Author: Schoolcraft, Henry R.
Biography:
SCHOOLCRAFT, Henry R. (1793-1864: ANBO)
Henry Rowe Schoolcraft was born on a farmstead near Albany NY to Margaret Anne Barbara (Rowe) and Lawrence Schoolcraft. His father was a farmer but also a glass manufacturer and a local JP. He had some tutoring in Latin besides basic schooling, but he was largely self-educated. In 1808 the family moved to Vernon NY and he was involved in the construction and management of glass factories in the Northeast, often in business with his father, but in 1817 he was declared bankrupt. Travelling westward, he undertook a range of activities and published about most of them: studied mines in Arkansas and Missouri, joined expeditions as a mineralogist, and became involved in treaty negotiations with indigenous tribes. In 1822 he was employed by the federal Indian service as the first Indian agent at Sault Ste Marie MI. In 1823 he married Jane Johnston, the daughter of an Irish trader whose wife was Ojibwa; the couple had two children who survived infancy. Bicultural and bilingual, Jane Schoolcraft was also a writer, though one whose works did not appear in her lifetime. With the guidance of the family he had married into, Schoolcraft began the ethnographic and popularizing work for which he is remembered today, notably collections of legends and compilation of statistics (Algic Researches, 1829; The American Indians, 1851; The Myth of Hiawatha, 1856; Historical and Statistical Information . . ., 1851-7). But his focus shifted from sympathetic recording to advocacy of temperance and conversion when he joined the Presbyterians in Detroit in 1831. He and his wife were estranged thereafter; she died in 1842 while he was on a trip to Britain to gather support. He was dismissed from the Indian service in 1841 for having engaged in politics and misappropriated funds, but was reinstated 1847-57 after a trial in which he was judged guilty and required to make reparation. In 1847 he married Mary Howard of South Carolina. He wrote so much that his few poems--which were in any case at first anonymous--are seldom mentioned; the last of them was Alhalla, or The Lord of Talledega (1843). He published (unreliable) memoirs in 1851. He died at home in Washington DC of a longstanding "paralytic" condition and is buried in the Congressional Cemetery. (ancestry.com 3 Sept. 2020; ANBO 3 Sept. 2020; WorldCat) HJ