Mohawks on the Nile: Natives Among the Canadian Voyageurs in Egypt, 1884-1885

MOHAWKS

on the Nile

MOHAWKS

on the Nile

Natives Among the

Canadian Voyageurs in Egypt

1884–1885

CARL BENN

Including the memoirs of two

Mohawk veterans of the campaign,

Louis Jackson and James Deer,

published in 1885

Copyright © Carl Benn, 2009.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.

Editor: Jane Gibson

Copy Editor: Shannon Whibbs

Designer: Courtney Horner

Printed and bound in Canada by Friesens

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Benn, Carl, 1953-

    Mohawks on the Nile : natives among the Canadian voyageurs in Egypt,

1884-1885 / by Carl Benn.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-55002-867-6

1. Khartoum (Sudan)--History--Siege, 1884-1885. 2. Mohawk

Indians--Sudan--History--19th century. 3. Canadians--Sudan--History-

19th century. 4. Jackson, Louis. 5. Deer, James D. 6. Mohawk

Indians--Canada--Biography. 7. Nile River--Navigation--History--19th

century. I. Title.

DT156.6.B45 2009      962.6’203     C2008-903970-X

1 2 3 4 5     13 12 11 10 09

We acknowledge the support of The Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and The Association for the Export of Canadian Books, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program, and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.

Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions.

J. Kirk Howard, President

Printed and bound in Canada.

www.dundurn.com

Published by Natural Heritage Books

A Member of The Dundurn Group

For my family

Contents

Dedication

Introduction

Chapter 1: A Cablegram from London

Chapter 2: The Voyageurs on the Nile

Chapter 3: Coming Home

Chapter 4: Mohawks as Workers

Chapter 5: Mohawks as Allies

Appendix I: Memoirs of Louis Jackson

Appendix II: Memoirs of James Deer

Appendix III: Additional Primary Texts

Appendix IV: Annotated Roll of the Mohawk Voyageurs

Appendix V: Canadian Voyageur Contingent Strength

Appendix VI: Distances in Egypt and Sudan

Appendix VII: Chronology

Notes

Bibliography

Index

About the Author

Introduction

An extraordinary event in the history of the Iroquois Confederacy occurred in 1884 and 1885 when about sixty men from the Mohawk nation participated in a British military expedition in Sudan, which at the time was a province within Egypt rather than the independent country that it is today. These men, drawn from native communities on the Saint Lawrence and Ottawa rivers, served in a force sent up the Nile River to rescue Major-General Charles Gordon from Muslim nationalists who besieged him in the Sudanese capital of Khartoum. To transport the troops, the government of the United Kingdom deployed soldiers from both the Egyptian and its own armies, sailors from the Royal Navy, civilian employees and contractors, and boatmen from West Africa and Canada. Almost four hundred individuals formed the Canadian Voyageur Contingent (or Nile Voyageurs) to pilot specially designed whaleboats upriver, including Iroquois Mohawks from Kahnawake, Akwesasne, and Kanesatake. The aboriginal men proved their excellence on the treacherous waters of the Nile and won praise for their contributions from the army’s senior officers and a range of other observers. Today, the image of North American indigenous people taking part in a Victorian imperial adventure in Africa seems incongruous in comparison to how we normally perceive First Nations history. However, Mohawk service on the Nile fell within a number of important norms in Iroquois cultural practices, work patterns, and alliance relationships, which we will examine in the pages below along with exploring the fascinating events that unfolded between the late summer of 1884 and the spring of 1885.

This book presents several elements that I trust will capture the richness of the story of the Mohawks in the Sudan War for modern readers. The first and longest section comprises my historical narrative and analysis of the Iroquois adventure, focused on placing native involvement in a larger perspective. The two components that follow are memoirs written by Mohawk veterans of the campaign, Louis Jackson’s Our Caughnawagas in Egypt and James Deer’s Canadian Voyageurs in Egypt, both of which were published in 1885, and which present the immediate perspectives of people who lived through the events of the period and therefore complement the modern interpretation in this book. Very few copies of either text survive, with the result that these documents, particularly James Deer’s, are not well known. (Deer’s work was self-published and may have enjoyed only limited distribution, and unlike Jackson’s booklet, is not mentioned in the two main studies of Canadian participation in the Sudan War, Roy MacLaren’s Canadians on the Nile or Charles P. Stacey’s Records of the Nile Voyageurs, nor is it cited in Harold Raugh’s extensive bibliography, British Military Operations in Egypt and Sudan.) Thus it is a pleasure to present these important documents in an accessible form within a contextualized study where they can be understood more fully than might be possible on their own. In addition, this book includes a selection of primary documents by Euro-American witnesses to Iroquois efforts or to closely related events, an annotated roll of the Mohawk boatmen, and other information, along with maps and a collection of period images to enhance appreciation of the story. To help readers keep track of the people mentioned, pertinent information (such as whether someone was a Mohawk or what an individual’s military rank was) forms part of each person’s entry in the index.

