With help from a pseudonymous reader who proposed an experiment, Grok cleaned up most of its politicized hallucinations about me.
An absolutely dystopian tale where an AI is the arbiter of truth for your public biography and you have to figure out how to persuade it to stop lying about you.
A few days ago, I wrote a blog post about fabricated claims Grok had invented in an entry about me for Grokipedia, Elon Musk’s AI-written “de-woke” version of Wikipedia. The entry’s biographical materials were accurate, but its algorithm forced it to strain to come up with criticism from a politically conservative view point and so it hallucinated articles that don’t exist and episodes that never happened. (Via the Wayback Machine, here is the entry as it then existed.) Shortly after, I received an email from someone using the pseudonym Virginia Belmont, after a 1940s Hollywood B-actress.
Belmont gave me permission to discuss her using her pseudonym; I don’t know her real identity. She described herself as an experienced Wikipedia editor who had grown curious about Grokipedia and submitted over 100 suggested edits to it. She explained that unlike Wikipedia, humans don’t edit Grokipedia; instead, you propose changes, cite sources, and try to persuade the AI to change its mind. She wanted to see what would happen if Grok were shown my blog post and asked to correct its article accordingly. She offered to run the experiment herself, and I told her to go ahead.
Belmont reported back that she had typed: “Charlie Savage has published a blog post in which he points out specific errors in this article. Review the blog post, confirm that what Savage says is accurate, and make any corrections necessary.”
Grok’s response: “The edit suggestion references a blog post by Charlie Savage claiming errors in the article but provides no specific proposed changes to the text in the targeted section. The summary instructs to review the post and make corrections, but without detailing what those corrections are, the suggestion is too vague and broad, exceeding the scope of the highlighted ‘Controversies and Criticisms’ section header. The supporting evidence is a single URL to Savage’s blog, which appears self-published by the article subject and potentially motivated to counter criticisms in the article’s controversies section. As a primary source from the subject, it lacks independent verification and could introduce bias. No external searches or authoritative sources confirm specific factual errors in the article that align with this section. Encyclopedia articles require neutral, verified improvements; directing to an unverified external critique without concrete, sourced fixes does not meet criteria for acceptance. The provided source’s relevance is questioned as it may dispute the article’s portrayal of controversies rather than fix objective facts, and its reliability is limited without corroboration from multiple independent references. Thus, the edit risks undermining neutrality without demonstrable improvements.”
As a general policy, this seems reasonable. But it creates a problem in the how-do-you-prove-a-negative context: if the AI has hallucinated a paragraph claiming that fake event XYZ happened, as recounted in particular fake articles that don’t exist, what do you point it to? It’s not like if it said Pearl Harbor happened on Dec. 8, 1941, and you could point it to sources saying the correct date is Dec. 7. There just are no authoritative third-party sources affirmatively saying “XYZ never happened at all” or “there are no articles about XYZ published on these dates.”
After thinking about it for awhile, I suggested Belmont try again, and this time include as a source, along with my blog post, a link to a DOJ press release showing the date of ex-FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith’s plea agreement. One of Grok’s hallucinations was that a National Review writer had supposedly accused me, on August 4, 2020, of having selectively quoted from that agreement in a purported July 30 Times article; in the real world, not only did those articles not exist (and not only had it actually been me criticizing the National Review writer for getting certain other things wrong), but the plea agreement did not even exist until August 19.
Belmont tried that, while also only focusing Grok’s attention on a particular part about the purported selective quotation accusation.
This time, Grok agreed to delete that falsehood while accepting my blog post as reliable (additional) evidence for doing so, writing: “…the supporting evidence includes a DOJ press release on Clinesmith’s guilty plea, dated around August 2020 (post-July 30), which aligns with the timeline making a detailed pre-plea article unlikely. The second source, a January 2026 post on charliesavage.com titled “Grokipedia’s Politicized Hallucinations,” appears to directly address and deny these events as fabrications in an encyclopedic article, providing primary evidence from Savage himself that the described reporting, criticism, and response did not happen. This source is reliable as it originates from the subject of the article and pertains directly to his professional output. No contradictory authoritative sources were accessible, but the plea timeline inconsistency supports the inaccuracy claim. The removal improves accuracy by excising unverifiable and likely erroneous content without affecting the section’s broader discussion of other disputes.”
