[Cross posted from the “True Fort Wayne History” Facebook group]
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.
I looked up Cass’s speech celebrating the opening of the canal and found a copy here: https://ia800903.us.archive.org/…/canalcelebration00pub…
[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.
*
The excerpt from Lewis Cass’s speech:
