Copway, George, 1818-1869

In July 1834, together with an uncle and cousin, he was invited to work with a Methodist minister as a missionary to Ojibwe who lived near the western part of Lake Superior. His activities in two different areas over the next few years included working with Reverend Sherman Hall in La Pointe, Wisconsin to translate the Christian Acts of the Apostles and the Gospel of St Luke into Ojibwa. In 1838 the Methodists provided for Copway's education in Illinois, and later ordained him as a minister.

In 1840, Copway met Elizabeth Howell, an English woman whose family were farmers in the Toronto area. They married and moved to Minnesota to serve as missionaries. They had a son, George Albert Copway (1843 – 1873) and a daughter Frances Minne-Ha-Ha (Copway) Passmore (1863–1921) during their marriage.

The couple later returned to Canada in 1842, where Copway served as a missionary for the Saugeen and Rice Lake Bands of the Ojibwa. He was elected vice-president of the Ojibwe General Council. In 1846, he was accused and convicted of embezzlement by the Indian Department. Because of this, he was defrocked by the Methodists.

The Copways moved to New York City, where he wrote and published a memoir, The Life, History and Travels of Kah-ge-ga-gah-Bowh (1847), republished in London in 1850 as Recollections of a forest life; or, the life and travels of Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh. It was the first book published by a Canadian First Nations person. It had six printings in the first year and rapidly became a bestseller.

During the 1840s, he toured and lectured in the United States and also traveled to Europe. That travel provided him with the material for his book of sketches of Europe, Running sketches of men and places, in England, France, Germany, Belgium, and Scotland, published in 1851 after his book on the history of the Ojibwe. During this period, Copway acted as an advocate for a Native American territory, suggesting a 150-square mile territory be established in what was the American Midwest east of the Missouri River.The tribes in the area were under increasing pressure of encroachment by European-American settlers. This proposal was never approved by the United States Congress, but Copway attracted considerable attention from leading intellectuals of the time, including the historian Francis Parkman.

In 1851, Copway started his own weekly newspaper in New York City, titled Copway's American Indian, which ran for approximately three months. He had attracted "letters of support from the eminent ethnologists Lewis Henry Morgan and Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, from Parkman, and from the novelists James Fenimore Cooper and Washington Irving.

Copway's career subsequently spiralled downward as he began drinking heavily and sank into debt, and in 1858 his wife Elizabeth Howell Copway took his daughter, Frances Minne-Ha-Ha, and left him. Copway traveled throughout New York and Michigan as a herbalist 'street healer' and a Union army recruiter. Copway died in 1869 in Ypsilanti, Michigan.