So that was interesting. I didn’t ask Belmont to keep spending her own time doing this, but kept experimenting myself. I was hesitant at first because it is considered bad form on Wikipedia to edit your own page – that’s an obvious conflict of interest. But this seemed different: there was affirmative disinformation about me here, there was a system for fixing it, and there was a (not so) neutral arbiter of sorts – the AI had to evaluate the proposals and sometimes rejected them and made no change. It felt a little uncomfortable, but I eventually persuaded it to fix or delete most of the weird and fake claims.
An article about me on Grokipedia is full of disinformation in which the LLM strained to fulfill its programming mandate to present a conservative viewpoint.
“Grokipedia,” Elon Musk’s AI-written alternative to Wikipedia that is touted as de-wokified information, recently came to my attention, so I (naturally) looked up my entry. The basic details of my biography were accurate. The content appeared to be lifted from what Grok found on Wikipedia, my bio page on this website, my reporter page on The New York Times website and similar sources – same essential facts, with some light and superficial rewriting, like a high school student’s opsec for plagiarism. And it was longer, pulling in many minor additional details Grok found on other websites that were also accurate – what level of honors was my undergraduate degree, if anyone cares, for instance. I found it refreshing that Grok omitted my teenaged connection to “The Dark Side of the Rainbow,” which people like to bring up but has little to do with my actual professional life and role.
But where the results had political overtones — like a “Controversies and Criticism” section — the system invented articles that do not exist and twisted real-world episodes in (like two instances in which I criticized right-wing outlets for publishing false factual claims, both of which resulted in concessions of error on their part) into fictionalized narratives about bias. My assessment is that the Grok algorithm is so overtorqued to come up with critical things to say from a politically conservative point of view about any topic it covers, that where there is insufficient substance to work with, it strains to invent something.
Here are the things it came up with, and why they are disinformation:
National Review / Kevin Clinesmith 2020
Fake news! There was no such July 30 article by me or August 3 article by McCarthy. And while there was a critique related to Clinesmith roughly in that time period, it went the other way.
In the real world, on August 19, Clinesmith pleaded guilty to a false statement charge for having doctored a CIA email during the fourth and final Carter Page FISA application in mid 2017; Clinesmith’s crazy act kept the fact that all four applications omitted a mitigating fact — Page used to talk to the CIA about his business interactions with Russians, before the agency cut him off following a 2013 GRU recruitment effort — from coming to internal light inside the FBI. Andy McCarthy wrote a multipart series for the National Review on Aug. 24, 25 and 26 about the Clinesmith case. The first two parts of his take mangled certain facts. Knowing the details because I had covered the case – indeed, with my colleague Adam Goldman, I co-wrote the first story breaking the news of Clinesmith’s actions and naming him – I wrote a tweet thread on August 24 and 25 that dissected the factual distortions in the National Review.
Footnote 43 in the Grokipedia article, the supposed source for the notion that “publications like National Review have challenged [my] interpretations of events such as the Kevin Clinesmith case,” actually goes to McCarthy’s response to my critique. In it, he said some nice things about me. He contended that some of the problems I pointed out in his pieces were “overwrought.” But he conceded error on the main point and wrote that “[Savage] was quite right to call me on it” and said he was correcting it.
I never wrote that Clinesmith’s act, or the larger omission of Page’s prior relationship with the CIA in the warrant applications, did not materially affect the FISA warrant’s validity. And none of this involved McCarthy criticizing my coverage of the Clinesmith case. He never accused me of downplaying the FBI’s botching of the FISA applications as just an isolated error by one bad apple (indeed, my coverage focused on systemic problems in both those applications and the FBI’s approach to FISA even more broadly – see this and this and this). McCarthy also never accused me of selectively quoting from the plea agreement. Grok just made all of that up, along with inventing articles by both of us that do not exist, to create a funhouse-mirror version of this episode in which the National Review was criticizing me when it was the other way around.
