones, taught classes and prayed with Indians; but most found their time consumed by child care, frequent illness, and domestic chores made more difficult by the harsh climate.[42] Their sporadic attempts to teach native women to sew and knit apparently met with little success. One of John Sinclair's reports suggested that Indian women in the bush deliberately discouraged Home Guard women at the posts from collaborating with the missionaries. Cree women at the mission station refused to cooperate in the manufacture of handiwork to sell in England. "The minds of the women are so much prejudiced by our country ladies [Indian women living in the bush]," Sinclair claimed, "that they care very little of doing any work for us, or for anyone else whom they know is sending home work to England."[43]
While living examples of the Christian family were important, the mission wives' activities did not figure centrally in the WMMS plan. Rather, the society depended on preaching and hymnals and scriptural excerpts in Ojibwa or Cree syllabics, often printed laboriously on small hand presses at the missions, to broadcast the good word. Because the HBC originally objected to the use of the press for fear that a newspaper might work against the company's interests, the WMMS spent considerable effort to gain permission to print at the missions. In the interim the missionaries were quite innovative. James Evans, for example, printed on birch bark using original type made from tea chest lead or bullets, while at Moose Factory George Barnley carved the type out of plaster of Paris blocks.[44]
Proselytizing was to be done not only by English missionaries, but also by native preachers such as Jacobs and Steinhauer. Thomas Hurlburt reported to Secretary Alder from Fort Pic on Lake Superior, "It will be necessary for white men to oversee the work in that country but it is my conviction that we must look to our native agents, as the great & immediate instrument, in the conversion of the heathen."[45] Hurlburt, who had a good command of Ojibwa language and mythology, recognized the strength of native beliefs and insisted that one must under-
stand them to supplant them. Knowledge of native ways, he wrote, "gives the missionary the power of combatting them in their strongholds. For as ignorant as they are they have a system of Demonology of their own which in many or most cases has a strong hold on their feelings."[46] Native preachers therefore had the inside track on traditional religion.
In Rupert's Land in the 1840s, both English and native missionaries envisioned a field as ripe for spiritual harvest as had been those of Jones and Turner in Upper Canada. Instead they confronted an Indian "demonology" to which whole bands of Ojibwa and Cree adhered, even after several years of preaching. Henry Steinhauer discovered that although an Indian might admire his ability to read the Bible, in the case of a Rainy Lake chief (and others), "he manifested no desire to learn nor did he at all wish to become acquainted with the principle of Christianity."[47] And a frustrated Peter Jacobs furiously denounced the obstinacy of the local Indians in a report from Fort Alexander in 1841:
I have found them to be very wicked, and that they are greates[t] blackguards that I ever have seen; and that they have not the least desire of becoming Christians. I have preached the word of God to them time after time: and that I now feel cleare of their blood. and they will now go to the Devil they will go there, with their eyes open. and that I have told them so. However one of them has given me his councent to become a Christian.[48]
By 1848, however, Jacobs still had not made much headway. He targeted Rainy Lake as the "headquarters of Heathenism of the surrounding Country" and blamed this on local "conjurers," or Midewiwin shamans.[49] These practitioners commanded large followings and, unlike shamans at the Credit and St. Clair missions in Upper Canada, vigorously fought all of Jacobs's efforts to promote Christianity. With the censure of an apostate, he repeatedly complained that their loyalty to tradition grew out of greed and self-interest in maintaining lucrative customs:
Indians fear & tremble before them many an Indian comes from afar to be initiated in the conjuring arts that comes with guns, [word illegible], blankets, cloths, traps, knives & dogs & gives all the foregoing articles to the head-conjurors for being initiated in the secret arts of Conjuring high & indeed some of these new-comers
have stripped themselves & their families entirely naked. In return for these goods the Conjurers teach them sleight hand &, giving them, a few herbs and making them out as medicines of great virtues & frequently what the conjurers give is not worth more than a shilling or two. By this deceiving way of the Conjurers they accumulate good fortunes for themselves & for their families. These are the reasons that the head-conjurers are bitterly opposed to Christianity because Christianity strikes at the roots of their interests. I am sorry to say that the Lac La Pluie Indians are really mad in their idolatrous worship.[50]
