United States v. Mah-Na-at-Ap-e-Kah, Methodological Promiscuity, and an Expanding State

In April 1826, the Boonslick Intelligencer and Advertiser reported news carried to the nascent Missouri community by a steamboat from the upper Mississippi.1 The news was of the murders of Francis Methode, his wife, and his three children, said to be at the hands of a cohort of “Winnebago Indians” near Prairie du Chien in what would become Wisconsin. Some twelve Native men were committed to the county jail “supposed to be accessories” to the murder. The 1827 trial in the Oyer and Terminer Court of Michigan Territory’s Crawford County saw the nascent American legal apparatus muddle its way towards a verdict on the fading and hotly contested borderland. In the process, the court sought to asset authority and define cross-cultural standards of evidence and justice over the neighboring Ho-Chunk people – both those who were on trial and their neighbors. This paper takes the case of Mah-na-at-ap-e-kah as an opportunity to answer calls for “methodological promiscuity” from Native American and Indigenous Studies scholars. Using this case and the attendant depositions, the paper attempts to make two distinct proposals. First it proposes ways to rethink the sorts of questions historians typically ask of legal sources, adjusting those questions to attend to the problems of Native legal history. Secondly, it suggests possibilities for a broader set of answers that might come from legal sources.