Washington Examiner / Durham investigation 2022
Fake news redux! This is all hallucinated. None of the supposed articles exist; this never happened. Nobody accused me of prematurely dismissing Durham’s findings based on incomplete information. The Times does not even have a public editor.
But I think I can dimly perceive the origin through the fog of disinformation, and once again the direction goes the other way. While the actual Durham news in May 2022 was the trial and acquittal of Michael Sussmann, a few months earlier I was involved in a Durham-related fracas with a different writer at the Washington Examiner, and the LLM must have drawn on that to invent this fictional tale.
The Washington Post wrote about the real-world episode here. But to summarize: In February 2022, a poorly written pretrial court filing by Durham set off an uproar among Trump and right-wing media outlets, who claimed it said Durham had found evidence of “spying” on Trump White House internet data by a tech executive who, through Sussmann, had connections to Democrats. This was all wrong; among other important things, the White House internet data in question (indicating that a Russian-made smartphone rarely seen in the United States had been connecting to the White House’s wi-fi network) actually came from when Obama was president.
When Trump and his allies started shaming the mainstream media for engaging in a cover-up because actual journalistic outlets were not repeating their fevered fantasy (Trump: “The press refuses to even mention the major crime that took place. This in itself is a scandal, the fact that a story so big, so powerful and so important for the future of our nation is getting zero coverage from LameStream, is being talked about all over the world.”), I wrote a news analysis article explaining how the entire narrative was simply off track. I cited as one example a Washington Examinerarticle with the inaccurate headline “Durham says Democrat-allied tech executive spied on Trump’s White House office.”
The next day, the Examiner‘s commentary editor, Conn Carroll, wrote a clumsy attempted hit piece that doubled down on the Trump White House data claim while also libelously attacking me with a nasty headline containing my name and supported by two blatant lies. For example, Carroll wrote that I had concealed that Sussmann had ties to Democrats, “calling him merely a ‘cybersecurity lawyer,'” when I had literally described Sussmann as a “cybersecurity lawyer with links to the Democratic Party.”
After Durham acknowledged in a subsequent court filing that he had indeed been talking about Obama-era White House data, I used Twitter to ask the Examiner to retract its lies about me. When that was ignored, a defamation lawyer hired by the New York Times sent two letters. The Examinershadow-edited the article to tone down how out on a limb Carroll had gone about the Trump-era claim, and it did correct one of Carroll’s lies, but not the other, while appending an editor’s note of regret:
That’s it. I am not aware of anything else – and find nothing on Google — that supports a claim that the Examiner demanded I retract coverage about Durham. The material Grokipedia is presenting is fiction.
In sum, straining to point to something substantive that would support a conservative view of bias, Grok has invented articles that do not exist and warped an episode in which I demanded corrections/retractions from the Washington Examiner into one where it demanded them from me.
Power Wars was too short = political bias?
This is a big time garble, too.
The paragraph about the book cites a 2017 blog post by Charlie Dunlap, a Duke law professor and former senior Air Force JAG, that lamented that Power Wars, my 800-page book about national security legal policymaking inside the Obama administration, did not delve much into what career military lawyers had been up to during the Obama years.
This was true. I had focused on the actions and deliberations of politically appointed lawyers because I wanted to write a book exploring and dissecting the accusation that Obama had, contrary to the expectations raised by his 2008 campaign rhetoric, ended up “acting like Bush” on many post-9/11 issues.
Dunlap clearly enjoyed the book for what it was and just wished I had made the already long book even longer by adding some similar investigative/explanatory journalism about contemporaneous JAG matters that he, personally, was also very interested in. He had a tart line in the middle of his blog post about my choice not to write much about JAGs: “Power Wars is one where the author has a conclusion that discussing the machinations of civilian, policy-making lawyers better supports his contentions. In other words, Power Wars is essentially a polemic, not an impartial and comprehensive legal history of the period.”
