A Man Called Wrinkled Meat: The Story of John Smith of the Chippewa Tribe Aged 138 Years
There is a small Catholic cemetery located in Cass Lake, Minnesota.
Cass Lake is a tiny hamlet in north-central Minnesota with a population of just under 800 souls. It is known for its bitter cold winters, heavy snowfall and timber. The town sits along the edge of the Chippewa National Forest, right in the heart of the ancestral land of the indigenous Ojibwe people of the Chippewa Tribal Nation for which the aforementioned forest is named.
Tucked away in a corner of that small cemetery in Cass Lake is a rather nondescript rectangular burial plaque. The plaque reads:
JOHN SMITH
BORN IN 1784
DIED FEB 6, 1922
138 YEARS OLD
If true, then this unassuming plaque in a small rural Minnesota cemetery marks the final resting place of the oldest living person ever recorded in all of human history!
John Smith, the man often called Chief John Smith in the historical record, lived to be a purported 138 (0r 137) the exact number is sometimes very much uncertain, years old.
In his native Ojibwe language Smith’s name was Ga-be-Nah-gewn-Wonce, which could be transliterated into English as “Wrinkled Meat”.
It is said that the man known as “Wrinkled Meat” was twice offered a chief’s position within the Ojibwe Nation, but that each time out of a sense of modesty, he turned it down. In John Smith’s own words once when asked about becoming an “official” tribal chief he simply stated that, “he didn’t want the responsibility”.
Despite his desire to live an anonymous life on the reservation of his people near Cass Lake, Minnesota, during the first two decades of the 20th century John Smith would reach prominence first within the state of Minnesota itself, and then across the entire nation as a whole, as one of the world’s oldest supercentenarians.
Smith’s advanced age first came to light around the year 1910 when he began travelling across the large Ojibwe reservation of the Chippewa Tribe selling postcards of himself to interested tourists and curiosity seekers. White people who lived in the area began to refer to John simply as the “Old Indian”.
In 1922 John Smith passed away from complications resulting from pneumonia all the while claiming to be well in excess of 130 years old.
Two years prior to his death, in 1920, Chief John Smith had gained nationwide attention as the star of an exploitative film simply called Old Indians which toured the United States and was shown to sellout crowds in silent movie theaters from coast to coast.
Though he never received a dime from the film, and spent his entire life in and around Cass Lake, Minnesota, many travelled from hundreds of miles away just to see the Ojibwe man they called “Wrinkled Meat”.
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| John Smith on Chippewa Reservation ca. 1920 |
In 1914, late in life no matter what his true age might have been, John Smith converted to Catholicism. After years living on government reservations many members of Smith’s Chippewa Tribe either felt pressured into converting to Catholicism or Methodism to try and fit into greater American society at large, or they had become so far removed from the practice of their native faith that the tenets of Christianity now resonated more deeply with them then did the nature based spiritual traditions of their ancestors. John Smith was no exception.
During the course of his long life Smith would claim to have had 8 wives, but it appears as if he was unable to conceive children because during the course of his life he had only one adopted son with his last wife as a Catholic, whom they named Tom.
Tom Smith always upheld the veracity of his father’s claim that he lived to be well over 130 years old. Years after his father’s death Tom recalled how his father had been able to, “recount in vivid detail events from the War of 1812 that had occured in the area,” even though John Smith himself always claimed that he neither fought, “with or against the white man,” during the war.
But despite Smith’s own claims regarding his age, and the stories he told his adopted son Tom, there is much doubt that exists as to what the true age of the man called “Wrinkled Meat” actually was.
As Native Americans were forcibly placed onto reservations throughout the United States during the late 19th and early 20th centuries a United States government administration called the Federal Commission of Indian Enrollment was given the task of trying to ascertain the age of as many indigenous people as possible for census purposes. It was not uncommon for Native Americans at the time to use events in nature such as meteor showers, the appearance of celestial phenomena or other occurrences such as natural disasters to determine the date of their birth.
Paul Buffalo, another member of the Chippewa Tribe of the Ojibwe people who grew up with Smith as a child on a reservation in Minnesota, and even referred to Smith as “grandpa” while growing up wrote that Smith had once told him that, “he was eight or ten years old on the night when the stars fell”.
Many researchers believe that what Smith, and other members of the Chippewa Tribe referred to as the, “night when the stars fell”, was in fact the Leonid Meteor Shower of 1833 which was a breathtaking and clearly visible celestial event all across the North American continent. It was very common, at the time, for Native Americans of the Great Plains and Canada to use the night of the Leonid Meteor Shower as a frame of reference for dating the passage of linear time.
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| Artist Rendering of the Leonid Meteor Shower 1833 |
If what Paul Buffalo reported is correct, that would make John Smith’s birth year sometime between 1823 and 1825, or about thirty years after his claimed birth year of 1784 or 1785. John Smith of the Chippewa Tribe would then have lived to be around 100 years old, a venerable old age by any standard, but certainly a far cry from the 137 or 138 years claimed by himself, and others, that would have made John Smith of the Chippewa Tribe the oldest living human being in history.
With regards to the skin condition that gave John Smith the aged appearance that caused him to be named the “Wrinkled Man” it may have been the result of disease such as a lifetime of untreated skin cancer which caused his face to wrinkle and crack in the distinctive way that it did.
Ramon J. Powell, who was the man at the head of the Federal Commission of Indian Enrollment at the time of Smith’s death in 1922 definitively asserted that, “it was disease and not age which made Smith’s skin look the way that it did”. Powell is also the first person to record the claims of Smith’s birth having been during the time of the Leonid Meteor Shower in 1833 as recorded in writing years later by Paul Buffalo.
It should be remembered that it was Powell’s job to try and record John Smith’s birthdate as accurately as possible given all the testimony of Native peoples that he could gather, but it should also be remembered, that given the overtly racist environment of the time towards the Native American population, any claims regarding John Smith’s age that were at odds with Powell’s preconceived notions of what Smith’s age should have been would most probably have been dismissed out of hand as the fantastic imaginings of fanciful natives.
Truthfully, there isn’t very much known about the events that actually made up John Smith’s life around Cass Lake, Minnesota. In 1922 the Star Tribune of Minnesota was the first media outlet to report the passing of the man that white people in the area called “the Old Indian”.
The Star Tribune unabashedly reported that Smith remembered wars between the Chippewa and Sioux that had occurred before 1810 and the paper also went out to record that Smith was an eyewitness to the War of 1812. It reported as fact that the well known Chippewa “Chief” John Smith or “Wrinkled Meat” had indeed passed at the age of 138 on February 6, 1922.
JOHN SMITH
BORN 1784
DIED FEB 6, 1922
AGED 138 YEARS
Quite possibly making John Smith, the Chippewa man they called “Wrinkled Meat” the oldest recorded living human being in world history.
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