Charlie Savage

[cross-posted from the Facebook group True Fort Wayne History, from January 2024]

On the portage and “Glorious Gate”–

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. Moreover, 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. (The minutes are here, starting on page 562.)

In that treaty, Wayne forced the Algonquin tribes to cede most of what is now Ohio for white control/settlement — along with and various strategic points west of there (referred to as “reserves” for the U.S., within the larger tribal lands), such as parcels around forts. One such demand was that the United States would ownership of a six-square-mile parcel around the newly built Fort Wayne, which was just across the river confluence from the Kekionga site and so would encompass the ruined historic village.

On Wednesday, July 29, 1795, Little Turtle — addressing Wayne as “elder brother” — proposed that all of the six-square-mile parcel be on the fort’s side of the rivers so the tribe could rebuild and reinhabit its village. In explaining that Kekionga had long been an important tribal crossroads, Little Turtle had waxed a little poetic, calling the village what the translator (probably his son-in-law William Wells) rendered as a “that glorious gate.” He also pointed out that when the French and English had earlier established short-lived outposts in the area, they never asked the Miami to sell any of their land.

The next day, Anthony Wayne answered Little Turtle. Wayne rejected the chief’s assertion that the English and French had not owned the land around their forts even if Little Turtle had not heard about it, arguing that it was a longstanding “rule” among Europeans that forts had to control at least as much ground around them as their cannons could reach. The implication was obvious: the Kekionga site was within cannon range of the new fort, so because of this purported “rule” Wayne couldn’t do as Little Turtle requested. However, Wayne said the Miami were nevertheless welcome to move back into the Kekionga site:

That seems to have been the end of it — Wayne had militarily crushed the tribes at the Battle of Fallen Timbers, so they were not in a strong negotiating position. The final treaty included: “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.

[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:

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.

Like many people, I have found zombie Twitter — Elon Musk’s X — to be increasingly unusable for the purposes that originally attracted me to it. Among many other degradations of the former Twitter experience, its algorithmic suppression of posts with news links significantly impedes my ability as a journalist to get a broader audience for and engagement with posts about my stories. This has been a problem for a couple of years, but only in the last month has a viable alternative emerged with the explosive growth of Bluesky. So for now I’ve shifted to that place, where my handle @charliesavage.

This move raises the question of what, if anything, to do about my now-dormant X account. I started posting on Twitter in 2008, and even if a lot of that was just ephemeral blather about sports or whatever, it feels weird to just nuke 15 years worth of posts that also contain discussion of news articles, detailed responses to critics whose attacks are still floating around the web, etc. Someone on Bluesky brought to my attention an open-source Github project, Tweetback, that allows one to post one’s downloaded archives. So I’ve done that here. Thanks to Zach Leatherman, the primary creator of that project, and to my son, a computer science major who helped me fix some glitches when rolling it out. (If you are thinking of trying this, here is the list of little problems we encountered, all of which were quick fixes once recognized.)

This is the next step in the ongoing experiment of stepping away from Twitter/X. I may eventually also delete all my posts there and shut down my account, but for now I’m leaving it up for three reasons. First, this will make it harder for anyone to successfully impersonate me on that platform, a real risk since the destruction of its verified identity system. Second, there is utility in keeping some original posts there to show their context — the downloaded archive does not show other people’s posts I was responding to or other people’s replies to my posts, and it cuts off the back ends of other people’s posts that I RT’d. Finally, there are on increasingly rare occasions still newsworthy posts there amid all the dreck, and having an open account can make it easier to see them.

Back in December 2020, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board completed a report on the National Security Agency’s XKEYSCORE system, whose existence had come to light as part of the Snowden leaks. XKEYSCORE is a software program that N.S.A. analysts use to query the vast repository of stuff that the agency has sucked up, including through bulk collection of communications abroad or foreign-to-foreign stuff transiting the U.S. network under Executive Order 12333. The report was entirely classified at the time, but a few months later a Democratic PCLOB member, Travis LeBlanc, got declassified and released a lengthy statement basically saying the report was garbage, which I wrote about for the New York Times. Anyway, the agency has now released a declassified version of the report itself, though it is so heavily redacted that I don’t see anything newsy to write about in it that wasn’t brought to light in the flap over the LeBlanc statement in 2021. Here it is:

Nora Dannehy, now a Connecticut Supreme Court justice, publicly confirmed at her confirmation testimony that she resigned as the No. 2 in John Durham’s counter-investigation of the Russia investigation in protest of what she saw as unethical politicization of the effort by then-Attorney General Bill Barr. With my NYT colleagues Katie Benner and Adam Goldman, we had first reported this backstory in our January 2023 deep dive investigative project on the Durham probe. Our piece went into greater detail than what she testified, but everything she said dovetails with our reporting.

