Henry Rowe Schoolcraft (March 28, 1793 – December 10, 1864) was an American geographer, geologist, and ethnologist, noted for his early studies of Native American cultures, as well as for his 1832 discovery of the source of the Mississippi River. He married Jane Johnston, whose parents were Ojibwe and Scots-Irish. Her knowledge of the Ojibwe language and of Ojibwe legends, which she shared with Schoolcraft, formed in part the source material for Longfellow's epic poem, The Song of Hiawatha.
Schoolcraft's second wife Mary Howard was from the planter elite in South Carolina. In response to the abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe's bestselling Uncle Tom's Cabin, Mary Howard Schoolcraft wrote and published The Black Gauntlet: A Tale of Plantation Life in South Carolina (1860), one of many anti-Tom novels in the years before the American Civil War. Hers was a bestseller.
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Schoolcraft was born in Guilderland, Albany County, New York, the son of Lawrence Schoolcraft and Anne Barbara (Rowe) Schoolcraft. He entered Union College at age fifteen and later attended Middlebury College. He was especially interested in geology and mineralogy.
His father was a glassmaker, and Henry initially studied and worked in the same industry. Schoolcraft wrote his first paper on the topic, Vitreology (1817). After working in several glass works in New York, Vermont and New Hampshire, the young Schoolcraft left the family business at age twenty-five to explore the western frontier.
From November 1818 to February 1819, Schoolcraft and his companion Levi Pettibone made an expedition from Potosi, Missouri to what is now Springfield. They traveled further down the White River into Arkansas, making a survey of the geography, geology, and mineralogy of the area. Schoolcraft published this study in A View of the Lead Mines of Missouri (1819). In this book he correctly identified the potential for lead deposits in the region; Missouri eventually became the number one lead-producing state. He also published Journal of a Tour into the Interior of Missouri and Arkansaw (1821), the first written account of an exploration of the Ozarks.
This expedition and his resulting publications brought Schoolcraft to the attention of the Secretary of War, John C. Calhoun, who saw him as "a man of industry, ambition, and insatiable curiosity." Calhoun recommended him to the Michigan Territorial Governor, Lewis Cass, for a position on an expedition led by Cass to explore the wilderness region of Lake Superior and the lands west to the Mississippi River. Beginning in the spring of 1820, Schoolcraft served as a geologist on the Lewis Cass expedition. Beginning in Detroit, they traveled nearly 2,000 miles (3,200 km) along Lake Huron and Lake Superior, west to the Mississippi River, down the river to present-day Iowa, and then returning to Detroit after tracing the shores of Lake Michigan.
The expedition intended to discover the source of the Mississippi River, in part to settle the question of an undetermined boundary between the United States and British Canada. The expedition erroneously concluded that the Mississippi's headwaters were in Cass Lake in present-day Minnesota. Schoolcraft published an account of the journey in A Narrative Journal of Travels Through the Northwestern Regions...to the Sources of the Mississippi River (1821).
In 1821 he was a member of another government expedition that traveled through Illinois, Indiana and Ohio.
Schoolcraft met his first wife soon after being assigned in 1822 to Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan as its first US Indian Agent. Two years before, the government had built Fort Brady and wanted to establish an official presence to forestall any renewed British threat following the War of 1812. The government tried to ensure against British agitation of the Ojibwa.
Schoolcraft married Jane Johnston, eldest daughter of John Johnston, a prominent Scots-Irish fur trader, and his wife Ozhaguscodaywayquay (Susan Johnston), daughter of a leading Ojibwe chief, Waubojeeg. The Johnstons had eight children, and their cultured, wealthy family was well-known in the area.[1] Jane was also known as O-bah-bahm-wawa-ge-zhe-go-qua (or Obabaamwewe-giizhigokwe in modern spelling) (The Woman of the Sound [Which the Stars Make] Rushing Through the Sky).
Jane and Henry had four children together:
The Schoolcrafts sent Janee and John to a boarding school in Detroit for part of their education. Janee at eleven could handle the transition, but John at nine had a more difficult time and missed his parents.
The Schoolcrafts had a literary marriage, producing a family magazine, and including their own poetry in letters to each other through the years. Jane Johnston Schoolcraft suffered from frequent illnesses. She died in 1842 while visiting a sister in Canada, and was buried at St. John's Anglican Church, Ancaster, Ontario.[1]
On January 12, 1847, after moving to Washington, DC, the widower Schoolcraft married again at age 53, to Mary Howard (died March 12, 1878[4]), a southern slaveholder from an elite planter family of the Beaufort district of South Carolina.[5] Her support of slavery and opposition to mixed-race unions created strains in her relationship with the Schoolcraft stepchildren.[6] They became alienated from her and their father.
After Henry Schoolcraft became paralyzed in 1848, Mary devoted much of her attention to caring for him and helping him complete his massive study of the American Indian.[5] In 1860 she published the novel The Black Gauntlet: A Tale of Plantation Life in South Carolina (which she said her husband had encouraged).[5] One of many pro-slavery responses to Harriet Beecher Stowe's bestselling Uncle Tom's Cabin, such defenses of slavery became known as the anti-Tom genre, published in the decade before the American Civil War.[7] Hers became a best-seller, although not on the scale of Stowe's.[8]
Schoolcraft began his ethnological research in 1822 during his appointment as US Indian agent at Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan. He had responsibility for tribes in what is now northern Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota. From his wife Jane Johnston, Schoolcraft learned the Ojibwe language, as well as much of the lore of the tribe.