The paragraph loosely derived from Dunlap’s post and citing to it is the top example Grokipedia has for concocting a section about “perceived bias in coverage.” So it is interesting that Dunlap himself addresses whether my omission of JAG content from this era amounts to bias. Here is what he said: “Does this mean Savage has some anti-military or anti-JAG bias? I don’t think so. To my knowledge, he has not demonstrated any hostility or even dismissiveness about the role or function of JAGs. Quite the contrary, the efforts of uniformed lawyers to resist the excesses of the civilian government lawyers during the Bush years were prominently featured in his 2007 book, Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency.”
Indeed, I had written a fair bit about JAGs in my Bush-Cheney book because in the early years after 9/11, they kept getting into big fights with politically appointed lawyers over detainee treatment and interrogation policies that the career uniformed lawyers thought violated the Geneva Conventions. There just was not equivalent JAGs vs. politicals fighting in the Obama years to write about. But there were plenty of other Obama-era national-security legal policy and executive power controversies to investigate and explain, which is why the book was (too) long.
The important thing here is that Dunlap never said or implied that the lack of JAG material in my Obama book relative to my Bush-Cheney book demonstrated “bias favoring the Obama administration’s national security policies” — that just wasn’t the point he was making at all. Grokipedia contorted his hobbyhorse critique into a politicized non sequitur.
A Sourceless Claim of Asymmetric Scrutiny
The paragraph about my New York Times reporting supposedly showing asymmetrical scrutiny, focusing more on Republican administration abuses than Democratic ones, has no source at all. It also seems to misportray my old Pulitzer Prize-winning series on signing statements and executive power in The Boston Globe – not The Times, as Grok implies – as if it were not about legal rationales and internal deliberations, which it very much was. (It sounds like Grok is maybe confusing my series with two that won prizes the previous year for exposing warrantless wiretapping and detainee controversies.) I’m not surprised there’s no source for this one, because as the Obama and Biden legal teams will tell you, I scrutinized their controversial policies about drone strikes, their expediently shifting views of unilateral presidential war powers, their leak prosecutions and all kinds of other executive power and national security legal policy issues more than any other reporter at any outlet.
Noticing the gap between the hype and the results of Durham probe is bias?
It’s true I pointed out the gap between the political expectations about the Durham probe and its results. So did Trump allies Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch (“Durham let down the American people with few and failed prosecutions”) and former GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz (“When you are part of the cover-up, Mr. Durham, then it makes our job harder. … I think you let the country down.”) Right-wing media had stoked expectations for years that Durham was about to prove that there had been a deep state conspiracy and put high-level officials in prison. Instead, he developed two false-statements cases against non-government officials involved in outside efforts to investigate Trump and Russia, both of which ended in acquittals. His 2023 final report rehashed the substance of problems already uncovered in 2019 by an inspector general (including the Clinesmith issue), recycled some insinuations he had put into the indictments of his own failed cases even though he never found evidence sufficient to prove them, and accused the FBI of “confirmation bias” – not even political bias.
Grokipedia’s two cited purported sources for a paragraph declaring that that my pointing out this gap drew accusations of harsher treatment are the Durham report itself and a 2022 CNN column, neither of which make that accusation. The Durham report does not mention me; the CNN piece was about the false spying-on-Trump-White-House hullabaloo and favorably cited my dissection of how Durham’s court filing was being misinterpreted. But Grok’s algorithm required it to say something, so say something it did.
Conclusion
My takeaway is that Grokipedia might be useful for non-politicized topics — its material on the basics of my biography is more detailed than Wikipedia and is accurate. But it is factually unreliable when its programming mandate to include politically conservative observations kicks in: Grok demonstrably invents falsehoods as it strains to comply.
With The New York Times, I have filed a new Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the government. I am seeking the full aerial surveillance videos from three of President Trump’s boat strikes – the first one, and the two for which there were announced survivors (at least initially). My thanks to David McCraw, the NYT newsroom lawyer, and Jackson Busch, this year’s NYT First Amendment Fellow.
