author
John Tanner
d. 1847
Best known for a remarkable 1830 captivity narrative, this frontier memoirist described life after being taken as a child and raised among Ojibwe and Odawa communities. His story became an important firsthand account of the Great Lakes borderlands and the uneasy space between Native and settler worlds.
1 Audiobook
About the author
Born around 1780 in the Kentucky frontier, he was captured as a boy in 1789 and spent roughly three decades living among Native communities in the Great Lakes region. He became deeply acculturated, learned Indigenous languages, and later worked as a hunter, guide, and interpreter around Sault Ste. Marie.
His best-known book, A Narrative of the Captivity and Adventures of John Tanner, was published in 1830. The memoir was written from his experiences and edited by Edwin James, and it has remained notable as a rare firsthand account of daily life, movement, trade, and conflict in the interior of North America during that period.
Tanner's life did not fit neatly into either white settler society or the Native communities among whom he had lived, and that tension gives his writing much of its lasting power. He is generally listed as having died in 1847, though some sources suggest the exact year may be uncertain.