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the Shawnee hunts in the Ohio River valley targeted women and men, especially powerful men and Christian converts. Witchcraft was at the center of the Shawnee prophet’s code (see document 28). The prophet insisted that he possessed the power to detect witches, and in a ritual reminiscent of the line-up of villagers at Andover, when the possessed accusers from Salem went on the road and named witches, the prophet gathered people around him and identified the culprits. The first targets were the Delawares, among whom Tenskwatawa lived in 1805 and 1806. The Delawares already believed in witches and were already sure there were some in their midst; a fever that swept through the villages in the spring of 1805 had killed many, and the Delawares, aided by a Munsee prophet, sought the witches who might be responsible for the sickness. This prophet, an ex-Moravian who was called Beata after her Christian baptism, tired of the proceedings, however, and the White River Delawares of Indiana turned to the Shawnee prophet, who lived nearby. He arrived in March 1806, gathered suspected witches around him, and pointed out the guilty parties, according to Moravian missionaries who lived and preached in the area (near modern-day Muncie) and left an account of the proceedings (see document 29). The Delawares coerced confessions using torture by fire. One woman, a Delaware Christian convert, was tortured over a four-day period before she confessed and named her grandson as the recipient of her medicine bundle. When he willingly confessed that he had used the bundle to fly to Kentucky and back, he was released unharmed.218

After this first interrogation, the trials continued, ensnaring chiefs and Christian converts. But when the prophet traveled among other Indians in the region, he found less traction for his accusations. Among the Wyandots on the Sandusky River in May 1806, the prophet identified four women as witches. The women were likely Christian converts who had been accused by Wyandots who were critical of the accommodationist policy of the tribe’s leaders. But none of the women was executed, as the leaders balked at the charges, and a chief intervened. This pattern proved the new rule, as skepticism vied with acceptance. As a missionary, Joseph Badger, put it in June 1806, he found the Wyandots “in great confusion about their prophet: part of them will not listen to him, others will.” While as many as six accused witches were killed in other Wyandot settlements during a power struggle in 1810, the ability of the Prophet to make accusations of witchcraft stick receded. The witch hunts continued, but were not always accompanied by executions.219

Assessing the witch hunts in Indian country in the early nineteenth century through the same kind of social and economic approach that Boyer and Nissenbaum applied to Salem reveals some intriguing parallels. Targets of witch accusations in Salem tended to be those associated with the economic transformations of the region—people absorbed in the new commercial culture of the outwardly oriented port. In Indian country, those who pursued an accommodationist approach, who tried to adapt to the expansion of the United States, or who converted to Christianity were singled out as people abandoning traditional practices—even if “traditions” had been completely transformed from the long-ago world before Europeans arrived. The first accused witches among the Delawares had close connections with the Americans and with their efforts to transform Indian society. Indeed, two of the first accused witches were chiefs, both of whom had signed the Treaty of Greeneville (1795), which placed all of southern, central, and eastern Ohio, in addition to lands in southern Indiana and Illinois, under U.S. control. They had also participated in an 1804 treaty that had ceded Delaware land to the United States. One of these chiefs, Tedapachsit, even endorsed the work of the Christian missionaries who were active among the Delawares. The accusation and execution of two Indians who had converted to Christianity confirmed