Son of the Forest: William Apess and the Fight for Indigenous Rights

from The Life of William Apess, Pequot

On April 10, 1839, Dr. J. S. Hurd, a New York City medical examiner, performed an autopsy on a man at William Garlick’s boardinghouse in lower Manhattan. Garlick’s boardinghouse stood at 31 Washington Street, two streets east of the Hudson River and bordered by Battery Place and Moore Street. Washington Street was one of several thoroughfares in a neighborhood that was home to crowds of low-paid workers, a population mirrored across the island along the East River, where eighteenth-century Dutch and English inhabitants had built sturdy homes adjacent to flourishing slips, piers, and warehouses. As commerce increased, though, the “East Ward” had become overcrowded. Wealthier families moved uptown, as far north as Fourteenth Street along Broadway, into neighborhoods delineated by the “grid” plan that the city’s Streets Commission had instituted for more orderly development. Their previous homes then became boardinghouses for an ever-shifting population of clerks, craft apprentices, cart men, dockworkers, sailors, and various day laborers.

The deceased had lived at this address since January with his second wife, Elizabeth, to whom he had been married for at least two years. Within days of the inquest into his death, scores of newspapers in New York, New England, and down the East Coast were reporting his demise. But bespeaking the man’s obscurity, what publicity there was surrounding his death initially lay more in its circumstances, signaled by a notice in the Philadelphia North American, than in his identity. “lobelia again,” the column read, for the inquest had uncovered that a “botanic physician,” Dr. Asher Atkinson, had administered lobelia, a homeopathic drug, to his patient shortly before his death. Many people, particularly members of the established medical profession, regarded botanic medicine as quackery, and the headline implied that Atkinson’s ministrations had evidently contributed to another patient’s demise. In such cities as New York and Philadelphia, where tensions between botanic and allopathic physicians were especially great, many readers viewed this individual’s death as but another example of the failure of unregulated medical practice.

The inquest, however, concluded that he had died of “apoplexy,” a diagnosis commonly used to describe something akin to a stroke and whose symptoms were congruent with what Dr. Hurd had found in his examination. The inquest absolved Dr. Atkinson of any blame and dampened further attempts to place the lack of effectiveness of botanic medicine at the center of the story of this individual’s death. Instead, reports shifted to who he was. A notice in the Philadelphia North American described him as “a Narragansett Indian … otherwise known about the country as Apes the Missionary Preacher.” “The deceased in his lifetime was an author,” the Albany Evening Journal noted, who “wrote the Life of ‘King Philip,’ several sermons, &c, which he sold for his own interest.” The same paper mentioned, albeit erroneously, that the man’s wife was a “good looking white woman,” a fact that, though titillating to some genteel readers, would not have made the couple unusual in lower Manhattan neighborhoods. Five Points, for example, was notoriously multiracial. No newspaper, however, mentioned that six years earlier the deceased had begun a meteoric rise as a spokesperson for Native American rights and liberties.

The deceased was forty-one-year-old William Apess. Two years earlier, he had been one of the country’s most important Native American intellectuals, having published more than any other indigenous writer before the twentieth century and attained fame and notoriety for championing his people’s tribal rights. In 1829, he had issued his autobiography, the first Native American to do so. He had led the successful challenge of the Mashpee Indians against the state of Massachusetts, through which the Mashpees sought to restore some measure of self-governance. Apess subsequently had embarked on a lecture career in New York, speaking on the history and culture of Native Americans.

Despite Apess’s extraordinary significance, today he is known almost exclusively among scholars of Native American studies, with excerpts from his writings taught...