TRACK NINE: Keokuk

John Chapman was friends for many years with Keokuk, the leader of the Sauk tribe. They saw each other often, living very different lives: a distinguished Native chief, and a peculiar white man in ragged clothes, with his obsession to plant apple trees.

Before the arrival of Europeans, the Sauk had been settled for some time around Saginaw Bay and down to Detroit, and after many decades of tribal conflict had drifted down from the Great Lakes and settled along the Mississippi River in Illinois. In 1804, both Keokuk and Chapman were in their 20’s and not quite certain how they would occupy their lives. Each of them liked to wander in the area that the US Government has recently organized as the Northwest Territories. 1804 was the fateful year when the first of many treaties were signed, in which the Sauk and other tribes – under circumstances that almost immediately were discovered to be fraudulent – apparently agreed to give up 50 million acres on both sides of the Mississippi River, and up into Wisconsin as well. The treaty precipitated a series of wars that lasted across three decades and involved some Sauk fighting on either side in the War of 1812 between the Americans and British. Fighting between the Sauk and the U S government flared again in the Black Hawk War of 1832.

But in the summer of 1804, the terms of that year’s treaty were still unknown, and the consequences were largely inconceivable to the young Sauk who was cheerfully living up to his name, which means “one who moves around alertly.” Keokuk enjoyed traveling, and he and Chapman clearly were sympatico in that way.

Keokuk and Chapman also shared a deep interest in collecting and preparing medicinal plants. It was important to Keokuk, and all men who aspired to be tribal leaders, to know how to take care of battle-field injuries and effectively provide for those in the tribe who handled the routine cuts and scrapes and boils and infections, including the medical problems of the elderly. Along with his oratorical skills and skills related to hunting and physical combat, Keokuk knew his way around the woods and the meadows where the useful plants could be found. The healing ceremonies and praying and chanting he left to others, but he could be counted on to bring in the yarrow, the horsemint, the willow, the sage, the slippery elm, the mullein, and the candle bush, among so other healing plants.

Chapman, born in Massachusetts, grew up in an environment where the European fascination with medicinal plants had a long tradition going back to the Middle Ages. Now, Chapman’s mother had died when he was quite young, and it fell to him and his siblings to take an active role in their own medical care from an early age. Now, out on the frontier, Chapman was welcomed by the wives of the settlers, for women played the healer’s role in their families, sometimes doing this in extreme physical isolation from other settlers.

Chapman and Keokuk were able to compare and contrast the similarities and differences in how the plants were used in white communities and red. Both men followed the practice of collecting only 1 of 3 plants found the wild, say yarrow, leaving the rest behind for the next person who had need and so the plants would continue to grow. There were plants for acute treatments and plants for rehabilitation of chronic conditions, and the men discussed these subjects at length, each improving their language skills at the same time.

Chapman’s skills at husbandry and his techniques for apple-tree nurseries were admired by Keokuk and other Natives. Chapman’s nurseries required a clearing in the forest, so that the seedlings had full access to sunlight. He created a rough sort of fencing with branches and logs to keep out wandering animals. The Indians too had cleared spaces in the woods, and they did it primarily with fire. They’d do a burning and later the cleared space would come back to life with grasses and plants of various kinds, and soon enough the game animals found the newly verdant area and would feed there, and become good targets for hunting. The Indians didn’t have to domesticate large critters like deer -- they created a natural but man-made environment that attracted them.

For hundreds of years before the Europeans arrived, and before the Native populations were decimated by diseases imported with the foreign travelers, Natives’ farming and forest management techniques had extensive and purposeful effects on the North American landscape. There would have been some mutual appreciation of the arts of conservation and husbandry between the Native groups and Johnny Appleseed.

So here is a song celebrating their mutual interest in medicinal plants and the joy that both John Chapman and Keokuk found in fashioning these remedies and getting people to try them out.