————

There are several approaches in employing terminology related to both native peoples and the Arab world today, which suggests that an explanation of my approach in Mohawks on the Nile may be warranted. To make the book accessible and clear to a wide audience, I normally used the common terms of standard Canadian English rather than those that other authors might employ, such as in other Euro-American situations or in parts of the Iroquois world. For instance, I employed First Nation, as is common in Canada, rather than Native-American, as we might expect to see in a U.S.-based publication; and, for the most part, I did not use aboriginal words, such as Haudenosaunee in place of Iroquois, in situations where those terms have yet to become common in mainstream English, but I did so when they have done so, such as Kahnawake rather than the old spelling, Caughnawaga. Words like white and native, while awkward in addressing North American history, remain functional, so I used them, but without capitalization in recognition of their limitations. In the case of Egyptian and Sudanese names, I followed the spelling recommended by the Sudan Archives at Durham University in the United Kingdom, again for the sake of accessibility for modern English-language readers (such as Asyut in place of the Victorian Assout, and Khartoum instead of the Arabic transliteration al-Khartum).

In preparing Louis Jackson’s and James Deer’s memoirs for publication, and in quoting other primary sources, I presented the historical documents faithfully in recording the words in the order in which they were written. However, to make them easier to understand I usually wrote out abbreviations in full and regularized punctuation, numbering, capitalization, and spelling. While I refer to the Mohawk community near Montreal as Kahnawake in my own prose, I left the term Caughnawaga unchanged in the historical texts by Deer, Jackson, and other writers as it seemed more appropriate to do so. I also left grammatical errors in place where they could not be mended through punctuation, but I adjusted sentence and paragraph breaks where such interventions strengthened the coherence of the texts. Deer’s memoir included a sports and a tour program from his time in Egypt, and these have been presented within his text where he placed them originally, but with minor adjustments to the formatting for the sake of clarity. Occasionally I inserted an extra word or two within Jackson’s and Deer’s narratives in square brackets to help make better sense of the documents or to correct an error. The endnotes that accompany Deer’s and Jackson’s sections are mine, designed to clarify points and explore comments that might be obscure to modern readers. (Neither work had any citations originally.) The distances mentioned by Jackson, Deer, and their contemporaries tended to be estimates and some of the dates for events they recorded are inexact; therefore, readers might wish to refer to the Distances in Egypt and Sudan and the Chronology in the appendices for clarification. Louis Jackson’s memoir included several illustrations, and one of them, his portrait, is presented in Appendix I. However, the other pictures have not been included because they are copies of poor-quality images from a map published in a British newspaper, The Graphic, on October 25, 1884. (Those prints can be seen in an electronic version of Our Caughnawagas in Egypt through the online catalogue of the University of Toronto libraries.) The pictures I have presented in their place in Jackson’s section of Mohawks on the Nile cover the same themes, but have more documentary value.

