There have been Native Americans in Europe since before the Columbian contact. Originally sought as evidence of landfall in some far distant place, these transatlantic travelers have at one time or another been captives, guides, regal equals, political and military allies, exhibits and performers on British soil. Popular perceptions of Native Americans in Britain across the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries reveal much about Britons’ changing attitudes towards North America, and about the emergence of race as a system of human classification. This study, whilst considering the visit as a phenomenon, and drawing information from a variety of sources, focuses primarily upon six visits which took place between 1710 and 1844 in order to address the changes in British attitudes.

In the eighteenth century visitors came from two communities, the Cherokee and the Mohawk nation of the Iroquois confederacy. The Iroquois were the most militarily powerful Native American political bloc in the Northeast, controlling territory that stretched from Albany on the Hudson in the east to the Genesee River draining into Lake Ontario in the west. The Mohawk kept the eastern door of the figurative Iroquois longhouse, and it was they who came into most frequent contact with the settlers and leaders of the colony of New York. In each of the four eighteenth century visits considered in the opening two chapters, the Native Americans who made the journey across the Atlantic were members of the Mohawk community. They were all male, but they were men with various levels of political power and influence. They were also men who represented the changing needs and desires of their community across more than a century. The ways in which these visitors were reported by the metropolitan press during their stay in Britain illustrate changes in British perceptions.

The opening chapter of what follows addresses the visit of 1710, which is of interest primarily because there was great disparity between official and popular reactions to the visitors. After one of their number had been taken to Boston to be shown the Anglo-American metropolis, a party of four Mohawk ‘Indian Kings’ were escorted from Iroquoia to the court of Queen Anne. Their visit was planned and coordinated by three colonial officials, Francis Nicholson, Samuel Vetch and Peter Schuyler. These men sought to draw attention to the American colonies and revive the Queen’s interest in a military conquest of French Canada. Despite the treaty of neutrality signed by the Iroquois in 1701, and three years before the French acknowledged British suzerainty over the Iroquois at the treaty of Utrecht, four Mohawks were brought across the water to pledge military allegiance to the Queen. The popular perception of these visitors was created by the colonial administrators with whom they traveled. The leader of the delegation, Hendrick Tejonihokarawe, was presented as the emperor of the Six Nations, and his three companions were variously introduced as ‘kings.’ As will be discussed more fully below, it was convenient to the ambitions of the administrators for both court and public to believe that these visitors were men of real power and influence in the Mohawk valley.

Joseph Brant, Theyandanegea, was the next Mohawk to represent his people politically in Britain. He traveled to London twice. In 1775, as the rebellion in the colonies turned to war, Brant traveled as both a political ally of Sir Guy Johnson and the official representative of the Mohawk community. Lord Dartmouth, the Secretary of State for Trade and Plantations, had requested a list of Mohawk grievances so that, in putting them right, he might secure Native American military allies. Having communicated those grievances to Lord George Germain, Dartmouth’s successor, Joseph made it clear during his first visit that he planned to ally himself with the crown and with his friends in the Indian department. During the second visit, in 1785, Joseph was determined that those friends who had let him down in the aftermath of the war were going to put things right. Returning to London, Joseph inquired about getting financial compensation for lands which the Mohawks lost, and also wondered whether the British army would join the Mohawks if they chose to mount an attack to recover their lost lands. In defeat Britain managed her Native Allies poorly, and left those who had staked everything on a British victory dispossessed.

The Eighteenth century visitor was not always a political operative. Hyam Meyers and Lawrence Blessius brought Sychnecta and Trosrogha, neither of whom had any political influence or ambition, across the Atlantic in 1764. Sychnecta was taken to Amsterdam and exhibited there. He was returned to Britain after the intervention of Ambassador Sir Joseph Yorke in The Hague. Yorke attached conditions to his return, but in defiance of those conditions Sychnecta was exhibited, along with his companion, at the Sun Tavern in the Strand in late February and early March of 1765. The situation in the colonies was thought to be so delicate in the aftermath of the Seven Years War and Pontiac’s rebellion that the House of Lords intervened to return Sychnecta and Trosrogha to New York in order to prevent another Native rebellion.

Despite the legislation enacted by the Lords in 1765, Sychnecta and Trosrogha were not the only Native Americans to be exhibited on British soil. Following America’s declaration of independence from Britain and the resettling of the loyal Mohawks on the north shore of Lake Ontario, the need for Native American political representation in London declined. By the mid-nineteenth century, with Washington the focus for political delegations, the only niche for the Native American visitor to London was as an exhibit or entertainment. The most high profile of the entrepreneurs to take advantage of this market was George Catlin, the proprietor of a gallery of Native American artifacts that toured Britain in the early 1840s.

Arthur Rankin approached Catlin in November 1843 with an offer of partnership. Rankin had traveled to Britain with a party of nine Ojibwas headed by Ah-Que-Wee-Saintz, ‘the boy chief,’ and the two men entered into a partnership in which the Ojibwas appeared in Catlin’s gallery. The single most significant difference between eighteenth and nineteenth century attitudes was that these were the first Native American visitors to be defined in the press in terms of color. The use of the term ‘red’ in newspaper articles relating to the Ojibwas is indicative of a major shift in perception between the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. During the eighteenth century, the British press was curious about Native American visitors in terms of their political position, and dealt with both sanctioned visitors and unofficial ‘exhibit-delegations’ in terms of their allegiance to the British government and crown.