In some instances, a community's fears for its own well-being apparently motivated widespread opposition to the missionaries. When the beleaguered Jacobs attempted a mission at Munedoo Rapids in 1849, his efforts were an unconditional failure. "The majority of the Indians are inimical to the establishment of a mission," he commented bitterly, "and will continue to be so."[51] These Ojibwa did not find Methodism a compelling substitute for traditional beliefs and feared that Jacobs's presence would offend the manitous of the fish, driving them away. Moreover, Jacobs was convinced that those sympathetic to his efforts were really hoping to improve their material rather than spiritual conditions:
The principle reasons that illustrate the repugnance of these Indians for the establishment of a mission are as follows. First. they hate Christianity from the bottom of their hearts because pure Christianity strikes at the very root of their heathenism. Secondly. They think that if a Mission was established at either of the two great fisheries, the Munedoo Rapids & Kange-wahnoong, which are about four miles apart, the fish would leave the rapids—a vain excuse this is. The few that are inclined to have a mission there are not really religiously disposed, but I am afraid nothing but worldly motives is all that they have in view. And to say the real truth, I have no confidence in these fellows at all, for they are a very deceitful tribe.[52]
Other bands remained at best ambivalent, uncertain whether Christianity was worth the risk. Older people at Lac Seul, 150 miles northeast of Jacobs's Rainy Lake mission, seemed receptive at first. They agreed to let him instruct their children but insisted that they themselves were "too old and too ignorant"
for his preaching. When two years of hard work produced no visible results, Jacobs blamed his failure on the old people's self-interest. Because they felt that conversion would be a great favor to Jacobs, they expected equal compensation in food and clothing. When Jacobs made no attempt to supply these items as incentive, "they manifested a great disappointment" and continued with their own practices.[53]
Similarly, the hostile shamans at Rainy Lake informed Jacobs in July 1848 that they would convert if he promised to ordain them. He was certain, however, that they would just use their Christian ministerial positions to recoup the losses incurred when the lucrative Midewiwin training was discontinued. Incensed, he refused to ordain them, a move that only aroused further hostility toward the mission. But the conjurers later decided that in the long run "the white man & his religion are too great to be opposed by a weak set like ourselves" and pragmatically opted to send their children for instruction.[54]
This pattern of initial resistance followed by a degree of acquiescence to Wesleyan efforts probably resulted from the combined impact of deteriorating economic conditions and the HBC's support of the missions. In the late 1840s and into the 1850s, famine was a frequent threat. Jacobs reported that in his area wild rice crops were failing, disease had decimated the rabbit population, and fish were scarce as well. "In this critical condition of the Indians," he observed, "they begin to talk of embracing civilization & Christianity. But when the months of May & June comes, the Season when they get plenty of Sturgeon, all their fair promises will be sunk in oblivion."[55]
Thomas Hurlburt also reported widespread hunger and suffering among the Indians in the vicinity of Fort Pic, but blamed this situation on contact with whites. "The Indians are diminished in number & reduced to the lowest state of wretchedness & dependence. This may be imputed to the introduction of fire arms into the country," he claimed, "& to the competition between the two rival trading companies, when the poor indian was urged by his thirst of ardent spirits to make wanton destruction of his only means of subsistence." These circumstances, he concluded, made these the most "docile" Indians he had ever met.[56]
The demands of the fur trade were great. William Mason complained that autumn trapping hampered the practice of Christianity, and overwhelming debts to the fur companies allowed the Cree no escape. "What a wretched system is this debt work!—The Indian is much enslaved by it," he explained, "yet so long accustomed to the system that he values not the time—labour—& situations he endures while attempting to discharge his debts."[57] Hunters were gone for so long that any good impressions of Christianity wore thin. To combat this circumstance, Mason resorted to bribing natives to stay at the mission. He was aided in this effort by their constant hunger: on one occasion he doled out more than two thousand fish in a fortnight to keep them fed. George Barnley, too, learned to exploit the situation; when starving Indians came into Moose Factory for food, he seized the moment and preached to them, viewing it as a God-given chance to proselytize. The use of books was seen as another means of combating the problem of time not spent with missionaries when in the bush: "They love their books & constantly read when out hunting," Mason reported. Mason distributed more than three hundred copies of "No. 1 Conference Catechism with Lord's Prayer."[58]
