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 expedition to the source of the Mississippi River. He is also noted for his major six-volume study of Native Americans commissioned by Congress and published in the 1850s.
He served as United States Indian agent in Michigan for a period beginning in 1822. During this period, he named several newly organized counties, often creating neologisms that he claimed were derived from indigenous languages.
There he married Jane Johnston, daughter of a prominent Scotch-Irish fur trader and an Ojibwe mother, who was the high-ranking daughter of Waubojeeg, a war chief. Jane lived with her family in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan. She was bilingual and educated, having grown up in a literate household. Jane taught Schoolcraft the Ojibwe language and much about her maternal culture. They had several children together, only two of whom survived past childhood. She is now recognized for her poetry and other writings as the first Native American literary writer in the United States.
Schoolcraft continued to study Native American tribes and publish works about them. In 1833, he was elected as a member of the American Philosophical Society.
By 1846, Jane had died. That year, Schoolcraft was commissioned by Congress for a major study, known as Indian Tribes of the United States. It was published in six volumes from 1851 to 1857, and illustrated by Seth Eastman, a career Army officer with extensive experience as an artist of indigenous peoples.
Schoolcraft remarried in 1847, to Mary Howard, from a slaveholding family in South Carolina. In 1860, Howard published the bestselling novel The Black Gauntlet. It was part of the Anti-Tom literature that was written in Southern response to the bestselling Uncle Tom's Cabin by Northern abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe.
Early life and education Schoolcraft was born in 1793 in Guilderland, New York, the son of Lawrence Schoolcraft and Margaret-Anne Barbara (née Rowe) Schoolcraft. He entered Union College at age 15 and later attended Middlebury College. He was especially interested in geology and mineralogy.
His father was a glassmaker, and Schoolcraft initially studied and worked in the same industry. At age 24, he wrote his first paper on the topic, Vitreology (1817). After working in several glassworks in New York, Vermont, and New Hampshire, the young Schoolcraft left the family business at age 25 to explore the western frontier.
Exploration and geologic survey From November 18 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. (French colonists had earlier developed a lead mine outside St. Louis in the 18th century.) He also published Journal of a Tour into the Interior of Missouri and Arkansaw (1821), the first written account of a European-American exploration of the Ozark Mountains.
This expedition and his resulting publications brought Schoolcraft to the attention of John C. Calhoun, the Secretary of War, who considered him "a man of industry, ambition, and insatiable curiosity."David J. Krause, The Making of a Mining District: Keweenaw Native Copper 1500-1870 (1992), p. 68. Calhoun recommended Schoolcraft 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 upper Mississippi River. Beginning in the spring of 1820, Schoolcraft served as a geologist on the Lewis Cass expedition. Beginning in Detroit, they traveled nearly 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 was intended to establish the source of the Mississippi River. It was also intended to settle the question of the yet undetermined boundary between the United States and British Canada. The expedition traveled as far upstream as Upper Red Cedar Lake in present-day Minnesota. Since low water precluded navigating farther upstream, the expedition designated the lake as the river's headwaters and renamed it in honor of Cass. (Schoolcraft noted, however, that locals informed the expedition that it was possible to navigate by canoe farther upstream earlier in the year when water levels were higher.) Schoolcraft's account of the expedition was published as 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, which traveled through Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio. In 1832, he led a second expedition to the headwaters of the Mississippi River. While traveling alongside the Brule River, he met Ozaawindib, an Ojibwe agokwa, and hired him as a guide. Because they arrived at Cass Lake a month earlier than had the 1820 expedition, the group was able to take advantage of higher water to navigate to Lake Itasca. Ozaawindib successfully led the group to the headwater of the Mississippi, named Omashkoozo-Zaaga’igan or Elk Lake in Ojibwe. Schoolcraft renamed the headwater Lake Itasca based on the Latin words for truth (veritas) and head (caput).
Marriages and family Schoolcraft met his first wife Jane Johnston soon after being assigned in 1822 to Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, as the first US Indian agent in the region. 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.
