Schoolcraft, Henry Rowe
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
Henry Rowe (1793-1864), an American ethonologist, writer, and traveler. He was born at Watervliet, now Guilderland, New York , and died at Washington, D.C. He was educated at Middlebury and Union Colleges. Chemistry and geology were his favorite subjects. After graduation he had experience in a glass factory of which his father was manager. He wrote a work on the manufacture of glass. In 1818 he was appointed to the geological survey of Missouri and Arkansas. He wrote a View of the Lead Mines of Missouri. Soon afterward he was appointed as geologist to accompany General Cass on an exploring expedition to the Superior copper region. In 1823 he was made agent for Indian affairs. He then married a chieftain's granddaughter and settled down at Sault Sainte Marie and Mackinaw. In 1828-1832 he represented the region in the legislature of Michigan. In the latter year he took advantage of an errand on Indian business to explore the upper waters of the Mississippi, and on this trip he discovered and named Lake Itasca. While Indian agent, he secured the cession of 16,000,000 acres of land to the United States . His birth near the Iroquois, his marriage, and his long residence among the Indians of the Superior region gave Schoolcraft an acquaintance with Indian manners and customs. A college training enabled him to make use of the information. Among his writings are Memoirs of a Residence of Thirty Years with the Indian Tribes, The Myth of Hiawatha and Other Oral Legends, Notes on the Iroquois, etc. His great work, however, was Historical and Statistical Information Respecting the Indian Tribes of the United States. It is a six volume treatise with 336 plates made from original drawings issued under direction of Congress at a cost of $30,000 per volume. The historian Parkman was of the opinion that Schoolcraft had not made the most of a great opportunity. It is not too much to say, however, that the work is a vast storehouse of information relating to Indian antiquities. Longfellow was indebted to Schoolcraft for the name and the material of Hiawatha. See Itasca ; Longfellow , etc.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's 1910 notice mentions that Schoolcraft "married a chieftain's granddaughter" without naming her; she was Jane Johnston Schoolcraft (Bamewawagezhikaquay), of Ojibwe and Irish parentage, and she is now recognized as the first known Native American literary writer, her poems and stories collected in a scholarly edition in 2007. Much of the Indian lore credited to Schoolcraft came through her and her family, and modern scholars stress that he blurred sources badly — the name Hiawatha belongs to an Iroquois statesman, while the trickster tales Longfellow retold are Ojibwe stories of Manabozho, a confusion Schoolcraft passed on to the poet. His 1832 arrival at Lake Itasca, praised here as a discovery, is now told as a journey guided by the Ojibwe leader Ozawindib to a lake long known to its inhabitants, though Itasca is still accepted as the Mississippi's source. The cession of 16,000,000 acres listed as an achievement is today read as a chapter in dispossession rather than a credit to the agent who secured it.
Written for this edition, 2026.