Hunters engaged by the HBC apparently soon realized that conversion, or at least a receptive attitude toward the missionaries, was a productive and reasonable tactic. Group leaders came under a great deal of pressure from both the government and missionaries to accept Christianity for their bands, and they knew that if they converted they could maintain their authority as Methodist class leaders or preachers.[59] Peter Jacobs's negotiations with the shamans and chiefs at Rainy Lake indicated clearly the importance to them of retaining status. Although the Rainy Lake Ojibwa were an ongoing source of frustration for the long-suffering Jacobs, by 1849 a number of headmen had requested that he help them take the first steps to becoming educated and "civilized."[60]
Missionaries throughout the interior reported that chiefs and shamans had converted, abandoning their medicine bundles for the Gospels. Some gave up their "idols, medicine, drums &c&c," others renounced rum, and a number even included their youngest wives among the castoffs; Mason, for ex-
ample, included two "repudiated wives" on his 1848 census of Rossville mission.[61] One man, an "apostle of the false Indian prophet" of Beaver River, had traveled to Norway House with the intention of swaying the local Cree to reject the missionaries and join the revitalization movement. But only the slightest exposure to William Mason's charismatic oratory sent him home apparently determined instead to bring his relatives to Christianity.[62]
Rossville at Norway House was probably the most successful of the WMMS Rupert's Land missions. Fifty to seventy students usually attended the school, which was established by James Evans. In 1848, Rossville had a Christian village of thirty-nine converted families. (The numbers would have been even greater if not for the devastation of the 1846–47 smallpox and measles epidemics.) Moreover, the station boasted seven native preachers. Despite William Mason's belief that the setting retarded Christianity and civilization (the climate was too severe for agriculture and dogs devoured the imported cattle), by 1852 the mission, now boasting 107 full church members, appeared to be flourishing.[63] Mason reported from York Factory that year that "heathenism has received its death blow and falls before the power & influence of the Gospel, priestly incantations and indian juggling have ceased. The conjurers themselves are asking for baptism at the hands of the Missionaries." During the same month he baptized the five children of the few remaining non-Christian chiefs at Oxford House.[64] Although he proved to be overly optimistic in his estimates of Methodism's success among Cree communities, Mason was convinced that the majority of influential men in the area had converted.
These men not only converted, but they also insisted that their families be baptized. In particular, they wanted their sons and grandsons received into the church. One fellow consigned his medicine bundle with its manitous to James Evans and in return demanded of Peter Jacobs that his wife and unborn child be accepted too. "This is the station of his speech to me," Jacobs reported:
I have now given my whole heart to God. I now deliver up my heathen gods [medicine bundles] to you. and do with them as you please. (I have given them to Brother Evans and I think he will
send them to you.) And here is my wife I wish her to go to heaven with me; and that she has a little Indian with her that is to be born within a month or two. I also give this child to the Lord. and I hope you will take and make it happy. and you must baptize it for he must also be a Christian. So I have now given my whole heart and my wife and my child to the Lord, now pray for me.[65]
Other men too, such as an Ojibwa chief from Walpole Island, also gave their children for instruction, or even sent them for training at the Wesleyan Industrial School at Mt. Elgin. In the final analysis, though, Old Batosh, a mixed-blood Cree, was undoubtedly the most generous initiate: he promised to commit his entire retinue of more than sixty children and grandchildren to Mason's spiritual guidance.[66]
The shift in male attitudes from opposition to acceptance (whether for spiritual or practical reasons) has been interpreted as an indication of widespread and rapid adoption of Christianity. There is little evidence, however, that women actively sought to join in the conversion trend.[67] While the missionaries did not always specify converts' gender, males represented a clear majority of the baptisms reported in the WMMS correspondence. Of the conversions in which the convert's sex was specifically stated, thirty-four of fifty (68 percent) adult conversions were male.