This focus on loyalty, an essential part of legitimizing Native American allies in the public mind, would have been greatly damaged by any popular perception of Native American racial inferiority. Instead political, social or military standing, each measures of class rather than race, were the significant measures by which Native Americans were judged during their time in London in the Eighteenth century. Native American visitors only became ‘red’ when the nuanced official relationships of the eighteenth century were no longer significant, and when major Native American visits to London were managed not by the state, but by entrepreneurs.

Samuel Smith of Hadley, Massachusetts first used Red as an appellation for the Native American in 1699. Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia promised to ‘draw heavily on what [he had] seen of man, white, red and black.’ By the time that George Catlin was in partnership with delegations from the United States the term had taken firm root. The 1840s saw the publication of Fenimore Cooper’s The Redskins and Schoolcraft’s The Red Race in America. Alden Vaughan suggests that "red was sufficiently flexible and ambiguous to meet the metaphysical imperatives of a society that did not wholly agree about the Indian’s basic character or social and political fate." The positive attributes of the term were not widely recognized by the time the Ojibwas and Iowas traveled to Britain. Indeed a decade after Catlin, DeBow’s Review dismissed ‘the doctrine of the unity of the races,’ suggesting polygenesis and concluding that ‘we are not all descended from one pair of human beings….The Negro till the end of time will still be a Negro, and the Indian still an Indian.’

In the eighteenth century Britons encountered and came to know individual representatives of various Native American communities because the political circumstances of the time enabled and required those individuals to fulfill a specific intercultural role. Tejonihokarawe was recognized as an emperor in 1710, and Joseph Brant was widely reported as a commissioned officer in the British Army during the 1770s. By the time Arthur Rankin brought Ah Que Wee Saintz and his companions across the Atlantic to enhance George Catlin’s gallery the avenues for political expression in London were limited. The loss of the American colonies was the crucial factor in this limitation. The change in popular attitudes towards visiting Native Americans came at a time when visitors to London were no longer politically active, and therefore had no opportunity or state endorsement to exceed the bounds of their ‘type’. By 1843 there was no political role for the Native American in the British capital, and Native American culture, represented as a whole, was brought to the British public as an exotic curiosity rather than a political reality. As ideologies shifted in order to legitimate empire in the public mind, notions of loyalty that had meant so much in the eighteenth century were still significant. As Bell’s New Weekly Messenger pointed out in relation to the Ojibwa party,

These remarkable strangers are all of the very numerous tribe of Ojibbeways whose locality is to the north of Lake Huron in the vicinity of Georgian Bay, and consequently they are born subjects of Her Majesty Queen Victoria.

This article, and others like it, explicitly established the visitors’ loyalty to the monarch. During previous visits this had been an expression of allegiance, the visitors of 1710 even offering Queen Anne military assistance. The Ojibwa visitors, though, were born subjects, apparently filling a minor role in Britain’s grand imperial design and expressing subservience rather than allegiance. The rhetoric informing the attitudes of the British public was changing, and entrepreneurs such as George Catlin were able to take advantage of these new expectations and attitudes. In a climate of growing fascination with people of other cultures from around the world, Catlin established his gallery of paintings and native artifacts in London in 1840. Prior to the involvement of the Ojibwa delegation there was already a pressure on Catlin to produce an authentic ‘educational’ attraction. He responded by setting up a provincial lecture tour during which Londoners who enacted nightly tableaux vivantes of Native existence used the finest pieces from his collection as ‘props’.

Following this tour, Catlin was persuaded to set up his full gallery in Manchester, and he was there when Arthur Rankin arrived in Liverpool with the nine Ojibwas in tow. Rankin was not the only entrepreneur to enter into partnership with Catlin. The artist later included Joe Kosot, a Sauk, in his exhibition, and also collaborated with Mr. J. Melody in order to showcase fourteen members of the Iowa community throughout the provinces and continental Europe. I focus here on Catlin’s early experiences in London both to limit the scope of my study and to better contrast these later visits with earlier political journeys that were also focussed at the metropole.

This contrast of metropolitan experiences suggests that the nature of ‘the visit’ changed dramatically when political alliance between the British government and Native American communities was no longer necessary. In the chapters which follow I consider the regal visit of Tejonihokarawe, the military visits of Joseph Brant, and the rise of the exhibition as coordinated by George Catlin in terms of the development of British attitudes towards the visiting Native American. Concluding remarks address William Cody’s Wild West Show, which toured Europe three times between 1887 and 1906. By the turn of the twentieth century the Wild West Show perpetuated a myth of the American frontier rather than showcasing a cultural reality. By the 1840s the metropole to which Native Americans were turning in order to negotiate their future was Washington D.C.. Europe as a whole, and London in particular, was a location peripheral to their fortunes. In 1710 though, London was the colonial metropole, and the site for political negotiation between Queen Anne, Lord Dartmouth and the Four Indian Kings.

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Last revised: February 19th, 2004.