The thread on “obscure nations” convinced me to try to get an answer to a hazy memory here.
I’ll have to give you the background - back when I was in about 7th grade or so, I had a class that used some sort of “reading skills laboratory” that had color coded levels you progressed through by reading short stories and articles, having your comprehension tested afterwards.
Someplace near the top of the levels, I remember a supposedly factual article about a colony one guy set up in the “New World” that was supposedly a model of friendly cooperation between the Europeans and the Indians. It was pictured as kind of a little Utopian society that managed to exist in what was then the “frontier”, until the death of its visionary founder and encroachment by other settlers destroyed it.
We’re not talking about any of the big names here - Penn, Williams, Oglethorpe, etc, all of whom set up colonies with some level of egalitarianism, for varying reasons.
Anybody have any ideas who my vaguely remembered article was about?
I don’t remember the article you’re talking about, but I definitely remember the Reading Skills Laboratory you spoke of. Tell me: was the highest level you could achieve ‘Gold?’
And pertaining to the article, didn’t the French establish a more-or-less egalitarian relationship with the Native Americans? From what I can recall from my AP History class, the relationship was mutually beneficial.
Well, I can’t remember the actual color codes - that could be right.
The French DID establish good relations with many of the tribes, but sometimes not, and they were generally more interested in trade than colonization. It should be noted that the Native American tribes in the east were astute enough to play the French and the English off against each other in many cases. Relationships among the various tribes in the northeast, the French and the English could become a very, very long thread, obviously.
Suffice it to say that I think I’m after an English-speaking guy who set up his own personal little kingdom. Probably too obscure and hazy for a concrete answer.
Aside from the pre-Revolutionary snag, the story sounds vaguely familiar to the utopian free-love society created by John Humphrey Noyes in Vermont. I suspect there is more to the story than the one you read about in the seventh grade.
I think it was originally called the Putney Association. Formed in roughly 1840, the group took on increasingly socialistic practices until by mid-decade they jumped on the idea of complex marriage. That pretty much ended their stay in Vermont and by 1848 they somehow contrived to create a compound on the Oneida Indian reservation in New York.
The community continued relatively consistently until roughly 1875, when Noyes tried to turn leadership of the organization over to his son. That caused a schism of sorts and by 1880 the group reorganized as–get this–a corporation.
The first thing the Oneida stockholders did was take their land holdings–actually Indian reservation land, which cannot be converted to fee title without the explicit consent of Congress–and alloted it among themselves, a classic Indian land theft. The Oneida corporation became Oneida Ltd., still known today for its flatware.