Jane was the eldest daughter of John Johnston, a prominent Scots-Irish fur trader, and his wife Ozhaguscodaywayquay (Susan Johnston), daughter of a leading Ojibwe chief, Waubojeeg, and his wife. Both of the Johnstons were of high status; they had eight children together, and their cultured, wealthy family was well known in the area.Robert Dale Parker, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft , University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, accessed Dec 11, 2008
Jane was also known as Bamewawagezhikaquay (Woman of the Sound the Stars Make Rushing Through the Sky). Her knowledge of the Ojibwe language and culture, which she shared with Schoolcraft, formed in part the source material for Longfellow's epic poem The Song of Hiawatha.
Jane and Henry had four children together: William Henry (June 1824 – March 1827) died of croup at nearly three., Canku Ota, accessed April 3, 2011 Jane Schoolcraft wrote poems expressing her grief about his loss.Dave Stanaway and Susan Askwith, CD:: John Johnston: His Life and Times in the Fur Trade Era , Borderland Records, accessed Dec 11, 2008 stillborn daughter (November 1825). Jane Susan Ann (October 14, 1827 – November 25, 1892, Richmond, Virginia), called Janee. John Johnston (October 2, 1829 – April 24, 1864), served in the Civil War but was wounded at the Battle of Gettysburg and disabled. He died at the age of 34 in Elmira, New York.
The Schoolcrafts sent Jane and John to a boarding school in Detroit for part of their education. Jane at 11 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. They included their own poetry in letters to each other through the years. Jane 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.
On January 12, 1847, after moving to Washington, DC, at age 53 Schoolcraft married again, to Mary Howard (died March 12, 1878). She was a southerner and slaveholder, from an elite planter family of the Beaufort district of South Carolina.Marli Frances Weiner, Mistresses and Slaves: Plantation Women in South Carolina, 1830-80, University of Illinois, 1998, p. 104, accessed April 3, 2011 Her support of slavery and opposition to mixed-race unions created strains in her relationship with the Schoolcraft children. They became alienated from both her and their father.
After Schoolcraft's hands became paralyzed in 1848 from a rheumatic condition, Mary devoted much of her attention to caring for him and helping him complete his massive study of Native Americans, which had been commissioned by Congress in 1846.
In 1860, she published the novel The Black Gauntlet: A Tale of Plantation Life in South Carolina (which she said her husband had encouraged). One of many pro-slavery books published in response to Harriet Beecher Stowe's bestselling Uncle Tom's Cabin, such defenses of slavery, published in the decade before the American Civil War, became known as the anti-Tom genre. Hers became a best-seller, although not on the scale of Stowe's.Stephen Railton, "Anti Uncle Tom Novels", Pro-Slavery Novels, Uncle Tom's Cabin & American Culture, University of Virginia, 1998-2009, accessed February 23, 2011
Indian agent
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 and its culture.
Schoolcraft created The Muzzeniegun, or Literary Voyager, a family magazine which he and Jane produced in the winter of 1826–1827 and circulated among friends ("muzzeniegun" coming from Ojibwe mazina'igan meaning "book"). It contained mostly his own writings, although he did include a few pieces from his wife and a few other locals. 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.Schoolcraft: Literary Voyager or Muzziegun, ed. by Philip Mason, East Lansing: Michigan State University, 1962, full text online Jane Johnston Schoolcraft used the pen names of "Rosa" and Leelinau as personae to write about different aspects of Indian culture.Jeremy Mumford, "Mixed-race identity in a nineteenth-century family: the Schoolcrafts of Sault Ste. Marie, 1824–27", Michigan Historical Review, Mar 22, 1999, pp. 2–3, accessed Dec 11, 2008
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 Ojibwe and Dakota (Sioux) nations. He worked 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 Native Americans against smallpox. He determined that smallpox had been unknown among the Ojibwe 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 (the North American front of the Seven Years' War).