Hen-Toh, whose birth name was Bertrand N. O. Walker, was a Wyandot writer of exceptional talent, whose works were never widely circulated and are little known to the reading public today. He was born into the Big Turtle Clan on the Wyandot lands in Kansas on September 5, 1870, the youngest of eight children born to Isaiah and Mary Williams Walker. Isaiah Walker belonged to the Little Turtle Clan of the Ohio Wyandots and Mary to the Big Turtle Clan of the Canadian Wyandots from near Fort Malden. Both descended from Wyandots who figured prominently in tribal history, and both had removed with the Ohio Wyandots to Kansas in 1843. They remained there until 1874, when the removed once more, taking their large family to lands assigned the Wyandots in extreme northeastern Indian Territory.

Hen-Toh’s early education aroused a life-long interest in reading and writing. He first attended the federally funded Seneca, Shawnee, and Wyandotte Industrial Boarding School near present-day Wyandotte, Oklahoma. After Hen-Toh left that school, he went briefly to public school at nearby Seneca, Missouri, and then studied for a time with a private tutor. He later took a job as a teacher and began a process of self-education, developing a habit of voracious reading that continued throughout his life.

From 1890 until his death in 1927, Hen-Toh worked in the Indian Service except for brief intervals. He taught for ten years in federal Indian schools in California and Arizona and at the Seneca Industrial School near his home. After 1901 he was a clerk at various Indian agencies but spent most of his time at the Quapaw Agency, which served the Wyandots.

Throughout this period Hen-Toh maintained a home on his allotment, which included the homesite occupied by the Walker family when they removed form Kansas. There he lived during his assignments at the Quapaw Agency, and there he retired when he was between assignments. Even when he was sent to distant agencies, he maintained his home. Surrounded by his large library, historic Wyandot wampum belts, and other family heirlooms, he found an atmosphere conducive to writing and to the study of history and literature. Here, too, he entertained his fellow Wyandots and others, played his piano, and sang.

Hen-Toh demonstrated a bent for writing early in his life. He began his writing career at age eleven when he joined the editorial staff of The Hallequah, the monthly school publication of the Seneca, Shawnee and Wyandotte Industrial Boarding School. Editors were members of the Hallequah Literary Society, which, like other such societies common in federal boarding schools, was organized to foster writing, debate, and oratory among the students. Perhaps part of his literary interests and encouragement grew out of his family’s literary background. Peter Dooyentate Clarke was Mary Walker’s near relative, their mothers being sisters. The year Hen-Toh was born, Clarke had published his Origin and Traditional History of the Wyandots. There was also a well-known literary personage in Isaiah Walker’s family. In later years, Hen-Toh kept hanging in his library a picture of his grandfather Walker’s famous brother, William Walker: Wyandot chief, diarist, poet, letter writer, orator, politician, and first provisional governor of the Territory of Nebraska.

When Hen-Toh began to write in earnest is uncertain. What is certain is that he aspired first to be a poet. He apparently did not circulate his poems until after 1900, for he was somewhat reticent. He once described himself as “a country boy,” saying, “I greatly enjoy meeting people, but do not like to mingle in a crowd.” This shyness seems to have carried over into his attempts to get his poems in print. He first sought local outlets such as Twin Territories at Muskogee, Creek Nation, and Sturm’s Statehood Magazine in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma Territory. Acceptance by these local publications no doubt prompted him to send his work to a national editor in 1906. The editor, however, rejected it as too unusual to be appealing to American readers. Thus rebuffed, Hen-Toh sent his work to The Indian School Journal, published at Chilocco Indian School, located in Oklahoma Territory, asking editors to say nothing about him personally and to publish his poems under his Wyandot name. For the next decade, Hen-Toh sent his works, with only two or three exceptions, to the Journal from which they were reprinted in other Indian school and friends-of-the-Indians publications.

In 1918 Hen-Toh left the Indian Service to write full time. During the next four years, he produced works of greater magnitude and of a different quality than most of his earlier works. This shift in Hen-Toh’s literary endeavors was apparently the culmination of several forces. Though his earlier works had been primarily poetic, he had published some traditional tales – “Indian Stories Told in the Lodges of the North-East Long Ago” (1907) and “A Wyandotte Myth – Why the Toad Was Called Grandmother” (1911) – which anticipated what would be his best work, the animal stories contained in Tales of the Bark Lodges. Hen-Toh may have been spurred to write full time in part by an inquiry in early 1918 from the Oklahoma historian Joseph B. Thoburn, who sought answers to some questions about Wyandot culture. Coincidentally, Hen-Toh had been thinking about those same matters and had written an article in 1917 titled “Mon-dah-min and the Redman’s Old Uses of Corn as Food,” which he had sent to Country Gentleman. The Magazine’s editor had rejected it, Hen-Toh believed, because it was an odd mixture of traditional narrative and discussions of food preparation.

Undaunted by this rejection, Hen-Toh entered a period of intense literary production. In 1919 he published Tales of the Bark Lodges by Hen-Toh, Wyandot, which he reprinted the next year in a second edition. Though Hen-Toh returned to Indian Service as clerk at the Quapaw Agency in 1923, he was apparently working on a collection of poems, Yon-doo-shah-we-ah (Nubbins) by Hen-Toh, Wyandot, which appeared in 1924. With that volume, his literary career ended. He published little else before his death on June 27, 1927.

