(1818-69)
Mississauga Ojibwa writer and lecturer
With the publication of his autobiography, Life, History, and Travels (1847), George Copway (Kahgegagahbowh, "Firm Standing") became one of the best-known American writers of his day. Three more books, completed in 1850 and 1851, and his publication of a newspaper, Copway's American Indian, in 1851, gave the young man access to America's highest social and literary circles. He was one of the first North American Indians to have his writings published and widely read.
In his autobiography Copway described his childhood on the north shore of Lake Ontario, in the Rice Lake area of Upper Canada, today's Ontario, from his birth in 1818 to his departure as a Methodist Church worker in the church's Lake Superior District. His parents had educated him in the Ojibwa tradition until their conversion to Methodism in the late 1820s. After they became Christians their son attended the mission school at Rice Lake.
None of the details of Copway's early life, until he left for Lake Superior in 1834, can be verified by other sources. Regardless of the lack of confirming accounts, however, the story he tells in his autobiography rings true. The Ojibwas in Upper Canada did indeed face enormous challenges in the 1820s as a result of the influx of tens of thousands of British immigrants onto their hunting grounds. The newcomers inadvertently brought disease, and traders introduced an abundance of alcohol. The Ojibwas—or Mississaugas, as the settlers called the Ojibwas on the north shore of Lake Ontario—suffered great population loss, and alcohol abuse became endemic. After Mississauga Christians led by Peter Jones, a bilingual and bicultural preacher from the Credit River, reached them in 1826 and 1827, many Rice Lake Mississaugas embraced Christianity.
Copway gave special attention in his autobiography to his family's conversion. The common human values shared by the Indian and Christian faiths attracted his parents, as did the Methodists' abstention from alcohol. Visions and dreams played an important role in his family's and his own acceptance of Methodism. His later life indicates that his desire to achieve equality with the newcomers also motivated him to join the church.
The new convert's two or three years at the Rice Lake Methodist school gave him enough knowledge of English to act as an Ojibwa interpreter for the nonnative missionaries. The bright young man moved quickly through the ranks in the Lake Superior District as his abilities in translating became well known. After three years as an interpreter, schoolteacher, and preacher, the Illinois Conference of the Methodist Church sent him and two other young Ojibwa converts to the Ebenezer Manual Labor School at Jacksonville, Illinois. Two years of study there prepared them for ordination.
Copway's close contacts with nonnatives led him to adopt much of their outlook. As he wrote in his last book, Running Sketches of Men and Places (1851), "Man is the one for whom this world is made." He accepted many of the values of the larger society and distanced himself from those Native American spiritual beliefs that did not place human beings in the center of the universe.
His marriage brought the Indian minister ever closer to the dominant society. On a short visit to Upper Canada in early 1840 he met Elizabeth Howell, a young Englishwoman whose family farmed in the Toronto area. They married in June 1840, just before Copway traveled to Minnesota to take up his first posting as an Indian missionary. But they would not spend long in the United States. When his nonnative Methodist colleagues declined to treat him as an equal he became frustrated and unhappy. Finally, in 1842, he left the United States for Upper Canada, where he served at the Ojibwa Methodist mission at Saugeen on Lake Huron.
Finances proved the young native minister's undoing. He spent band funds freely, without always obtaining council approval to do so. In early 1846 two Upper Canadian bands, those of Saugeen and his own Rice Lake, accused him of embezzlement. As a result of the charges the Indian Department put him in jail, where he remained for several weeks. The Canadian Conference of the Wesleyan Methodist Church expelled him. Alienated and bitter, Copway and his family returned to the United States after his release from prison.
In terms of his career, his expulsion from the Methodist Church proved a blessing in disguise, for it forced him into a new field of endeavor: he became a celebrated author and lecturer. How Copway succeeded in writing his life story while, in one observer's words, "going from place to place, without much of steady employment, for 6 or 8 months, and perhaps more," remains a mystery. No doubt his well-educated wife helped. Curiously, his autobiography resembles the African slave narratives then available, as well as the works of writers of spiritual confessions. As one might expect, he makes no mention of his short stay in a Canadian jail, or of his expulsion from the Canadian Conference of the Wesleyan Methodist Church.
Copway's Life, History, and Travels proved an instant success. It had gone through seven printings by the end of 1848. As the newly acclaimed author spoke well, a lecturing career opened up to him. Large numbers of Americans came to his lectures to see and hear "the noble Christian convert." New writing projects followed: his Traditional History and Characteristic Sketches of the Ojibway Nation (1850), the first history of a North American Indian nation in English by an Indian; and Running Sketches of Men and Places (1851), an account of his European travels in 1850. He also published an epic poem, The Ojibway Conquest (1850), although Julius Taylor Clark, a former Indian agent, later claimed to have written it. Apparently Clark gave the manuscript to Copway to publish on the understanding that Copway would use the money earned to promote the creation of an Indian territory west of the Mississippi.
In the May 31, 1851, issue of the Literary World, the magazine's editors, Evert and George Duyckinck, described George Copway as "a shrewd, wide-awake man, with a knowledge of the world which few of the white race could overmatch." Yet events would prove this assessment premature. Copway's inability to enlarge upon his writing themes and his constant need to solicit money caused his downfall. Within half a year after the Duyckincks' reference, Copway was indeed overmatched. His newspaper folded, and gradually thereafter he lost his audience.
Little is known about Copway's life after 1851. Scattered references exist to lectures he presented throughout the eastern United States (one was canceled in Boston in 1858 because of poor attendance). During the Civil War he worked as a recruiter of Canadian Indians for the Union Army. After the war, in 1867, he surfaced as a root doctor in Detroit. One year later he appeared in Canada, without his wife and infant daughter, at the Lake of Two Mountains (Oka) Reserve, just west of Montreal. There he declared himself a "pagan," eager to join the Roman Catholic Church. The one-time Methodist preacher, author, lecturer, and herbal doctor died at the Lake of Two Mountains Reserve early in 1869, just before his First Communion.
Donald B. Smith, "The Life of George Copway or Kahgegagahbowh (1818-1869)—and a Review of His Writings" Journal of Canadian Studies 23, no. 3 (fall 1988): 5-38.
Donald B. Smith
University of Calgary