Only on rare occasions did women demonstrate open resistance; in general their responses are obscure in the mission record. Undoubtedly, Western preconceptions of native women helped shape women's experiences with Methodist evangelicals and Christianity. Developing concepts of domesticity and femininity among the middle and upper classes in England and the United States in the nineteenth century rendered woman spiritually and morally powerful only if she devoted herself wholly to the care of home and family. Frail and nervous, ruled by emotion, a "prisoner of her reproductive system," the Christian woman knew her place and joyfully submitted to her husband's will.[68] Although her focus was on bearing and raising children, she was not a sexual creature. Indeed, most male medical practitioners and health reformers insisted that a real woman did not desire regular sexual activity, and that those who did
sapped male strength and unnaturally increased their own. On the contrary, feminine morality was based on chastity and modesty.[69]
Indian women's independence, socially and sexually, horrified the Wesleyan missionaries as it had the Jesuits. The Methodist perspective was perhaps even more rigid, however. Evangelicals viewed human existence as an ongoing struggle between the conscience and the physical self; because they were basically hostile to the temptations of the flesh, they regarded sexuality and the body with a wariness verging on fear.[70] James Evans's report about conditions at the St. Clair mission indicates his attitude about native women clearly. Although he believed that the men were often idle or drunk, the women, he said, were particularly debauched, for "their very sex enabled them to be more audaciously obscene."[71]
Methodists in both Britain and the United States were debating the issue of female education in the 1840s. James Dixon, a British Wesleyan minister who toured Methodist churches in Canada and the United States during that decade, made a strong case for the need to instruct women. He stated the usual commonplace about women's role in forming the character of the next generation, but he also made a point that must have struck home in a period fraught with interdenominational rivalry: educating women was a way to combat the growth of the Catholic church. "The women are always the objects of attention with the Popish church. . . . The moral force of the Popery, so long exercised in the world, has been accomplished very much through the societies formed in various ways to influence, to educate, and then to employ, women, for the furtherance of its objectives."[72]
This was a sticky issue, for, like the Jesuits, the Wesleyans insisted that missionaries have but limited interaction with native women. Evangelists received specific instructions on this matter, such as those sent to George Barnley shortly after his arrival at Moose Factory in March 1840 on how to behave with native women:
Keep at the utmost distance from all trifling and levity in your intercourse with young persons, more especially with females. Take no liberties with them. Converse with them very sparingly
and only for religious purposes; even then do not converse with them alone. Be above suspicion. Beware of the half cast females—the daughters of Europeans by native women. Forget not that the thought of foolishness is sin.[73]
As a result, women often had only minimal contact with WMMS missionaries. To be sure, the Wesleyans did attract some female converts, but in these cases the women seem to have based their decision on practical rather than spiritual factors. Certainly few women claimed spiritual rebirth, although group conversions following camp meetings may indicate instances when women were swept up emotionally. In general, however, familial circumstances apparently governed a woman's decision to convert. For example, Thomas Woolsey reported from Edmonton House in 1858 that he had baptized Joseph La Patack, an important Cree chief, and his wife. Joseph obviously commanded more notice and support than his unnamed wife. "[His] subsequent deportment," Woolsey observed with satisfaction, "has convinced me and others that I had not mistaken the sincerity of Joseph La Patack's profession at his baptism."[74] Woolsey never commented on the woman's commitment, and one suspects that she was simply part of a mandatory family conversion, like some other wives—for example, Mrs. Wawanosh, wife of a head chief at St. Clair mission—and many children. One woman to whom the missionaries did direct attention, however, was Mary Ann Morrison, the Cree wife of a Scots employee of the HBC at Norway House. A model Christian, her happy deathbed scene warmed Charles Stringfellow's heart: "she literally went home to God rejoicing," declaring that "'Christianity has done me good."'[75]