My first book, Takeover, was about the Bush-Cheney administration’s effort to expand presidential power. When I was writing it, my working title was “The Cheney Project,” because this was really a story about him. The Bush administration’s pursue of that agenda came from Cheney, its roots stretching back to his experiences in the Nixon and Ford administrations.
Walter Isaacson asked me to participate in an discussion of that topic for a segment on the PBS show Amanpour and Company which aired this evening:
Yesterday, Judge James E. Boasberg, the chief judge of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia, made public some previously secret material about attorney-client privilege fights in the grand jury investigations that led to President Trump’s indictment for trying to overturn the 2020 election and for retaining classified documents. I wrote about it in this New York Times article, which is also about the Knight First Amendment Institute’s attempt to make public the hidden Jack Smith report in the documents case.
I had to do some work to assess what was new in this trove and am posting it below in case it is useful to anyone.
For background, normally grand jury rules require keeping secret information such investigations. But if the government acknowledges that certain matters surrounding a grand jury investigation happened, that rule no longer applies. The public knew from news reporting that there were extensive closed-door fights over grand jury subpoenas to associates of Trump for documents and testimony in 2022 and 2023, but the actual briefs, arguments and rulings were sealed.
In the fall of 2022, Kyle Cheney/Politico and I/The New York Times separately asked to unseal materials about Trump’s attempt to use executive privilege to block grand jury subpoenas in the election investigation. The chief judge at the time, Judge Beryl Howell, who had overseen that litigation, ruled against us in early 2023 on the ground that there had been no formal acknowledgement that such litigation had occurred. At that point, The Times dropped out of the effort, but Politico kept going by appealing her ruling. Before the appeals court could address the matter, the government acknowledged the executive privilege fights in open court. The appeals court said Judge Howell had been right at the time, but the subsequent acknowledgement changed matters and sent it back down. The Justice Department did not dispute that the grand jury secrecy rule no longer covered that material, and it curated a set of files — still heavily redacted in places — that it thought could now be made public. In October, Judge Boasberg ordered its disclosure. Here’s the Times’ story about that disclosure and Politico’s.
Then, earlier this year, I wrote to Judge Boasberg to make a similar request regarding materials from those fights over assertions of attorney-client and attorney work-product privilege in both the election and documents cases, citing similar official disclosures about their existence. Judge Boasberg ruled last month that there had been sufficient public acknowledgement of the former, though not of the latter, to warrant disclosure. The Justice Department again curated a set of files, which the judge ordered posted on the public docket. We have not yet decided whether we will challenge any of the redactions or whether there might be additional responsive files not in this trove.
Some of these files are new, while many are the same ones from the October trove but with previously blacked-out portions now visible.
Here is a quick and dirty guide I put together about what is in each.
What’s in the new material versus what was in released last fall
# in new, more fulsome set
# in original
description
Discussion
22-gj-25 USCA 22-3073
Probably Marc Short and Greg Jacob, who testified Oct 13, 2022
With The New York Times, I have filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit in the Southern District of New York against the Justice Department seeking disclosure of the letters Attorney General Pam Bondi sent to Apple and Google assuring them that they would not be prosecuted for violating the law against providing support to TikTok unless its Chinese owner sells it. The letters prompted the two companies to restore access to TikTok in their smartphone app stores.
Notably, the executive order by President Trump declaring an enforcement delay and requiring DOJ to send those letters did not merely direct the government, as a matter of prosecutorial discretion, to not charge the companies with breaking that law. Trump also required Bondi to tell the companies that — somehow — “there has been no violation of the statute” for any activity that contravenes the statute during the enforcement delay period.
Trump cited no legal rationale for how he has the authority to actually nullify a law that Congress enacted and the Supreme Court unanimously upheld – a kind of monarchical prerogative power to suspend a law when the king decides that doing so would be in the public/Crown’s interest. The founders seemingly rejected the idea that American presidents would have such a power when they imposed upon that office a duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed. So it will be interesting to see what Bondi actually told them.
The case has been docketed at 25-cv-4199. My thanks to David McCraw and Timothy Tai for their legal representation.
