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Tales of the Tribe of Ishmael
A Research Note
BRIAN SIEGEL
| Recent publications by Brent Ruswick, Elsa Kramer, and Nathaniel Deutsch1 suggest that my interest in Indianapolis's Tribe of Ishmael is more widely shared than I had imagined. These scholarly studies, like others before them, build their conclusions upon the evidence left in four different sources of information about the Tribe—in chronological order, the writings of Rev. Oscar C. McCulloch,2 a leading advocate of the organized charities movement; James Frank Wright,3 a retired newspaperman and child welfare agent; Arthur H. Estabrook,4 a fieldworker for the Eugenics Record Office; and Hugo P. Leaming,5 an original revisionist historian. By drawing at various times from one or another of these separate versions of the Ishmaelites' story, and by treating as fact details that do not stand up to independent verification, scholars seeking to understand the Tribe's significance to the development of eugenic thought have at times confused rather than clarified the story. I have studied the Ishmaelites for some time, and hope that my findings might save other scholars time and energy. |
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According to his diary, McCulloch discovered the Tribe on January 18, 1878, just ten weeks after he and Rev. Myron Reed had read and preached upon Richard Dugdale's The Jukes (1877).6 The book became the inspiration for McCulloch's study of the Tribe. McCulloch wrote three accounts of his first encounter with seven desperately poor people—a man, his mother, two younger women, and three children—and each account is slightly different. |
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The second account, the first public mention of the Tribe, is in McCulloch's 1880 paper to the National Conference of Charities and Correction. The account resembles that found in his diary, but subtle changes have been introduced. The man who had been described as half-blind is no longer so. The second woman, first identified as his wife's sister, is now his sibling, and her child is reported to be the result of incest. McCulloch also altered his diary, reducing one of the women's offspring from four children to two. In the third account, the two younger women's (now) three children switched mothers, and the woman previously identified as the man's sister again became his wife's sibling. These inconsistencies are odd, and one suspects that they were invented, claims-making accounts. The same suspicion arises over McCulloch's ever larger and more alarming counts of the Tribe's numbers.7 |
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When McCulloch went to the township trustee, he found the original seven people listed as Ishmaelites, a.k.a. the "pesthouse" mob.8 This is quite plausible, because twenty-seven of the thirty addresses given for George Ishmael in the 1874 to 1923 city directories were in the old City Hospital or pesthouse neighborhood,9 that is, the Fall Creek bottomlands below the 1910s landfill that lies underneath the current IUPUI medical campus. The census records and city directories document the occupational shifts of the illiterate family members from ash- and swill-collecting laborers and teamsters to junk dealers by 1910. However, as Nathaniel Deutsch demonstrates, McCulloch's history of the Ishmael family is largely fictitious. |
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