By different Indians

On 10 September 1805 John Johnston sat down to make a fair copy of what the United States factory at Fort Wayne was owed.

He was the factor. The factory was a government trading house: goods came upriver from Philadelphia, furs and peltries went back, and the accounts went to Washington. Johnston ran it from 1802 until late in 1811.

The schedule he copied out runs down one page and onto the next. At the foot he wrote "True copy" and signed it, Jno. Johnston, U. S. Factor.

He began with the men who owed the factory money, and he named every one of them.

Abbot and Audrian, $14. Charles Peltier, $12. David Stinsecomb, $4.17½. The rest were traders and settlers about the post, and every one of them is named on the page.

Captain John Whipple, who had commanded the post, owed $1.60.

William Marshall, labourer, owed $2.70½.

John Flinn, the interpreter, owed $4.49½.

The list does not stop at small men. Doctor Abraham Edwards, the post surgeon, $42.23½. Ensign John Brownson, $13.75. George Hunt, the sutler, $38.48½. Daniel Landon, the contractor's agent, $98.34½, the largest of them. William Wells, the Indian agent, $68.77.

And John Johnston, U. S. F., $158. The factor, in his own book, owing the largest single sum of any private man on the page.

The book does not say what for. It does not say what any of them bought.

Sixteen names. $518.84.

Then a rule across the page, and a second heading: Due on account of the following.

Four lines sit under it. General John Gibson, secretary of Indiana Territory, $31.50. His Excellency Governor Harrison, $78.18. The Eel River Annuity, $50.64½.

And between them:

By different Indians...................... 972 –

Nine hundred and seventy two dollars. Nearly twice the sixteen named men put together, on one line, with no name on it.

The page turns and the schedule finishes with the things that are not people at all. The Indian Department. The Military Department. The military department at Fort Dearborn, and the Indian agency there. Expenditures made in the Indian Department by the factor. Factory buildings, $1,111.54. This is a list that mixes men with offices and with a building, and Johnston was not sorting people from institutions. He was sorting what the factory was owed.

$3,434.54. True copy.

Ten months later he did it again.

Debts due the Factory July 1, 1806. This time he put one line at the top, before the governor, before the territorial secretary, before his own name.

By different Indians. One thousand two hundred and three dollars.

The whole schedule came to $3,284.50. More than a third of it was that first line. Five men are named in the 1806 list. Gibson, Harrison, Johnston, Flinn and Thomas Weisman.

Both schedules add up exactly. Sixteen named debts to $518.84, and every line of 1805 to $3,434.54. Every line of 1806 to $3,284.50. Johnston's arithmetic is right to the cent in both years.

The account book runs from 1802 to 1811 and covers two hundred and fifty nine printed pages.

No Miami is named in it. No Potawatomi. Not Little Turtle, whose town stood a few miles off. Not Richardville. Not Pacanne, not Five Medals, not Winamac.

Little Turtle appears thirty nine times in the introduction the editor wrote. In the manuscript he does not appear at all.

The plural word, Indians, occurs twice in the whole book. Both times it is that line.

The editor wrote something else in that introduction. The Fort Wayne factory, he said, "dispensed large annuities paid to the Indians for land cessions, and financed an extensive purchase of land at Fort Wayne in 1809." That is Griswold's sentence, written more than a century after the fact, and it is not the manuscript's. The account book never mentions the treaty.

What the schedules will not tell you is who the debtors were, how many of them there were, what any of them carried away from the counter, or whether the sums were ever settled. A blanket, a gun, a kettle, powder, a bolt of stroud: the factory sold all of it and priced all of it to the half cent, and none of that is attached to a person here.

The manuscript was rescued from a family who had begun cutting it up for a scrapbook, and several pages were already gone.

A man who owed two dollars and seventy-and-a-half cents is in this record by name, and by his trade, two hundred and twenty years later.