A Friend among the Senecas: The Quaker Mission to Cornplanter's People (review)

Abstract

Book Reviews75 published in a scholarly edition until now. T. L. Underwood is a leading scholar ofradical and millenarian groups ofseventeenth-century England. He was first to analyze in depth the eschatology ofearly Friends. His recent study of Baptist-Quaker controversy in this period, Primitivism, Radicalism , and the Lamb 's War (Oxford, 1 997), is an excellent contribution. His introduction to the Muggletonians in this volume is very useful for anyone seeking to understand this strange group, which tangled often with early Friends. The largest piece in this collection is The Acts ofthe Witnesses, Muggleton's autobiography, published after his death. The Transcendent Spiritual Treatise (1652) describes and proclaims the commission that the two witnesses had just received that year. This is specialist reading, to be certain. But this volume is important reading for anyone seeking to understand early Friends in their context, or wishing simply to sample more ofthe flamboyant religion of a very special moment in history. Douglas GwynWoodbrooke A Friendamong theSénecas: The QuakerMission to Cornplanter 'sPeople. By David Swatzler. Mechanicsburg, Pa.: Stackpole, 2000. xvi + 319 pp. Maps, illustrations, appendix, notes, bibliography, and index. $24.95. InMay 1798 the Indian Committee ofPhiladelphiaYearlyMeeting ofthe Religious Society ofFriends sentthree Quakermissionaries to live andwork on the upper Allegheny among the Sénecas, who along with the Mohawks, Cayugas, Oneidas, Onondagas, and Tuscaroras formed the Six Iroquois Nations. Henry Simmons, one of these Friends' missionaries, had briefly served as a schoolteacher among the Oneidas and, building on this limited experience, became a schoolteacher at the village of the Seneca leader Cornplanter. By early February 1799, Simmons had started writing down his experiences at Cornplanter's village Jenuchshadago. In^4 Friendamong the Sénecas David Swatzler takes Simmons'sjournal as a starting point for an exploration of Seneca history and culture and Quaker interactions with the Sénecas at the turn ofthe nineteenth century. Simmons' time on the upperAllegheny was short: he left the Sénecas and returned east from his mission post in October 1799. As a schoolteacher, his influence was apparently negligible since he had a great deal of trouble convincing the Seneca children to attend school regularly. What makes Simmons' short tenure at Jenuchshadago noteworthy is that the missionary was present when the elderly Seneca Handsome Lake had his first visions thatinspiredthe Longhousereligion, which continuestobepracticedamong some Iroquois peoples today. Simmons recounted how a deathly ill Hand- 76Quaker History some Lake had a vision of three men holding "Bushes in their hands with berries on them, of different kinds" that would enable him to regain his health. Furthermore, the men told Handsome Lake that it was time for the Sénecas to reform, for "the great Spirit was much displeased with his people's getting drunk, and other gross Evils" (266-67). Handsome Lake's Longhouse religion aimed at reform and revitalization appealed to Sénecas who had suffered through years of devastation since their first contacts with Europeans. Swatzler's book is set up almost like a lengthy annotation of Simmons' eight-month-longjournal. This mode oforganization rooted in the chronology of the journal leads to some repetition and an odd arrangement of themes. After a chapter describing the history of Quakers in the eighteenth century, Swatzler moves directly to a chapter on "Iroquois Games." The logic of this juxtaposition will be lost on most readers. Simply because Simmons discussed a witch killing and a wife beating in the same journal entry in June 1799, Swatzler writes a chapter on the combined topics "Witches and Wives"—an unfortunate pairing. Many ofSimmons' journal entries, however, lead Swatzler to examine important elements of Seneca culture and history in interesting detail, including Iroquois ritual feasts, subsistence cycles, and the troubled record of Seneca dispossession. Although Swatzler does not offer a new interpretation of Friends' roles among the Sénecas, he clearly explains the missionaries' civilizing agenda and the ways in which the Seneca leader Cornplanter sought to use the mission program to halt the damaging effects ofalcohol among his people. The author also provides an appendix withthe full text ofSimmons' original journal and an edited version that eliminates Simmons' abbreviations and attempts to make the journal more readable. Even though Swatzler could...