She was also asked about the Durham investigation at around the 1 hour 40 minute mark: pic.twitter.com/SDEShExyWl

— Charlie Savage (@charlie_savage) September 21, 2023

I wrote in the New York Times Magazine (gift link) about my weird connection to the experience of listening to Pink Floyd’s “The Dark Side of the Moon” while watching “The Wizard of Oz,” which is sometimes called “The Dark Side of the Rainbow.” I didn’t invent this idea, but an article about it I wrote in 1995, as a 19-year-old college intern at the Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette, is its earliest available documentation. Not unlike the Oxford English Dictionary’s citations to the first published usage of a word — even though people were surely using that word in the same way earlier, just without leaving any record of it — this article has come to be a stand-in for its mysterious origins. As a result people keep citing it and it has barnacled itself to my career as a national security and legal policy journalist. I’ve come to accept that the world is intent on treating this somewhat ridiculous thing as a defining contribution, and that no matter what else I have done or may yet do professionally, if I get an obituary after I die, it may well mention that article as a somehow notable fact.

UPDATE: Thanks to brothers Jeff and Scott Warden for sending in this shot – it’s apparently been taped to Jeff’s wall since 1995:

As Alberto Ibargüen — the head of the Knight Foundation and former publisher of The Miami Herald — retires, I would like to add a public note of personal appreciation to the encomiums.

https://www.philanthropy.com/article/knight-foundation-leader-to-retire-leaving-a-powerful-legacy

In 1999, when I went to work for The Miami Herald as a cub reporter just out of college and he was its publisher, he took a mentor-like interest in me. We got to know each other over occasional dinners/drinks, a Miami Heat game, etc.

In late 2001 or early 2002, when I was thinking about applying for a Knight Foundation journalism fellowship at Yale Law School, he encouraged it (he has a law degree from Penn) and wrote a strong letter of recommendation that really helped me stand out from the pac

The Yale year transformed my life both personally — I met my future wife, Luiza Chwialkowska Savage, another fellow — & professionally, putting me on the path to journalism that specialized in post-9/11 legal policy & executive power issues like Gitmo, hot topics on campus that year.

Alberto and I continued to periodically stay in touch as he went on to lead the Knight Foundation, where has steered altruism at a programmatic level. The help he provided to me as an individual is just a footnote to that legacy. Thank you, Alberto, and enjoy retirement!

Originally tweeted by Charlie Savage (@charlie_savage) on March 26, 2023.

Judge Beryl Howell, the chief judge of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia, has decided not to unseal filings and rulings ancillary to the material presented to the grand jury investigating Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election and the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. The New York Times and I had made that request, along with Politico and Kyle Cheney. I was hoping to liberate for public understanding the briefs and rulings about whether Trump’s former aides could lawfully avoid answering questions as witnesses under executive privilege, a hidden fight that has raised novel issues about the extent of a former president to assert residual secrecy powers and that has likely set precedents that will affect unrelated future disputes.

Norma Thiele, my journalism teacher at North Side High School in Fort Wayne, Indiana, died on Monday at age 92. For more than four decades, “Miss Thiele” was a great writing teacher and adviser to the then-weekly student newspaper, The Northerner. After each issue of the paper, she would mark up everything that was wrong with it in red pen and staple it to the bulletin board; there was always a lot of red pen. She was also someone whom the teenaged version of me butted heads with a lot: she took no guff, but also had a big laugh. It was such a big and complicated influence that I wrote about our relationship as one of my college application essays. She retired at the end of my senior year in 1994. In honor of that, the editors of The Northerner – Josh Kline, Adam Loeffler and I – wrote to the former editors in chief going back two generations to solicit essays and memories about her. The principal, Dr. Richard Gardner, gave us some funds and we published all the essays in a special commemorative issue that surprised her when it showed up. On several occasions in the years since some of us newspaper vets met up with her for coffee or lunch to see how things were going. She never married and lived much of her life on a farm outside of Fort Wayne. But Miss Thiele took on a second career of sorts after retiring by becoming a mentor to the large Burmese refugee community in Fort Wayne — helping them adjust and navigate life, and often serving as an honored grandparent stand-in for people separated from their extended families. Her funeral service is tomorrow. https://www.midwestfuneralhome.com/obituary/Norma-Thiele

Updated 2/20/2023: Big thanks to Adam Loeffler, who found and scanned the tribute issue from her retirement, with remembrances from former editors-in-chief of The Northerner.