(1830-99)
Michigan Potawatomi author, entrepreneur, celebrity, and Chautauqua lecturer
Simon Pokagon was the youngest son of Leopold Pokagon, a village headman who was for American officials the best-known speaker and negotiator for the several small, staunchly Catholic Potawatomi communities of southwestern Michigan. Little is known of his childhood years except that they were spent in his father's village during the height of the midwestern Indian removals, which Leopold and other Michigan Potawatomi leaders skillfully resisted. In his adult years Pokagon worked at advancing his own public career through imaginative exaggerations of his father's accomplishments.
Pokagon maintained he was monolingual until age fourteen, when he was sent to Notre Dame Academy to begin his schooling. He then spent a year at Oberlin Collegiate Institute and two more at Twinsburg Academy in Ohio. Subsequently, he intimated he had been preparing for the priesthood, although how much his studies at the ardently Calvinist Ohio schools might have prepared him for such a vocation is questionable. As an adult, once established as a prominent protégé of the evangelical Protestant Friends of the Indian reformers, he turned away from his earlier Catholic heritage, apparently without formally adopting Protestantism. In his last decades, Pokagon's American publicists and sponsors billed him as the best-educated "full blooded" Indian of his day. They claimed he was fluent in five languages, including English, Latin, and Greek, and was the "hereditary principal chief" of the Potawatomi tribe.
Such press-agent puffery lacks substance. Holographic originals of his letters show that his command of written English was at best weak. None of the essays printed under his name in journals such as the Forum, Arena, Harper's Magazine, and the Chautauquan contains so much as a quote from the Latin classics or a Greek epigram. The only evidence of any exposure of his to these ancient languages is his occasional and erratic use of Greek vowel diacritics in the orthography he allegedly devised for Potawatomi, as in the title of his O-Gî-Mäw-Kwê Mit-I-Gwä-Kî (Queen of the Woods) (assuming that he was in fact the author of this slim volume). This book appeared posthumously in 1899, issued by Pokagon's attorney-publicist, C. H. Engle. Engle advertised Queen of the Woods as a true autobiographical account of events that really happened. But Queen is actually a clumsy mix of mawkish "vanishing frontier" fable coupled with a derivative polemic against the immorality of nicotine addiction and the evils of Demon Rum.
The first half of Queen purports to narrate the details of Pokagon's life following his return from school in Ohio (about 1850). Casting off the veneer of "civilization," he takes to the woods clad in buckskins, becoming a mighty deer slayer. Living a solitary life, attuned to nature, this fictive Simon encounters an unspoiled wood nymph, a "real natural" Potawatomi who speaks the languages of the birds and beasts. This was Pokagon's beloved Lonidaw, who appears in the book with her trusty (but terribly jealous) anthropomorphized companion, an albino deer. (Lonidaw, also known by her baptismal name of Angela, was the daughter of Sinagaw, a leader of the group of northern Indiana Potawatomis who broke away from the coerced westward emigration of 1837 to take refuge in southwestern Michigan.) Pokagon's sponsors called him the "king" of the Potawatomis, and in the book, upon their ill-fated marriage Lonidaw becomes his "Queen of the Woods." After living happily with Simon for some years, and delivering two babies with only Simon in attendance (there were in fact two additional children), Lonidaw drowns tragically, in an accident caused by two drunken American boatmen. (Pokagon later remarried; his second wife, Victoria, is not mentioned in Queen of the Woods.) Then the narrative changes course and tone entirely, as the author takes up the same popular puritanical causes Pokagon had long been advocating from various podiums.
Nonetheless, there is one substantial biographical truth in Queen of the Woods, whether or not Pokagon himself in any sense actually authored the manuscript. Its central theme is that of the unspoiled Savage who achieves Civilization, only to revert to nature, where the evil forces of Civilization pursue and destroy his happiness. Thereupon he again embraces Civilization, this time struggling to root out its immoral elements. This was the public image Pokagon cultivated in concert with his patrons, who were in the main the grandes dames of the Friends of the Indian reform movement. For them, Simon Pokagon was a major success story. In their eyes, he was a "master link" between Savagery and Civilization, an embodiment of their fondest hope: that Indians could traverse the great divide and serve as models of literate, Christian, smoke-free temperance for the uncouth lower-class immigrant elements of American society. There is also a substantial historical truth in this relationship. Simon Pokagon and his sponsors constituted an early version of the continuing alliance between idealistic elites and Native Americans, with images of the latter still being spun out as antistereotypes, moral exemplars for today's regenerative movements such as environmentalism and crime control.
