The Caspar Partridge Case, 1850-1855, concerned the kidnapping of a Menominee child by a white family after their own son, Caspar Partridge, disappeared. The Partridge family believed the Menominee child was Caspar. They renamed him and raised him as their own son.


Background

On April 9, 1850, Alvin and Lucia Partridge took their children maple sugaring in the woods near their farm in the Winnebago Co. township of Vinland, outside Oshkosh. Their four-year-old son, Caspar, wandered away and was never seen alive again.

At the time, relations between white settlers and the Menominee Indians were tense. The federal government was trying to force the Menominee off their Wisconsin homeland. The tribe resisted through legal action. Disputes over tribal boundaries and annuity payments increased anxiety among the settlers. Many settlers vividly recalled the violence of the Black Hawk War 18 years earlier. In this tense environment, rumors spread through white communities that the Menominee Indians had stolen Caspar Partridge.

Seizure of an Indian Child

Eighteen months later, Alvin Partridge's sister spotted a light-skinned boy with a Menominee family near Waupaca. Twenty-two white men invaded the Menominee camp and seized the child, who was named Oakaha. The men summoned Alvin Partridge to identify the boy, but he was not sure it was his missing son. 
 
Other members of the Partridge family were certain that Oakaha was the missing Caspar Partridge. They obtained a writ of habeas corpus to prevent Oakaha from being returned to the Menominee.

The Trial

In early 1852, a six-day trial was held in Oshkosh to determine Oakaha's true parents. In their testimony, members of the Partridge family pointed to a general physical resemblance between Caspar and Oakaha. Menominee elders, Catholic missionaries, and white traders disagreed. They all swore that they had known the child since his birth and he was not Caspar Partridge. The judge ruled in favor of the Menominee and ordered Oakaha returned to his Menominee mother. But before that could occur, vigilantes took the boy away to the Partridge homestead in Ohio.


Seizure of Oakah


Eighteen months later, in May of 1853, a child's decomposed remains was discovered on the Partridge family's Wisconsin farm. The remains were assumed to be those of Caspar Partridge. This discovery prompted federal officials to track Oakaha to McHenry County, Illinois, where they seized him late in 1854. The officials were on their way to northern Wisconsin to reunite the boy with his Menominee mother when the Partridges filed an injunction to stop them. Before a legal hearing could be held, family members kidnapped Oakaha a second time, on March 5, 1855, in Milwaukee. They then fled into the wilds of Kansas Territory.

Adult Life of Oakaha
 


Despite repeated efforts, neither the federal government nor the Menominee Nation were able to recover Oakaha again. Oakaha was renamed Joseph Partridge. He grew up in Kansas, served in the Civil War, and spent most of his adult life plagued by mental health and financial problems. He wandered unhappily throughout the Midwest until his death near New Lisbon, Wis., in 1916.

"Red Child, White Child: The Strange Disappearance of Caspar Partridge," Wisconsin Magazine of History, Vol. 58, No. 4 (Summer, 1975): 258-312.

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