This is the first in a three-part series. Part II will publish on Thursday. Part III will publish on Friday.
UTICA — On a September day just over a century ago, a shot rang out near Utica.
In its wake, a woman lay murdered, a family shattered, and a man went to jail. The incident became an often-repeated but rarely researched part of Knox County history.
Today we would call it a hate crime.
The victim was Rachel Konkapot, a pregnant 26-year old Native American woman of the Stockbridge tribe. She was a long way from home.
The people of the Stockbridge Nation call themselves the muh-he-cannock, the “People of the waters that are never still.” They originated as a branch of the Mohican tribe who converted to Christianity and congregated around the “praying town” of Stockbridge, Massachusetts, in the 1730s.
During the American Revolution, they allied with the Americans, but their service did not prevent them from being ousted from their homes in the mid-1780s. Their Oneida relatives gave them temporary refuge in upstate New York, but they too faced pressure from land-hungry American settlers.
Around 1815, Delaware relatives invited the Stockbridges to join them on land they had purchased from the Miami tribe along the White River in Indiana.
It took nearly three years for the first group of Stockbridge people to organize the long westward trek … and, when they finally arrived, they found the Miamis had been forced to cede that territory to American officials.
Some of the Stockbridges decided to stay anyway, given that they would at least be allowed to live there for a few years. Others — including Rachel Konkapot and her husband — decided to return home to New York.
They were heading there when they passed through Knox and Licking counties.
Of Rachel’s early life, we can say very little. Like most people of her day — White or Indian, and women in particular — she lived largely without leaving a paper trail.
We know that she was born sometime between 1793 and 1796, but we have no birth certificate to say exactly when. We know that she married Elisha Konkapot — probably in her early 20s — but we have no marriage record to confirm the details. We don’t even know her maiden name.
We do know that she that she could read and write at least well enough to affix her signature as a founding member to the charter of her community’s Women’s Christian Fellowship Society in 1818.
But, beyond that, most of what we know about Rachel’s life involves how it was taken from her.
Various 19th century histories of Knox and Licking counties tell of Rachel’s murder. N.N. Hill’s 1881 History of Knox County records that five local men — John McLean, James Hughes, and three others for whom no first names were provided (McDaniel, Evans, and Chadwick) — were chopping wood when the party of about 20 Stockbridge travelers came along and camped near them.
Rachel and two of her companions attracted their attention by lagging behind the others.
“The diabolical prospect was made and accepted,” Hill tells us, “that they should play cards and that the loser should shoot her. McLean was the loser and did the shooting.”
The Ohio Register reported on Sept. 15, 1819 that the ball struck Rachel’s left thigh and “shattered it in a most shocking manner.”
“It was undoubtedly the intention of the ruffians to have killed the whole of them, if possible,” the Register continued, “as they were walking nearly abreast, and were fired at from a position calculated to have an equal effect on all of them.”
When McLean and his associates were arrested and taken to Newark, he confessed to the crime and exclaimed that he “was sorry that he did not kill them all.”
Even at a time when violence against Native people was often tolerated, if not openly celebrated, killing a pregnant woman without provocation was a bit beyond the line for a “civilized” place like central Ohio.
McLean and Hughes were eventually tried for murder in Licking County. Hughes was acquitted, moved to Indiana, and died there at the age of 81. His family members today appear to have no knowledge of their ancestor’s trial.
John McLean was found guilty and was sentenced to 10 years in the State Penitentiary. Sources differ as to whether he died in prison or shortly after serving his time.
But Rachel did not die immediately. Her companions took her first to a nearby farm belonging to James Bell where she remained for a few days. She was then carried to Mount Vernon where it was hoped she could be treated more effectively.
For more than a month, she recuperated in a gunsmith’s shop on High Street (today the site of the Fiesta Mexicana restaurant) before the November weather made the log building too cold for her comfort. She was moved to a house on the corner of Mulberry and Vine streets (today the parking lot for Honeybuckets Tavern) where she died, probably of an infection, at the end of December.
Although lengthy obituaries for someone who was not a well-known person were uncommon at this period, the Ohio Register devoted several paragraphs to Rachel’s passing.
“She bore her affliction with unparalleled fortitude, patience, and resignation,” it reported. “On the morning of her decease, she was seized with violent spasms which soon terminated with her earthly existence, she appeared to be sensible of her situation, and often spoke with propriety on religion, Death, Judgment and Eternity.”
The obituary also noted that Rachel forgave her attackers and that she “prayed that God might forgive them.”
Newspaper editors tended to borrow freely from one another during the 1800s and her obituary was republished in at least a dozen newspapers across eight states. Apparently, Rachel’s story was sufficiently tragic to elicit a good deal of sympathy elsewhere.
It did so locally as well. Community leaders in Mount Vernon provided money for Rachel’s physician and for lodging for the four or five Stockbridge travelers who stayed with her as she died. They provided her also with a plot in the city cemetery and the $6 wooden casket in which she was buried.
They did not, however, provide her with a headstone — an oversight that Stockbridge people and other members of Rachel’s family are today trying to address (the subject of an upcoming story on Knox Pages).
Hill’s History tells us that Elisha Konkapot returned to Mount Vernon each November for several years thereafter to look after Rachel’s grave. We cannot confirm that, but it is certainly not impossible. However, Elisha may have had another motive for his annual visits: Remember … Rachel Konkapot was pregnant when she was shot.
