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Taken captive as a child around the year 1800, John Dunn Hunter returned to the United States sixteen years later and eventually published a popular, highly controversial account of his life with the Kickapoo, Kaw, and Osage. In his Memoirs of a Captivity among the Indians of North America: From Childhood to the Age of Nineteen (1823), Hunter touted indigenous traditions, intelligence, and character, and he expressed his love and sympathy for the families who had treated him as one of their own.1 Challenging dominant stereotypes about American Indians, Hunter's book humanized them and vividly described their struggles to survive the onslaught of US territorial expansion. In response, the most prominent "Indian experts" of the day, including Lewis Cass, William Clark, and Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, attacked his credibility (Drinnon 61–94). Cass, the governor and superintendent of Indian affairs for the Michigan Territory, spearheaded the campaign. In a damaging article in the North American Review, Cass accused Hunter of fabricating his life story. He placed Hunter in an illustrious tradition of con artists: "John Dunn Hunter is one of the boldest imposters, that has appeared in the literary world, since the days of Psalmanazar" (61).
By the time the scandal broke, Hunter was in Mexican Texas and part of a pan-Indian movement. Eventually joining forces with a faction of Anglo settlers, the unlikely coalition, on December 21, 1826, declared its independence from Mexico in the name of the Fredonian Republic. Its treaty of alliance—authored by a committee consisting of Hunter, the Cherokee chief Richard Fields, Benjamin Edwards, and Herman Mayo—charged Mexico with subjecting the "White and Red emigrants from the United States of North America, now living in the Province of Texas" to "repeated insults, treachery and oppression" ("The Fredonian Declaration of Independence" 60).2 The treaty proclaimed that Texas henceforth was divided into a northern half for American Indians and a southern half for Anglos, but the document pledged to maintain open borders between their "Respective Allied Territories," to defend each other against invaders, and to respect the property rights of every individual (60). The red-and-white republic never got off the ground—recruits did not materialize, as the leaders had hoped, and Mexican troops routed the rebels. Hunter never would have the opportunity...