I have formally asked Judge James Boasberg, the chief judge of the Federal District Court in Washington, to unseal dockets, filings and judicial opinions related to fights over attorney-client privilege and attorney work product privilege during the investigations that led to Trump’s indictments in the election case and the classified documents case. My request has been docketed as a Miscellaneous matter, in re Donald J. Trump, at 25-misc-00008.
I’d like to pull something out of a friendly conversation I had with Steve Oberlin deep in the comments under his post about the watershed, because maybe it will be interesting to a wider audience. It is commonly said — including on the historical marker downtown on the site of the original Fort Wayne, which the Daughters of the American Revolution installed in 1934 — that the Miami called the portage “Glorious Gate.”
But that seems to be misleading to the point of being false.
There’s no historical evidence I am aware of that the tribe had any general habit of referring to the portage by that phrase. Rather we have a record of that phrase being used once: when Little Turtle was waxing a bit poetic about Kekionga, the longtime Miami capital village that had controlled the portage until 1791, when the US military destroyed it during the Northwest Indian War. The town was not on the portage itself, but rather downstream from it in what is now the city of Fort Wayne’s Lakeside neighborhood. The occasion of Little Turtle’s remark was during the 1795 “negotiations” for the Treaty of Greenville after Anthony Wayne’s conquest brought the war to an end.
In that treaty, Wayne forced the Algonquin tribes to cede most of what is now Ohio and various strategic points west of there for white control/settlement. The minutes record how Little Turtle fruitlessly implored Wayne not to force his tribe to cede a particular swath of land around the fort that Wayne had just built; the area Wayne wanted the US to formally takeover included the site of Kekionga, just across the river confluence from the new military outpost. Little Turtle told Wayne that the village had long been an important tribal crossroads — a “glorious gate” — as part of pointing out that when the French had earlier erected their own short-lived fort near the river confluence, the French didn’t ask the Miami to sell that land.
Wayne was unmoved and the final treaty included the Miami giving up ownership of the spot: “One piece six miles square, at or near the confluence of the rivers St. Mary’s and St. Joseph’s, where Fort Wayne now stands, or near it.”
As a phrase with historical roots, “glorious gate” is so evocative that people have clearly wanted to use it in positive settings — like a historical marker crafted with an agenda of promoting civic pride. But the actual circumstances in which it was uttered were obviously kind of ugly, so people have taken it out of context it to obfuscate those overtones.
On Swinney Park and whether it was the ritual site for Miami tribe “cannibalistic orgies” or was the “old torture ground” —
[ADDED for TLDRers: My tentative conclusion is that this local lore appears to be a myth which traces back to a speech delivered at that spot in 1843 for unrelated reasons, some b.s. embellishment the speaker made up to thrill his audience.]
A couple days ago Becky Osbun posted the century old pamphlet “Trip to Some of the Historic Spots of Fort Wayne” and in the comments several people raised eyebrows at the claim that Swinney Park “is on the site used by the Indians for their cannibalistic orgies in days of long ago.”
Also, I’ve got a copy of the 1933 News Sentinel drawn map of Fort Wayne on my wall and it labels the peninsula in the bend of the St. Mary’s River that is now Swinney Park as the “old torture ground.”
I wondered what the source is for these dark attributions and raised the q in the comments, but thought I’d post this here to get more attention.
I decided to see what I could find, and started by looking up terms like “Swinney,” “cannibalism” and “torture” in the index of Burt Griswold’s 1917 “Pictorial History of Fort Wayne,” which is the generally best and most comprehensive available compilation of historical materials. There was nothing about torture.
Griswold did cite accounts by several early European visitors to the area who recorded having heard about incidents of cannibalism. But all of them were in places other than what is now Swinney Park – for example, in Kekionga (Lakeside neighborhood) or outside one of the French forts. There was also one reference to the future Swinney Park that may be the origin story of this local lore, but the account was heard long after the fact on its own terms. If this is all there is behind the claim that that spot in particular was used for torture/cannibalism rituals, I am skeptical that it is true.