In this last productive period, Hen-Toh worked from models of dialect humor that, though waning in popularity among general readers, had long been popular among Indian writers who were born in the old Indian Territory. Modeling their works after the popular dialect writers in nineteenth-century America, Indian writers of the territory had begun, as early as the 1850s, producing humorous letters, narratives, and anecdotes in the dialects of their individual tribes-people who had learned English as their second language. Near the turn of the century, some had gained widespread popularity, even national notice, such as Alex Posey (Muscogee), who Fus Fixico letters circulated widely. Hen-Toh was familiar with Posey’s work, publicly noting his loss to the literary world when Posey drowned in 1908. His commentary on Posey’s Fus Fixico letters indicates his clear understanding of Posey’s literary achievement, which Hen-Toh believed would be especially appreciated by readers who were familiar with Indian humor and the dialect in which Posey had couched it. Hen-Toh was also familiar with the work of Royal Roger Eubanks (Cherokee), an artist and writer, who had written and illustrated dialect animal stories similar to Hen-Toh’s and published them in 1910.

Hen-Toh chose an Indian persona through which to project not only his narratives but also the poems he published after 1918, for like his contemporary dialect writers and others before them, he believed that with each passing generation, much of traditional culture was lost. He believed that was particularly true of the Wyandots. In earlier days, storytelling was a vital part of Wyandot domestic life, and knowledge was passed orally from generation to generation. Though Wyandot storytelling had declined during his lifetime, Hen-Toh believed he could preserve some of the old stories he had learned as a child through the oral tradition, which persisted during his youth. In later years, Hen-Toh remembered many of the old stories from his childhood and kept them fresh in his mind through his steady contact with tribal members whose lives reached back to far earlier times. His mother, to whom he was very close, had been thirteen at the time of removal and was living as late as 1911. Furthermore, he saw Wyandot elders on a daily basis during his work at the local agency, they visited in his home, and he sought them out. His “Sketches of the Wyandots” (1906) and “Wyandot Research” (1911) had been based on interviews with Wyandots who had made the trek west form Ohio in 1843. Hen-Toh’s close contact with old Wyandots had provided him a familiarity with not only Wyandot history and culture but also the rhythms of their English speech. He could have pointed to a number of models for his Wyandot narrative voice.

Tales of the Bark Lodges, then, was Hen-Toh’s major effort to preserve some of the traditional tales he had heard. The second edition, which appeared in 1920, was enhanced with illustrations by Eubanks. The son of a well-known translator for the Cherokee Nation, Eubanks was a teacher, writer, artist and cartoonist. Without a doubt, Hen-Toh chose him as an illustrator because of the interpretive illustrations Eubanks had drawn for his own dialect animal stories a decade earlier. Though attractive, the second edition of Hen-Toh’s tales had a small press run and, like the first, did not enjoy wide circulation and quickly went out of print. After 75 years, the 12 stories as they appeared in the 1920 edition, are available to readers once more.

Today’s readers will find much that is appealing in the stories. They are full of wit and humor and can be read simply for entertainment. Perceptive readers, however, will recognize the humor, which turns on the games of competition, trickery, and one-upmanship played among the animals, as a vehicle for valuable lessons in such matters as etiquette, decorum, and mutual respect that formed a base of Wyandot society.

Readers will also find in the stories a demonstration of the art of storytelling. Hen-Toh did not want to preserve the tales simply retelling them as isolated narratives. He enhanced the charm and flavor of the oral tales by presenting them in dialect, as if told by an old Wyandot woman to a young, part-Wyandot listener in the waning decades of the nineteenth century. The animal stories become, in effect, stories within the story of the Wyandot household to which the boy and his aunt belong. Both become actors in the story. He looks for excuses to have another story told. She, who enjoys telling the stories and needs little prompting, often links the tales by making the action of one grow out a grudge left over form an earlier episode, especially from the competition between the two central figures, Ol’ Coon and his cousin Ol’ Fox.

Readers might find parallels between the narrative frameworks for the tales and the frameworks that surround the stories told by Uncle Remus to the little boy in Joel Chandler Harris’s stories. In his foreword, Hen-Toh himself notes the parallel’s between his tales and Harris’s, citing the public controversy engaged in by John Wesley Powell of the Bureau of American Ethnology and others concerning whether such stories had their origins in Africa or indigenous America. But like his contemporary Alex Posey and other Indian writers, he defended the Indian origin of the tales.

Despite the perceived parallels, Hen-Toh clearly had in mind some scenes of his early childhood as he shaped the narrative frameworks. The storyteller is modeled after an old aunt who lived in the Walker home, and the little boy, whom she calls “Bra-ty” is Hen-Toh, who was called “Bertie” when he was a child. The father is like Isaiah Walker, who carefully mends the maple-wood bowls that the mother brought from Canada during the removal. The bowls are reminiscent of those Hen-Toh’s mother had brought from her childhood home and had donated in 1911 to the Canadian National Museum in Ottawa.

Through these frameworks, Hen-Toh sets the storytelling scene in winter and makes the storytelling a part of Wyandot domestic life, both of which were proper contexts for storytelling in traditional Wyandot society. Through those contexts and the stories told in them, the reader gains insight into not only the art of storytelling but also the joy of listening.

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