Together they wrote for The Literary Voyager, a family magazine which they produced in 1826–1827 and circulated among friends. It is thought to be the first magazine in Michigan. Although they produced only single issues, each was distributed widely to residents in Sault Ste. Marie, then to Schoolcraft's friends in Detroit, New York and other eastern cities.[9] Jane Johnston Schoolcraft used the pen names of "Rosa" and Leelinau as personae to write about different aspects of Indian culture.[10]
Schoolcraft was elected to the legislature of the Michigan Territory, where he served from 1828 to 1832. In 1832, he traveled again to the upper reaches of the Mississippi to settle continuing troubles between the Ojibwa and Dakota (Sioux) nations. He reached out to talk to as many Native American leaders as possible to maintain the peace. He was also provided with a surgeon and given instructions to begin vaccinating Indians against smallpox. He determined that smallpox had been unknown among the Chippewa before the return in 1750 of a war party that had contact with Europeans on the East Coast. They had gone to Montreal to assist the French against the British in the French and Indian War.
During the voyage, Schoolcraft took the opportunity to explore the region, making the first accurate map of the Lake District around western Lake Superior. He discovered the true headwaters of the Mississippi River in Lake Itasca, a name which he coined from the Latin words veritas meaning 'truth' and caput meaning 'head'.[11] The nearby Schoolcraft River, the first major tributary of the Mississippi, was later named in his honor. American newspapers widely covered this expedition. Schoolcraft followed up with a personal account of the discovery with his book, Narrative of an Expedition Through the Upper Mississippi River to Itasca Lake (1834).
After his territory was greatly increased in 1833, Schoolcraft and his wife Jane moved to Mackinac Island, the new headquarters of his administration. In 1836, he was instrumental in settling land disputes with the Chippewa. He worked with them to accomplish the Treaty of Washington (1836), by which they ceded to the United States a vast territory of more than 13 million acres (53,000 km²)—worth many millions of dollars. He believed that the Chippewa would be better off learning to farm and giving up their wide hunting lands. The government agreed to pay subsidies and provide supplies while the Chippewa made a transition to a new way of living, but their provision of the promised subsidies was often late and underfunded.
In 1838 pursuant to the terms of the treaty, Schoolcraft oversaw the construction of the Indian Dormitory on Mackinac Island. The building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It provided temporary housing to the Chippewa who came to Mackinac Island to receive annuities during their transition to what was envisioned by the US government as a more settled way of life.
In 1839 Schoolcraft was appointed Superintendent of Indian Affairs in the Northern Department. He began a series of Native American studies later published as the Algic Researches (2 vols., 1839). These included his collection of Native American stories and legends, many of which his wife Jane Johnston Schoolcraft told him or translated for him from her culture.
While in Michigan, Schoolcraft became a member of the Board of Regents of the University of Michigan in its early years. In this position he helped establish the state university's financial organization.[12]
Schoolcraft founded and contributed to the first United States journal on public education, The Journal of Education. He also published The Souvenir of the Lakes, the first literary magazine in Michigan.[12]
Schoolcraft named many of Michigan's counties and locations within the former Michigan Territory. He named Leelanau County, Michigan after his wife's pen name of "Leelinau".[13] For those counties established in 1840, he often created faux Indian names. In names such as Alcona, Algoma, Allegan, Alpena, Arenac, Iosco, Kalkaska, Oscoda and Tuscola, for example, Schoolcraft combined words and syllables from Native American languages with words and syllables from Latin and Arabic.[14] Lake Itasca, the source lake of the Mississippi River, is another example of his faux Indian names.
When the Whig Party came to power in 1841 with the election of William Henry Harrison, Schoolcraft lost his political position as Indian agent. He and Jane moved to New York. She died the next year during a visit with a sister in Canada, while Schoolcraft was traveling in Europe. He continued to write about Native Americans.
In 1846 Congress commissioned him to develop a comprehensive reference work on American Indian tribes. Schoolcraft traveled to England to request the services of George Catlin to illustrate his proposed work, as the latter was widely regarded as the premier illustrator of Indian life. Schoolcraft was deeply disappointed when Catlin refused. Schoolcraft later engaged the artist Seth Eastman as illustrator. An Army brigadier general, Eastman was renowned for his paintings of Native American peoples. He had two extended assignments at Fort Snelling in present-day Minnesota, the second time as commander of the fort, and had closely studied, drawn and painted the people of the Indian cultures of the Great Plains.
Schoolcraft worked for years on the history and survey of the Indian tribes of the United States. It was published in six volumes from 1851-1857 by J. B. Lippincott & Co. of Philadelphia. Critics praised its scholarship and valuable content by Schoolcraft, and the meticulous and knowledgeable illustrations by Eastman. Critics also noted the work's shortcomings, including a lack of index, and poor organization, which made the information almost inaccessible. In 1954 the Bureau of American Ethnology of the Smithsonian Institution prepared and published an index to the volumes. (It was not until 1928 that the US government had another overall study of the conditions of American Indians; it was informally known as the Meriam Report, after the technical director of the team, Lewis Meriam.)
After their deaths, Schoolcraft and his wife Mary were each buried in the Congressional Cemetery in Washington, DC.[4]
Numerous counties, towns, lakes, streams, roads and other geographic features are named in his honor, including:
In addition,