————

This book began as a paper at the 2005 meeting of the Annual Conference on Iroquois Research within the very congenial, mountaintop surroundings of the Rensselaerville Institute in upstate New York. I would like to express my appreciation to the people who attended that gathering for their insights and suggestions, which helped formulate my subsequent research and interpretation. In addition, very special thanks go to Gerald F. Reid of Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut, for sharing his research with a rare generosity of spirit, for which I am most grateful, and then for multiplying his thoughtfulness by peer-reviewing an earlier version of the text, thereby enabling me to strengthen it considerably. A second person who was most gracious in providing information and serving as a reviewer was Sue Ellen Herne at the Akwesasne Museum, whose contributions also enhanced the end result significantly and who likewise deserves my sincere gratitude. A third peer reviewer was Laurence Hauptman, the respected historian in Iroquois history from the State University of New York in New Paltz, whose contributions also generated a debt of gratitude on my part. As well, I would like to acknowledge my thanks to Salli and Ernest Benedict at Akwesasne for their interest and for offering information about their ancestors who served on the expedition and for providing additional insights to improve my understanding of the Mohawk voyageurs in the Sudan War. Ottawa-based freelance historians Donald and Dianne Graves deserve recognition for kindly undertaking skilful research for this project on my behalf at Library and Archives Canada, and thus supplemented my own efforts. Philip Coppack, my colleague in the Faculty of Arts at Ryerson University, enthusiastically deployed his expertise as a geographer familiar with the latest map-making technologies to work out the distances between various points along the Nile River to correct the great mass of conflicting data that exists in the primary and secondary literature, and to him goes a special word of appreciation. Food historian Fiona Lucas of the City of Toronto Museums and Heritage Services provided welcomed insight into the diet of the voyageurs, and Kevin Hebib, of the same organization, charitably mended my photographs of illustrations from period newspapers. As well, my thanks go to the following people for their help: John Carter of the Ontario Ministry of Culture, and to Ann Crichton-Harris, Robert Malcomson, Anthony P. Michel, and Fred Shore. Jane Hogan of the Archives and Special Collections at Durham University Library never failed to help with her expertise and sensible advice on the Sudan, and I am indebted to Ms. Hogan for her guidance. Beyond the Durham University Library, the staff at other institutions also were generous, especially those at the Griffith Institute at the University of Oxford, Library and Archives Canada, the McCord Museum, the National Army Museum in England, the New Brunswick Museum, Ryerson University Library, the Toronto Public Library, and the University of Toronto libraries. My thanks goes to the Ontario Arts Council for a grant that allowed me to undertake more research than would have been possible otherwise at a time when I worked in the museum field and had no other access to support for this study. Toward the end of this project, I made a career change, becoming chair of the Department of History at Ryerson University, and through the generosity of my new home institution, I was able to have maps drawn for this book through the good offices of the chair of the Department of Geography, Shuguang Wang, who arranged for the fine cartographical effort undertaken by Ryerson’s Paul Du, to whom I also am grateful. Before sending my manuscript off to the publisher, Ann Joan Procyk reviewed my text and, as usual, caught mistakes that I was able to correct before final submission to Dundurn Press. Finally, I must acknowledge my appreciation for the commitment of my publishers, Barry Penhale, Jane Gibson, and Kirk Howard, in having the faith to bring out Mohawks on the Nile, as well as to the rest of the people at Dundurn who worked on this project, particularly senior editor Shannon Whibbs and designer Courtney Horner.

Toronto

April 2009

Hauling whaleboats through Bab el Kebir, the great gate of the Second Cataract.

Chapter 1

A Cablegram from London

In 1884, Canada was a self-governing dominion within the British Empire, occupying most of its current land mass after having expanded enormously following the 1867 confederation of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and the United Province of Canada (now Ontario and Quebec). In that modernizing Victorian country of four and a half million people, telegraph lines provided rapid communication between its capital of Ottawa, its other major centres, and a good portion of the rest of the North American continent. Even much of the world beyond stood within a few hours’ reach because of the transatlantic cable, which had been laid across the ocean floor from Ireland to Newfoundland in 1866, and which allowed people to connect to other parts of the globe using lines emanating from Europe. On August 20, 1884, the Colonial Office at the imperial centre in London sent a cablegram across the Atlantic to Canada’s governor general, Henry Charles Keith Petty-Fitzmaurice, fifth marquess of Lansdowne. Because of the time of year, the message — in cipher — reached him at his summer residence within the Quebec Citadel instead of his primary home at Rideau Hall in Ottawa.¹ Decoded, the note said, in part, it is proposed to endeavour to engage three hundred good voyageurs from Caughnawaga, Saint Regis, and Manitoba as steersmen in boats for Nile expedition — engagement for six months with passage to and from Egypt.² Eight days later, London sent another cablegram, increasing the request to five hundred men.³

