Hendrick Aupaumut
Hendrick Aupaumut (1757-1830) was a Mahican historian and diplomat, born among the Stockbridge Indians in Massachusetts, who were originally from the Hudson River Valley. He was a soldier at the time of the American Revolutionary War, in which he served on the American side as a captain of Mahican warriors. He wrote a history of the Mahican people, and defended them to President Thomas Jefferson in a letter. He worked with the United States in its exchanges with tribes further west, hoping to negotiate peace, but was, ultimately, unsuccessful, because of powerful settler interests. With the other Stockbridge Indians, he moved westward to avoid increasing settler violence, until they relocated to their present reservation of Stockbridge-Munsee Community in Wisconsin. His notable works include a History of the Mahican people, and a narrative of his diplomatic attempts in his embassy to the Western Indians.
External links
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- Papers of the War Department 1784-1800.
- Letter to Thomas Jefferson from Hendrick Aupaumut, 12 December 1808.
- History of the Muh-he-con-nuk Indians by Hendrick Aupaumut (ca. 1790) in American Indian Nonfiction: An Anthology of Writings, 1760s-1930s (pp. 63-74).
- A Short Narration of My Last Journey to the Western Country by Hendrick Aupaumut (pp. 61-131) in Memoirs of the Pennsylvania Society (pub. 1826).