C. H. Engle was also the publisher of Pokagon's several pamphlets, including "A Red Man's Greetings" and "The Lord's Prayer" (the latter in Potawatomi), both printed on birch bark. During his speaking tours, Pokagon peddled these to his audiences, and Engle continued to market them following his death. Pokagon's several published essays were much-edited print versions of some of his public speeches. In their original oral form, these addressed a variety of issues prominent in the minds of his American sponsors and certain audiences of the day, ranging from abolition, to free silver, to temperance, to women's rights, to racial tolerance.
Along the way, Pokagon also stumped for the general allotment policy, and for the peaceful acceptance by Indians of assimilation generally. Although his skills in writing English were severely limited, he was reportedly (according to his publicists) a spellbinding orator. His style was a mix of fawning sentimentality and surrender to the inevitable, with just enough of a tinge of anger over paradise lost to titillate but not badly annoy his late nineteenth-century audiences. He was especially skilled at arousing and encouraging the growing guilt feelings of elite Americans about Indians, which he manipulated to tap their personal pocketbooks for his own expenses.
Pokagon's posthumous Queen of the Woods brought him some years of fame—a reputation renewed in the 1970s when, with the sudden increase in popularity of American Indian and other ethnic literatures, he was identified by uncritical enthusiasts as the first Indian novelist. But during his lifetime his career peaked on May 1, 1893, when he was invited to address the opening of the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition. He was selected to first peal the replica Liberty Bell, a key symbol of that century's Columbian celebrations, and to present an oration celebrating the progress of American civilization, with Pokagon himself standing forth both to epitomize and to eulogize the transformation of New World natives.
To be exact, Simon Pokagon was esteemed only in the eyes of his American public and patrons. Far from being the "king" or the "hereditary principal chief" of the Potawatomis, he was for some years merely an elected council member representing one of the several Michigan Catholic bands. Long before his grand 1893 Chicago performance his own constituents had come to distrust, then to depose and shun him. This was due to his efforts to collect for himself, at first unbeknown to other Potawatomis, an inordinately large share of a court-of-claims award of thirty-nine thousand dollars, which was supposed to be doled out equally to tribal members, on a per capita basis. The Catholic Potawatomis became even further incensed when they discovered Pokagon had secretly conveyed to a combine of shady Chicago attorneys and real-estate promoters a "deed" to their fancied claim to ownership of Chicago's lakefront, a claim from which the Potawatomis dreamed of extracting a huge windfall.
Simon Pokagon died suddenly and unexpectedly at his home near Hartford, Michigan, on January 28, 1899. When the Chicagoland's Daughters of the American Revolution decided to honor the deceased celebrity by interring him in that city's Graceland Cemetery, they received no complaints from the Catholic Potawatomis along Michigan's St. Joseph River. Chicago was where Pokagon enjoyed a reputation and had a following, so to them that was where his remains belonged. His metropolitan patrons further honored Pokagon and his father by persuading the Chicago Park District to erect a statue of both men in that city's Jackson Park.
Simon Pokagon's public career can be viewed as the construction of a reputation and a persona that had little to do with inherent talent or cultivated art. His inordinate need for public acclaim and compliant eagerness to seize the opportunities offered by the preferences of sponsors and mass audiences, led Pokagon to conform to elite American expectations of how a good Indian should comport himself. So it was that he became an archetype celebrity Indian, in his "army blue" suit, sometimes topped by a borrowed Sioux headdress, hawking his "Lord's Prayer" and "Red Man's Greeting," posturing dutifully before American audiences: Simon Pokagon was the Friends of the Indians' Christian counterpoint to Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Indian spectaculars.
James A. Clifton, The Pokagons, 1683-1983: Catholic Potawatomi of the St. Joseph River Valley (Washington, D.C.: Potawatomi Nation and The University Press, 1984); Clifton, James A., "Simon Pokagon's Sandbar," Michigan History 71, no. 5 (1987): 12-19; James A. Clifton and Bernadette Rigal-Cellard, eds., Simon Pokagon's "Queen of the Woods" (forthcoming).
James A. Clifton
Western Michigan University