The Caughnawaga and Saint Regis mentioned in the cablegram were Iroquois (or Haudenosaunee) territories with mostly Mohawk (or Kanienkehaka) populations on the Saint Lawrence River. Today we generally know them as Kahnawake and Akwesasne (and in the end, a third Mohawk community, Kanesatake, or Oka, on the Ottawa River, also contributed men for service in Africa). Imperial officials intended the reference to Manitoba to indicate native rather than white river pilots from that part of the country, although the aboriginal people who came from there were not Iroquois, being Saulteaux Ojibways instead. The British government needed skilled voyageurs to guide whaleboats full of troops and supplies through the perilous cataracts of the Nile River in Egypt’s rebellious province of Sudan. The objective of the expedition was to rescue one of the heroes of the age, Major-General Charles Gordon, who had begun the sixth month of his defence of the provincial capital of Khartoum against thousands of Muslim nationalists led by a man known to his followers as the Mahdi. About two weeks after Lord Lansdowne received London’s request, his military secretary, Gilbert Elliot, Viscount Melgund, travelled to Kahnawake to join a Canadian militia officer in recruiting Mohawks. Then, on September 15, 1884, three-and-a-half weeks after the Colonial Office had sent the first note, the Canadian Voyageur Contingent sailed from Quebec City on what would be a remarkable journey for its members as they participated in the campaign to save General Gordon.⁴ In the end, the expedition would fail: the whaleboats would not reach Khartoum, the city would fall, Gordon would be beheaded, and Britain would abandon most of Sudan to the nationalists until the latter 1890s. Despite the army’s lack of success, the story of the Mohawk journey to Sudan is a good one that can capture our imagination and reveal much about the Iroquois world. It also presents us with an opportunity to consider how native people in eastern North America faced the challenges and opportunities of modernization as well as their relations with the larger world within frameworks that both emerged from and protected indigenous cultural values. Additionally, the story of the Mohawk boatmen, placed within the contexts of Britain’s intervention in the Arab world and the shared experiences of the Canadian Voyageur Contingent, reminds us that aboriginal history, if it is to be comprehensive, often ought to be understood within broad settings beyond the narrower realms that tend to structure scholarly inquiry about the First Nations.

————

The call for Mohawks and Ojibways to pilot boats up the Nile River through the desert, in what contemporaries called the Soudan War, was inspired by the British army’s Colonel William Butler, who promoted the idea to the man who would lead the Gordon Relief Expedition, General Baron Wolseley. Like many others in the Victorian military, Butler and Wolseley had served in different parts of the world, gaining experience that informed their thoughts as they pursued their careers and the interests of the empire. These two soldiers (and some of their fellow officers who would participate in the Nile campaign) had spent time in Canada, where they had encountered expert river pilots — many of whom were aboriginal — during the Red River Rebellion. Late in 1869, shortly after the dominion had assumed sovereignty over the vast western and northern interior regions of the continent, but fifteen years before Lansdowne received the cablegram from the Colonial Office and sixteen years before the Canadian Pacific Railway connected central Canada to British Columbia, rebellion had broken out in today’s Manitoba, led by the famous Métis visionary, Louis Riel. Once the snows cleared in the spring of 1870, Garnet Wolseley (then a colonel) led eleven hundred Canadian militia volunteers and British regular soldiers from Ontario to Manitoba to assert the government’s authority. Wolseley achieved his objective without the loss of a single man en route, and without bloodshed at his destination, as Riel and his followers had fled before the advanced elements of the expedition approached the rebel stronghold of Upper Fort Garry in today’s Winnipeg. Butler, then a lieutenant, had gone ahead of the rest of the force to gather intelligence (and even had interviewed Riel during the days of the rebel leader’s provisional government) and had seen what the best Canadian and First Nations boatmen could do on the lakes and rivers of the continent’s interior. After the rebellion, Butler reported on conditions in western Canada, and in response to his recommendations Ottawa formed the North-West Mounted Police in 1873 to bring law and order to the region. He also published a popular book in 1872 on the Canadian west, The Great Lone Land. Like several other senior officers in Egypt who had served with Wolseley in Canada (and later in the Second Ashanti War of 1873–74 in West Africa), Butler became part of Wolseley’s Ring. This was a group of individuals who the general collected around himself because of his need for capable staff officers at a time when the British army did not produce enough men with the necessary qualifications for that kind of work. As a member of the Ring, Butler was in a good position to promote the idea of engaging Canadian boatmen on the Nile to Wolseley’s sympathetic ear.

