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  • “All the Land Had Changed”: Territorial Expansion and the Native American Past in Pauline Hopkins’s Winona
  • Colleen O’Brien (bio)

The first chapter of Pauline Hopkins’s third and least-known book, Winona, A Tale of Negro Life in the South and Southwest (1902), seems not to fit its title. Although the magazine novel advertises “Negro” characters and the geography of the “South and Southwest,” its prehistory begins among aristocrats in England, and then recaps a particularly fraught historical episode that displaced the Seneca people of Western New York in the first half of the nineteenth century. The novel opens in the vicinity of what would become the Seneca Nation in 1848, extending from a crucial Underground Railroad station—the city of Buffalo, New York—to an island in the Niagara River that became part of the British colonies after the French and Indian War, and then returned briefly to the Seneca. Contested territory and unstable borders become a central theme in the novel, whose characters later traverse proslavery Missouri and John Brown’s Bleeding Kansas.

The origin of the story, however, is a personal and familial conflict over land on an English estate, even further from the United States South. An aristocrat flees England and a set of trumped-up murder charges to find refuge among the Seneca, who rename him White Eagle. The fugitive, neé Henry Carlingsford, is innocent, but has been framed by his scheming cousin, Titus, who covets the estate he would inherit. Men greedy for land displace White Eagle again when he settles in New York. The fictional White Eagle experiences a very real moment in Seneca history: David Ogden, who had wrangled with the Seneca since at least 1818 because they essentially refused to sell their land, finally gained government support to expel them from that land. By 1838, as Matthew Dennis [End Page 27] explains, “the Seneca lost all their remaining New York lands, except a one-square-mile reservation at Oil Spring, and were nearly removed to a trans-Mississippi reservation in Kansas.”1 Although they managed to reclaim two reservations by 1842, this dispute over land was a major blow to the Seneca that is still unresolved.2 White Eagle is exiled for the second time “[w]hen the Indians gave up Buffalo Creek Reservation to Ogeten [sic] in 1842, and departed from Buffalo” (290).3 Hopkins generalizes this specific Seneca event to point toward the United States government project of Indian removal: the second paragraph of the novel explains, “From 1842, the aborigines began to scatter. They gave up the last of their great reservations then before the on-sweeping Anglo-Saxon” (287). Yet she does not apply the image of the expansionist Anglo-Saxon to “White Eagle, who had linked his fortunes with the Seneca” (288).4

Not only does “White Eagle” find himself on contested Indian ground, he also “link[s] his fortunes” with an entirely different kind of disputed property. Within the next ten years, two unnamed women who are fugitive slaves redefine his life and identity as much as the people who named him “White Eagle.” He marries one of the women and adopts the other’s child. He never meets the woman who, during her flight from slavery, died and left an infant son named Judah. The woman who will become White Eagle’s wife carries the infant to freedom, and then the fugitive slave and exiled English aristocrat raise Judah as their own. She dies after bearing him a daughter, Winona, but he lives on with his two children, who are also his heirs. Ultimately, his cousin, the “on-sweeping Anglo-Saxon” destroys White Eagle (287). After framing Henry Carlingford in an attempt to steal his inheritance, Colonel Titus has moved to Missouri and become a slave owner. By a very Hopkinsian twist of fate, the fugitive slaves linked to White Eagle belong to Titus. When Titus learns that the two women left behind children whom he can claim as his own property under the Fugitive Slave Law, he strikes out to find them. The opportunity to dispose of his cousin only sweetens the deal, and Titus shoots White Eagle in the back...

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