Hendrick Aupaumut, Negotiator

Main attributes of this Native American place: Archaeological; Native Practices; Landmark. 

Sachem, diplomat and historian Hendrick Aupaumut (1757‐1830), Stockbridge‐born and educated, enlisted in the Contintental Army during the Revolutionary War. He was commissioned a captain after the Battle of White Plains in 1778.

The Stockbridge Mohicans’ numbers diminished after the war, their lands gradually taken over by whites. Most moved to Oneida Creek, N.Y., in the mid 1780s and established the town of New Stockbridge. Aupaumut was an important emissary between the Stockbridge Indians and United States authorities — and soon served as a native go‐between to other tribes in the Northwest. Gen. Arthur St. Clair in 1791 dispatched Aupaumut with a peace offering to frontier settlements. Secretary of War Henry Knox the next year sent him to accede with the Delaware, Miami, Shawnee and other tribes. Indian Commissioner Timothy Pickering admired Aupaumut as an intelligent man able to speak and write fluently in English.

“Ostensibly, Aupaumut represented the United States, but he acted primarily to revitalize Mohican autonomy and influence as the ‘front door’ between the Anglo‐Americans and the Algonquian peoples to the west,” according to historian Alan Taylor.

In 1794, after the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794 with Gen. Anthony Wayne, Aupaumut sat in on treaty negotiation with the Six Nations and others at Canadaigua. “He signed the treaty that was drafted and continued to work as a negotiator for a number of years. In 1808 or 1809 he was seen in Washington with Nicholas Cusick, a Tuscarora, on their way to North Carolina to try to obtain reparations from the North Carolinians for lands that the Tuscaroras had been forced to abandon in the eighteenth century,” according to literary historian Paul Lauter.

Fearing his own Stockbridges were literally losing ground in New York state, Aupaumut sought out the Munsees and Delawares who had settled on the White River in Indiana. He was appointed agent to that tribe in 1808. In 1818 a group of Stockbridge Mohicans migrated to the White. But the land had been sold. Three years later, son Soloman Aupaumut led a group to Wisconsin, where they settled on Menominee. The last Stockbridges, among them Aupaumut, settled on land on the Fox River in 1829.

Aupaumut’s “A Short Narration of My Last Journey to the Western Country” portrays the Native American struggle with language, with customs, with survival. Written about 1794, the manuscript went unpublished until 1827, after it was found among the papers of Isaac Zane of Philadelphia. The first page was missing. Benjamin H. Coates edited the ms. for publication as “A Narrative of an Embassy to the Western Indians, from the Original Manuscript of Hendrick Aupaumut.” A version appeared in Electa Jones’ Stockbridge Past and Present.

Aupaumut believed the United States would treat the Indians with fairness. “The great men of the United States have their liberty — they begin with new things, and now they endeavor to lift us up the Indians from the ground,” he wrote, “that we may stand up and walk ourselves.” “Aupaumut recounted his people’s history. He told how his forefathers had worshipped the Great Spirit with sacrifices until one day 84 years ago a white man by the name of John Sergeant (father of their present minister) arrived at their fireside as ‘one of the messengers of the great

and good Spirit.’ From Sergeant they learned that ‘Jesus Christ was sent into this world to save poor sinners that he was crucified and had again rissen from the dead and had gone into the heaven,’” according to historian Rachel Wheeler.

Aupaumut is buried in the old Stockbridge Indian Cemetery in Kaukauna, Wisc.

— Bernard A. Drew

SOURCES

  •   Aupaumut , Hendrick, “A Short Narration of My Last Journey to the Western Country,” written 1794, in Benjamin H. Coates, ed., as “A Narrative of an Embassy to the Western Indians, from the Original Manuscript of Hendrick Aupaumut,” in Memoirs of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Vol. 2. (Philadelphia, 1827). A version appears in Electa Jones’ Stockbridge Past and Present; or, Records of an Old Mission Station. Springfield: Samuel Bowles, 1854.

  •   Bross, Kristina, and Hilary E. Wyss. Early Native Literacies in New England: A Documentary and Critical Anthology. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008.

  •   Clarfield, Gerard H. Timothy Pickering and the American Republic. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1980.

  •   Lauter, Paul, general editor. Heath Anthology of American Literature, fifth edition.

  •   Taylor, Alan, “Captain Hendrick Aupaumut: The Dilemmas of an Intercultural Broker,”Ethnohistory, Vol. 43 No. 3, summer 1996.

  •   Wheeler, Rachel, “Hendrick Apaumut: Christian‐Mahican Prophet,” Journal of the Early Republic, summer 2005.