[To "Voices from 19th-Century America"]

John Dunn Hunter (1798?-1827) was white, but was reared by the Kansas and the Osage from around age two, after his parents were killed by Kickapoo. In 1816, he left his family, eventually living with whites and learning English; and writing this book about his life, the people he knew growing up, and the wonderful landscape in which he lived most of his life. The book and its author sparked controversy, with Hunter being accused of fabricating the details he includes. Four years after Hunter's death, John Neal had Hunter "confess" that he was actually the runaway son of a tinker whose tall tales got away from him, in "The Adventurer," published in the 1831 Token, which was edited by Samuel Goodrich. Hunter also provides a chapter in Goodrich's Curiosities of Human Nature (1843); Goodrich concludes that Hunter fabricated his story, though this didn't keep Goodrich from using Hunter's book as the basis for "Jumping Rabbit's Story," which appeared in Robert Merry's Museum in 1843. (Richard Drinnon's works on Hunter, mentioned below, are a fascinating look at the reasons for and the effects of this controversy.)

Memoirs first appeared in 1823, in an edition printed in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; later revised editions were printed in 1824, in London, England. My well-traveled copy (London to Sydney to London to my house) is of the third edition, which is the most complete. The book has been reprinted a few times; one of the recent reprints was edited by Richard Drinnon (NY: Schocken Books, 1973), who also wrote a book examining Hunter's life and times, and the controversy surrounding him: White Savage: The Case of John Dunn Hunter (NY: Shocken Books, 1972).

The book is available here as HTML. The first section -- Hunter's memoirs -- is the longest; it's broken (sometimes mid-paragraph) into five parts.