SCHOOLCRAFT, HENRY ROWE

(b, Albany Country, now Guilderland, New York, 28 March 1793; d. Washington, D.C., 10 December 1864)

ethnologhy.

Schoolcraft’s father. Lawrence Schoolcraft, a descendant of English settles in Canada and New York, was a glass manufacuturer, who served in the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. Schoolcraft’s mother was Margaret Ann Barbara Rowe Schoolcraft, who was of English descent. School-craft was a natural scholar, who quite young gathered a small library of good books. he collected rocks and minerals, painted, and wrote poems and essays that were locally published. With Private instruction he prepared for Union College, and attended it for a time. He later studies informally under Frederick Hall at Middlebury College, Vermont.

Devoted to his father. Schoolcraft readily joined him in the manufacture of glass in 1809; both men superintended factories at several localities in New York and New England. Under the influx of cheaper foreign imports, all of these businesses collapsed soon after the War of 182.

In 1818 Schoolcraft set out westward to tour the lead mines of Missouri, where he hoped to become superintendent by federal appointment. His six-thousand-mile tour of the Mississippi valley, the Ozark Mountains, and the lead district, published in 1819 as A view of the Lead Mines of Missouri, brought him to the attention of Secretary of War John C. Calhoun, who in 1820 assigned Schoolcraft as naturalist on the Lewis Cass expedition from Detroit to the source of the Mississippi River. The expedition turned back before reaching its goal. but twelve years later, at the request of Cass, who was by then secretary of war. Schoolcraft continued the search to Lake Itasca. considered the river’s source by the accompanying Indian guides.

Schoolcraft’s major scientific accomplishment resulted from his appointment as Indian agent in 1822 at Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan Territory. The first and only agent in that post, for nineteen years he gathered notes on the Indian tribes, especially the Chippewa and their customs, languages,mythus, songs, and history. In this work Schoolcraft was greatly aided by his wife, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, granddaughter of an Ojibwa chief; her father. a cultured fur trader. also provided valuable help. From 1836 Schoolcraft was also acting superintendent of Indian affairs for the northwest. He negotiated a number of treaties on land and mineral rights, and devoutly religious himself, encouraged missionaries and their Indian schools.

In 1841 Schoolcraft left Michigan for New York in order to supervise his many publications. In 1847 he returned to the Office of Indian Affairs in Washington to compile information on all American Indian tribes. For over ten years he edited the six-volume Histroical and Statistical Information Respecting the History condition and Prospects of the Indian Tribes of the United States an unasorted, lavishly illustrated compendium of material gathered by agents and staff of the Office of Indian Affairs and by himself. His second wife, Mary Howard Schoolcraft, helped him considerably in continuing the work despite his increasing paralysis. These books and Schoolcraft’s other publications on American Indian lore were Longfellow’s major reference sources for The Song of Hiawatha.

Schoolcraft was elected to the Lyceum of Natural History of New York and to the New-York Historical Society in 1820, upon the publication of his report on the lead district. He was founder of the American Ethnological Society in 1842 and was awarded the L.L.D. the University of Geneva in 1846.

Schoolcraft’s reports on mineral occurrences in both the Missouri and the Lake Superior region were among the earliest descriptions of mineral resources in the United States. He presented assays of lead ore, descriptions of the Missourimines, distribution of outcrops, local geography, and notes on other resources. From his first report in 1819, privately published, he learned the value of publication Henceforth he prodigiously contributed notes, observations, poems, and articles, to newspaper, magazines of his own founding, and established journals; he also published books and government reports. He often repeated material, and he made little effort to organize his observations. His name became widely known, and he developed correspondences with distinguished scientists, including Benjamin Silliman (1779–1864), and with literary figures. His extended reports on the two upper Mississippi expeditions considerably influenced new settlement into Michigan Territory.

Almost the only predecessor of Schoolcraft in making ethnological notes on American Indians was Governor Lewis Cass of Michigan Territory, who provided the agents in his area with questionnaires on Indian observations, and who undoubtedly sparked Schoolcraft’s interest. The latter’s own fondness for poetry led him to record especially the American Indian songs, myths, and legaends. His contributions to ethnology resulted chiefly from his having been an early observer in the field and his presenting widespread, written results from which latter workers could synthesize, after the westward expansion and conflict made observations less reliable.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. Schoolcraft’s monument to early ethnology is Historical and Statistical Information ... of the Indian Tribes of the United States, I-V (Washington, D.C., 1851–1855), VI (Philadelphia, 1857), to which Frances S. Nichols compiled an index, which is Bulletin of the Bureau of American Ethnology, 152 (1954). In addition to Schoolcraft’s numerous shorter work, many of his observations of American Indians were also included in Personal Memories of a Residence of Thirty Years With the Indian Tribes on the American Frontiers (Philadelphia, 1851). Algic Researches, 2vols (New York, 1839), includes Indian oral legends, compiled over many years. For the state of New York, Schoolcraft compiled Notes on the Iroquois (New York, 1846).

The descriptive accounts of his Mississippi River and Missouri trips are in A View of the Lead Mines of Missouri (New York, 1819), Narrative Journal of Travels Through the Northwestern Regions of the United States...to the Sources of the Mississippi River (New York, 1821), and Narrative of an Expedition Through the Upper Mississippi to Itasca Lake the Actual Source of the Mississippi (New York, 1834).

II. Secondary Literature. For an effusive biography of Schoolcraft, a long list of shorter biographical sources, and an extensive bibliography of his writings, see Chase S. Osborn and Stellanova Osborn Schoolcraft-Longfellow-Hiawatha (Lancaster, Pa., 1942).

Elizabeth Noble Shor