Moving Wolseley’s troops and supplies along the first half of the two-thousand-kilometre route, from Toronto on Lake Ontario to Prince Arthur’s Landing (now Thunder Bay) on Lake Superior, was comparatively easy because the army could use railways in the populous regions of southern Ontario and steamships on the upper Great Lakes. However, the long journey from Prince Arthur’s Landing to Fort Garry was much more difficult because it ran mainly through a forested wilderness largely without roads in a region with few resources to support the expedition. (There was a better route to the seat of rebellion, via rail through American territory to Minnesota, from which the march to Manitoba would be easier, but President Ulysses Grant would not allow British and Canadian troops to travel through the United States, and his government belligerently delayed one of the expedition’s steamers at the American lock at Sault Sainte Marie between lakes Huron and Superior.) Wolseley solved the problem of getting from Prince Arthur’s Landing to Upper Fort Garry primarily by employing small boats along the region’s waterways, as would be the case along much of the Nile in the 1880s. That part of the journey in 1870 involved carrying supplies around forty-seven portages and running eighty kilometres of rapids, which the force accomplished through utilizing the piloting skills of boatmen or voyageurs. These individuals typically worked in the fur trade, rafted timber, guided travellers, or most commonly laboured as forwarders who moved goods along the country’s rivers and lakes in small boats, especially where schooners and steamers could not go in the years before railways and roads came to dominate most of the country’s communications lines. Canoes of aboriginal design or inspiration had been employed for generations — including large freight canoes — but from the 1700s onwards people increasingly adopted wooden bateaux and other small craft. On the Red River Expedition, the army used a variety of keel boats, averaging somewhat less than ten metres in length. Each vessel generally had two voyageurs to perform the tasks of bowman and steersman, along with eight or nine soldiers to pull the oars under their supervision. When necessary, everyone got out and towed the vessels through hazardous sections of the waterways or portaged them and their cargoes around impassable rapids and other barriers. At the time, it rained for the equivalent of almost eight of the thirteen weeks of the journey west from Prince Arthur’s Landing, which added to the discomfort caused by the hard, physical demands of the work to be done and all of the other annoyances of the Canadian forests, such as the great clouds of mosquitoes and blackflies that made life a misery for everyone. There were somewhere between sixty and one hundred Iroquois men along with over three hundred other aboriginal and white voyageurs on the expedition.⁵ The natives in general and the Mohawks in particular acquitted themselves so well that Wolseley described them as the most daring and skilful of Canadian voyageurs.⁶ A junior British officer, Lieutenant H.S.H. Riddell, echoed the sentiment, calling the Iroquois, who mainly came from Kahnawake and who regularly learned piloting on the rough Lachine Rapids near their home, skilful and the finest boatmen in Canada.⁷ Another veteran of the campaign, Captain G.L. Huyshe, expressed his view that a very small percentage of the boatmen in 1870 were really ‘voyageurs,’ excepting about one hundred Iroquois Indians drawn from the villages of Saint Regis and Caughnawaga in the neighbourhood of Montreal, who, with scarcely an exception, were splendid fellows, and without whom it is not too much to say that the troops never could have reached their destination.⁸

With their Red River experience in 1870, it was natural for Butler, Wolseley, and others who had been on the campaign to hope to recruit the same kind of people for the new mission in Egypt, and hence the cablegram asked specifically for recruits from Kahnawake, Akwesasne, and Manitoba (and which silently implied a rejection of river pilots who were not native). In the end, however, the almost four hundred men who would sail to the Middle East represented a broader section of Canadian society, both white and aboriginal, although about sixty of those who joined up were shantymen, voyageurs, and river pilots from Kahnawake, Akwesasne, and Kanesatake, whose ranks included as many as ten veterans of the Red River Expedition along with at least one former soldier from the American Civil War of 1861–65.⁹

The Red River Expedition at Kakabeka Falls, 1870, as envisioned in an oil painting by Frances Anne Hopkins in 1877 — an artist who was familiar with the world of the fur trade and the Canadian interior.

————

The three Iroquois communities that sent men to Egypt shared similar origins in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, long before Britain conquered Canada from France in the Seven Years’ War of 1756–63. In the early 1600s, when Europeans began to penetrate the lower Great Lakes beyond the Saint Lawrence River, the majority of the people they encountered spoke one or more of the various Iroquoian languages of the region, such as the population of the several nations of the Huron (or Wendat) Confederacy near Georgian Bay in today’s Ontario, or the Eries who lived to the west of present-day Buffalo. Like the Hurons, the Iroquois formed a confederacy. At the time, it comprised five nations occupying the land between the Hudson and the Genesee rivers in modern New York: the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca. During the great struggles among the First Nations of the period, the famous conflicts between natives and newcomers, and the colonial wars that pitted France against England, hundreds of Iroquois moved north to Roman Catholic missions and allied with France. The earliest group (including Algonkian speakers as well as Iroquoians) formed a multi-ethnic settlement at La Prairie or Kentake on the Saint Lawrence River in the 1660s. The community soon came to be dominated by Mohawks, and subsequently established a permanent home in 1716 at Kahnawake on the Saint Lawrence, across from Montreal and Lachine. In the eighteenth century, three other Iroquois missions formed under similar conditions, two on the Saint Lawrence at Akwesasne and Oswegatchie (today’s Ogdensburg, New York) and a third on the Ottawa River at Kanesatake, which included a sizeable number of Algonkians until their descendants moved away in the 1860s. The