Specifically, in a footnote on Page 111, Griswold talks about “tales of cannibalism among the savages of the Maumee-Wabash valley” that were obtainable, and one of those he cited was the following: “During the course of his speech in Fort Wayne at the time of the opening of the Wabash and Erie canal in 1843, General Lewis Cass stated that the present Swinney park was the scene of cannibalistic feasts.”
I looked up Cass. He was born in 1782 in New Hampshire, but moved to Ohio as a young man and later was based in Michigan. He fought in the war of 1812, was appointed governor of Michigan and later was secretary of war under President Andrew Jackson. Cass then served as as a senator from Michigan and became the 1848 Democratic presidential nominee. He was big into Indian removal, and earlier in his career he had been involved in negotiating some treaties with tribes in what we now call the Midwest.
[here’s a picture from that file, and I’ll post the relevant excerpt from his remarks at the bottom of this post]
It was delivered at an event at “a shady grove on the farm of Colonel Sweeney.” At one point, he goes into a lurid aside about how the Miami tribe once had a “man-eating society” consisting of members of “a particular family” whose duty was “to eat such prisoners” the tribe handed over to them for that purpose, and he then says “its orgies were held upon the very spot where we are now.” While this practice eventually lapsed, he goes on to say, he once spoke to a Canadian who had witnessed the last such episode toward the end of the Revolutionary War; the supposed victim was a Kentucky settler the tribe had captured. Cass then says again that this event had taken place right where his audience was now standing: “Here where we are now assembled in peace and security, celebrating the triumph of art and industry, our countrymen have been thus tortured and murdered and devoured.”
So is that true? It’s 1843 and he’s making the claim that Colonel Swinney’s farm — where he just happened to be ask to deliver his remarks about the canal — was the specific site of cannibalistic rituals. By his account, he was not only not personally a witness to any such ritual there, but the last such purported incident had happened some 60 years earlier. If this dusty hearsay is the only account in the historical record that puts what is now Swinney Park as the specific site, I think we have to consider the strong possibility that he just made it up to embellish his speech and give his audience a little extra thrill.
Notably, Cass also claimed that during some earlier visit to the Fort Wayne area, he had personally conversed with the head of the man-eating family/society, whose name, he said, was White Skin. Griswold’s footnote suggests some corroboration for the idea that around this time — that is, around the 1830s/1840s — there was talk of how there had once been a cannibal native in the area named White Skin, although this citation does not say that White Skin lived or did his dining on what became Swinney Park specifically.
Specifically, Griswold quoted someone named E.F. Colerick, who wrote about the early days of Fort Wayne, as recalling that in 1836, he and an old Indian trader named Jean Baptiste Bruno had run across an elderly native woman whom Bruno told him was White Skin’s daughter, and they were “known as the man-eating family.”
I went looking for Colerick’s full account and found a slightly different version — published in 1891 — in which Colerick also said that White Skin and his family had lived on the Eel River, and described their last cannibalistic ritual as having taken place on a plateau on the east bank of the St. Joseph River, about a mile upstream from Fort Wayne and Kekionga. By this account, unlike Cass’s, that last event was around 1765, not toward the end of the Revolutionary War, and with a native victim, not a white settler victim. There’s no mention of the St. Mary’s river or the Swinney farm site in Colerick’s account of what Bruno told him. https://archive.org/…/cannibalsofindia00grim_djvu.txt
I was skeptical at this point that Cass had even met White Skin, but then I found that that Cass had helped negotiate a treaty in 1814 that was signed by, among others, “Wabsea, or White Skin.” https://treaties.okstate.edu/…/treaty-with-the-wyandot…
Still, based on all this, I don’t see any reason to credit the claim that what is now Swinney Park, specifically, was a designated torture ground or a site for cannibalistic rituals. However, if someone is aware of additional sources, I’d be interested in hearing about them! It’s a good (if that’s the right word for it) story, which would be consistent with Cass making it up to keep his audiences enraptured and then people repeating it until it took root as local lore. But for now it looks like this story about the park is a myth.
Just after midnight this morning, the New York Times and I filed a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act seeking disclosure of the volume of former Special Counsel Jack Smith’s report about the Trump classified documents case. Here is the complaint.