Some women requested baptism following a brush with death—their own or that of loved ones. In the early years of the Credit mission, a woman saved at a camp meeting revealed that she had recently lost several children. With touching symbolism she described her conversion experience: "For this last week, I have been filling, & filling, but that time [the prayer meeting] I thought I should have burst."[76] Margaret Sohia, of the Rossville mission at Norway House, asked for instruction following her recovery from a severe illness. She told Stringfellow, the
missionary, that she trusted in Jesus and would even die if God so wished.[77]
Conversion, though, was no guarantee of a woman's permanent acceptance of Christianity. Occasionally they backslid openly, abandoning Methodism to regain sexual or marital freedom. One of the most distressing cases to the missionaries was that of a woman from Rossville who had led an exemplary Christian life. Nevertheless, she remained torn between the old ways and the new, and in the end she left Rossville to return to her relatives and traditional beliefs, later dying with the question of her "doom" unanswered in the missionaries' minds.[78]
Only a few women publicly opposed the Wesleyans, and rather flamboyantly. George Barnley attributed the exuberant but ephemeral success of a prophetic movement at Moose Factory and York Fort in 1843 to the fact that "a missionary zeal was awakened in the bosoms of an old woman and a youth who took up their residence among the Albany Indians, and soon introduced their chart, with all the enchanting revelations of the new system, and the poor people were almost universally carried away with the delusion."[79] According to the ministers, the movement originated in the discontent of two male shamans at Fort Severn who blamed Christianity for their declining influence, although HBC records indicate that the leader was a Home Guard Cree from York Fort who advocated communal distribution of meat and the destruction of dogs used to haul for the company. Transported by visions of a fantastic Indian heaven replete with fat deer and a fabulous mansion closed to whites, the woman and her young helper mesmerized the local Cree.[80]
HBC officers reported to Governor George Simpson that the old woman's success in propagating the new beliefs had turned the Indians lazy—an intolerable situation for the profit-oriented Englishmen, who retaliated by spreading the rumor that Abishabis, the original visionary, was a windigo. The chief trader at Albany, G. Pramston, labeled Abishabis a fraud, and the company then imprisoned, tried, and condemned him at Fort Severn. A hatchet blow from behind (classic windigo execution) finished Abishabis's prophetic quest. In a dramatic finale to the episode, company officers forced the woman and
boy to toss their cultic paraphernalia into a bonfire before an assemblage of Cree and HBC employees.[81]
In another case, "Our Queen Dowager down the river" drove poor Peter Jacobs nearly to despair in his struggle to convert the Rainy Lake Ojibwa (whom he likened to "the Jews of old. 'behold this people is a stiffnecked people'"). This duplicitous woman, he complained, "gave me many encouragements, saying again and again that 'not only herself,' but her people would soon become Christians. Now during the past year she also took it in her head to give her hand and heart to a man who had a wife already." Jacobs, devastated by the woman's rejection of Christianity and the principles of monogamy that he had tried to teach her, was convinced that she had woefully damaged his accomplishments.[82]
Overall, however, the tenor of women's responses to WMMS missionaries might almost be called demure. There was no clear pattern of acceptance or rejection; women seldom openly resisted the Wesleyans, but, unlike men, neither did they seek out religious or secular instruction. This was a marked contrast to the antagonism encountered by the Jesuits or by missionaries working in the late 1700s and early decades of the 1800s. During the Wesleyans' tenure, indeed, there was little evidence of the pattern described by David Thompson and others of women's traditionalism leading to incipient gender conflict in communities that had come under European influence.
