Henry Rowe Schoolcraft (1793–1864)

If Cherry-Garrard’s account of the Scott expedition were ranked a 10, then I suppose Henry Schoolcraft’s account of the Cass expedition of 1820 would be a 3. This is naturally because of the severity of the conditions in the Antarctic and that it has no native inhabitants. When reading accounts of the part of the US where I grew up, there is a certain tedium to hearing all of the already named tributaries to the Mississippi, that the shore has elm, poplar, and chestnut trees growing on show more it, that there is considerable hornblende on the shore, and that the temperature reached 71° F that day. Even so, there is much of interest here. I’m pretty sure my public school education in the Detroit area didn’t mention Henry Schoolcraft (1793 - 1864), but 4 mile road in Livonia is still called Schoolcraft road, and there is a county named for him in the upper peninsula.

The 1820 expedition was just before white settlement in most of these areas and Schoolcraft is best when describing the habits of all the Indian tribes he encounters. Schoolcraft’s prejudices aren’t, of course, concealed. On his return journey he passes down the Fox river through Green Bay (then part of Michigan territory), and shares with us, The inhabitants are, with few exceptions, French, who have intermarried with Indian women, and are said generally, to be indolent, gay, intemperate, and illiterate; but I cannot speak from personal observation.
Schoolcraft refers to various Indian spiritual beliefs as pretense and also denies that they have any religion.
In a remarkable display of chutzpah (not an Indian term), Schoolcraft’s party had landed at La Petit Corbeau which I figure to have been about 27 miles downriver from what is now downtown Minneapolis where they were welcomed by a band of about 200 Sioux Indians. They were addressed by the band’s leader and presented with a large amount of corn. The visitors noticed that there was another ceremony in an adjacent cabin. They were told that this was the celebration of an annual feast and that strangers were not permitted to attend. Schoolcraft got Governor Cass to intercede and they were admitted. Schoolcraft proceeds to describe the ceremony in detail and then to tell us how incredibly boring he found it! I wonder what his church services were like at home.

When traveling in search of the source of the Mississippi river, all travel was by canoe with frequent portages measured in the number of pauses required during them. The mosquitoes were as bad then as they are now, but there was no Off! and you couldn’t stop for a burger at the air-conditioned Red Cow in Minneapolis. The trip was made about 70 years before the germ theory of disease was widely accepted, so even if there were an infectious illness and masks were available, people might not even have worn them! When reaching Chicago, Schoolcraft describes, The village consists of ten or twelve dwelling houses, with an aggregate population, of probably, sixty souls. Changes in spelling are occasionally apparent and remind us of the Indian origin of many place names. He travels on the Ousconsing river. He passes the mouth of the Milacky river where there are two American families and a village of Pottowatomies. Along the eastern shore of Lake Michigan he sees the Kikalemazo and Maskagon rivers. I was also reminded that the prefix Mich or Mis means great or big in the Algonquian languages and is the root of Mississippi, Michigan, Michilimackinac, etc. The early 19th century was a time of high variability in English spelling, at least in the US, and although I don’t know if it was in the original manuscript, Schoolcraft uses the term embassadors, refers to the gesticulation time of the Bison(!), and mentions some animals eating muscles.

There are also published accounts of Schoolcraft’s journals for his second trip to find the source of the Mississippi (The Lake Itsaca trip. After this trip I think he claimed that Lake Cass was the source.) and of his trip into the wilds of Missouri and Arkansas. These e-books are available for free, but I sometimes purchase the 99 cent Amazon versions since they tend to have had better OCR scanning and some organization. In this case several of Schoolcraft’s drawings were referred to but missing, there were periodic probable page numbers scanned into the body of the text, and a map of the trip mentioned by Schoolcraft was also missing. I consulted the Rand-McNally road atlas. show less

(Included in the Yellow Fairy Book)

Y'all see this is what happens when you don't listen to your parents, and neglect your younger sibling. They literally go to the fucking wolves. This is why we can't have nice things.

One of the earliest attempts to systematically record the folklore of Native Americans. Henry Schoolcraft married a half-Ojibwe woman, learned the language, lived among them for about thirty years, and recorded their legends; he was off-and-on engaged as Agent and then Superintendent of Indian Affairs in the Northern Department (1822-41).

The current work is a 1995 reprint of a posthumous collection first published in 1916 as "The Indian Fairy Book", Schoolcraft's work provided Longfellow show more with the material that became "The Song of Hiawatha".

(Schoolcraft was born and raised a couple of miles down the road from me, and attended Union College.). show less

good travel descriptions but more detail about geology than I wanted to know or will ever want to know.