The ambiguous character of female response appears to rise from two features of this period: the shifting nature of native life in mid-nineteenth-century Canada and the Wesleyans' perspective on the importance of women to their mission. Although individual men resisted conversion, the number of shamans and leaders who did convert suggests that Christianity exercised greater appeal to males, who found it necessary for maintaining a working relationship with the Hudson's Bay Company. As conditions in Rupert's Land and Upper Canada grew increasingly desperate for Indians, limiting their autonomy and increasing interaction with and economic dependence on whites, women may well have realized that open antagonism toward missionaries only worsened the situation; thus they tempered their responses so as to protect community relations
with the HBC. In essence, they found that it was counterproductive to oppose the missionaries.
Although the Wesleyan missionaries did not face pronounced resistance from women, their success was nonetheless limited. The WMMS missions withered away, fraught with problems and neglected by London as internal struggles for reform absorbed Methodists in England. James Evans returned to England in 1946, ostensibly to repair his failing health, but he left behind a string of accusations asserting that he had intimidated Indian girls into sexual relations with him. Ironically, he died upon his arrival in London, but his fellow missionaries continued to debate the matter of his innocence for years.[83]
Several ministers relinquished their posts out of concern for the well-being of their wives. Childbirth and illness incapacitated George Barnley's wife and, he explained, "acting on a naturally excitable temperament produce[d] a state of nervousness, & depression almost insupportable to herself, & of course very distressing to me."[84] When the situation became unbearable, the Barnleys left Moose Factory and returned to England without awaiting WMMS approval for vacating the mission. Peter Jacobs's wife also went into decline in the hostile environment of Rainy Lake. "She is pining away, very fast," he anxiously reported; "whether this is the cause of the troubles we now have or from the disappointment of not going to Canada I cannot tell; when I ask her the cause of her pining away she says nothing."[85] Of the group of missionaries whose tenure began following the transfer of the missions to the Canadians, perhaps most striking was the situation of Robert Brooking's wife. Following their return to Canada from Rossville, Enoch Wood, missionary superintendent of the Canada Conference, reported that "Mrs. B. is much altered, having a depressed, squaw-like appearance. Their daughter has been neglected. She is as wild as a deer. . . . I feel somewhat interested to see the changes."[86]
Moreover, the Hudson's Bay Company had become disenchanted with the Methodists' inability to maintain their missions, and Governor Simpson went so far as to suggest to Enoch Wood that HBC territories were no longer a desirable field for Methodist efforts. In self-defense, Wood told the WMMS that
the company wanted the Methodists out of its lands, that it now viewed the missionaries' efforts as a deterrent to economic gain.[87] By 1852, William Mason was the only Wesleyan missionary in Rupert's Land; alone, he could not meet the spiritual needs of his sparse and widely spread flock. Discouraged by lack of support, Mason transferred to the Church of England's Christian Missionary Society (which had tried to have all the WMMS missions transferred to its jurisdiction) in 1854 and moved from the area.[88]
That same year, the WMMS turned over the Rupert's Land missions to the Canada Conference. Thomas Woolsey, along with Robert Brooking, Charles Stringfellow, and Henry Steinhauer, participated in this fresh start. But despite the new attempt, the Rupert's Land missions made little headway. The seriousness of the situation became clear when Woolsey, at Victoria mission in present-day Alberta, received a letter from William Os-ke-maw-gweyan and three other men. These Stone Indians from Goose River claimed that the Wesleyans "threw us away," leaving them to struggle, in Woolsey's words, "as sheep without a shepherd."[89] Indeed, the Wesleyans were unable to provide them with any missionary, and the Canadian Methodists gradually abandoned the Northern Ojibwa and Cree in favor of domestic proselytizing.[90]