It Happened Here -- Those Remarkable Schoolcrafts

It Happened Here -- Those Remarkable Schoolcrafts

If you haven't had a course in Anthropology or you aren't from the northern Mid-west you might draw a blank if you hear the name Schoolcraft.  Henry Rowe Schoolcraft was a New Yorker, born and educated and introduced to the world of business via his father's Hamilton glass foundry. But it was in the Ozarks and the northern Midwest as an early explorer, discovering the source of the Mississippi River and as a student and recorder of the folkways and legends of the Chippewa and other Great Lakes Indians where he became famous. (In Missouri a freeway, in Michigan three townships and a college with 36,000 students, on Michigan's northern peninsula a county, and in Minnesota a state park are all named for H. R. Schoolcraft.) 

Henry Schoolcraft was a serious, studious boy whose middle class father sought to introduce him early into the family business in Guilderland. At age 13 Henry was responsible for the family's company store at the glassworks. The next year he became an overseer, and at age 15, entered Union college to study chemistry, geology and mineralogy. 


 




Willow Street, Guilderland

"...Hamilton Glass wks made bottles, window glass, closed 1815"--Foundry Rd. Guilderland

By age 17 he was superintendent of a new glassworks his father had organized in Geneva, New York but within two years the directors of the plant had decided not to renew his contract. It is not difficult to imagine how the bookish, some said priggish, young man who owed his job to his father's influence, might have run afoul of traditional foundrymen and gaffers. In 1813, Lawrence Schoolcraft found another position for his son as a superintendent at a struggling glassworks in Salisbury township in Vermont.  In Vermont he studied further under the tutelage of a professor from Middlebury College. When, the failing business was unable to continue paying his salary, Lawrence and his son bought a glassworks in Keene, N.H. and Henry became its proprietor and superintendent  The end of the War of 1812 brought a recession, exacerbated by the British dumping large quantities of consumer goods (including glassware) on the American market. Henry made some bad business decisions and the Keene enterprise went bankrupt.  Henry returned to his father's home, now in Geneva,  in disgrace. His return was made more difficult by the knowledge that his brother-in-law       Willet Shearman who succeeded him at the Geneva glassworks had created a thriving business making window glass. 

"GLASS FACTORY
  BAY
  1810 - 1850
  ONTARIO GLASS MANUFACTORY
  BLOWERS OF WINDOW GLASS
  VILLAGE OF 500 INHABITANTS "                    On Rte. 14  1 1/2 Miles S. of Geneva
 

Within a year Henry left his father's home to explore opportunities in the West. He found his way to Missouri where he joined up with another New Yorker, Levi Pettibone . The two amateur explorers set off into the Ozark Mountains to look for lead deposits. Henry had some success with a paper he had written about manganese mining and hoped he capitalize on it with a commercially successful book that would examine the prospects for mining the lead deposits in this little-known region.¹ The inexperienced explorers, after losing most of their supplies when their pack horse floundered crossing a stream, and becoming lost for several days, was befriended by a hunter-mountain man and Schoolcraft was able to fill several notebooks full of useful information and write his book. 
 

Henry journeyed to Washington to promote his book and look for employment. Though a meeting with President Monroe came to nothing, a meeting with Secretary of War, John Calhoun was more fruitful. Calhoun was organizing an expedition with Michigan territorial Governor Lewis Cass into the headwaters of the Mississippi to impress the Northern Indians who continued to be aligned with the British and to survey and explore the area. Calhoun recommended Schoolcraft as the expedition's geologist. For four months Schoolcraft travelled with the expedition exploring central Minnesota and coming within a few miles of the source of the Mississippi before being thwarted by low waters, then heading east to trace the shores of Lake Superior and Huron back to Chicago. ( A few years later Schoolcraft would return to discover the Mississippi's headwater which he would name Lake Itasca.)

In 1822 the glassmaker, turned explorer secured a position as Indian Agent at Sault Ste. Marie. The same year he married Jane Johnston daughter of a Scots-Irish fur trader and his Ojibwa wife. She was largely responsible for setting him on a path of studying Native American culture, its legends and myths that would occupy his attention the rest of his life. Articulate and cultured, she taught him the Ojibwa language and explained to him many Ojibwa legends and stories. Together they wrote The Literary Voyager, the first magazine produced in Michigan. She, herself, wrote poetry in both English and Ojibwa. Together they had four children.

Though Schoolcraft became a devoted recorder of Native American culture, he came to believe the only way to save Native Americans was through assimilation, giving them the tools to become “Americanized” As an agent of the U.S. Government he helped negotiate the 1836 Treaty of Washington through which the Ojibwa ceded 13 million acres of land in exchange for an annuity, training in agriculture and related crafts to transition them to an agricultural life.

In 1839 Schoolcraft began to publish his Native American studies under the title Algic Researches. After the Democrats lost power in 1841, Schoolcraft lost his position as Superintendent of Indian Affairs for the Northern Department and he returned with his family to New York, where he took up the study of the Iroquois League. In 1842  Jane Johnston Schoolcraft died.

Four years later Congress commissioned Schoolcraft to write an encyclopedic reference work on American Indians. While in Washington, the next year he met and married Mary Howard from Beauford, South Carolina, a widow from a wealthy slave-owning plantation family. Her strength, aristocratic bearing and Cultured manner must have appealed to him for in other respects she was an unlikely partner. The future Mrs. Schoolcraft was a staunch defender of slavery who condemned miscegenation! Such beliefs quickly alienated Henry's two surviving children and it is difficult to see how the marriage would have survived if fate had not intervened. The following year Henry Schoolcraft suffered a debilitating stroke. Mary Howard Schoolcraft became his devoted nurse and caregiver, and despite her views of the racial inferiority of non-white races she worked closely with him as his secretary and transcriber, allowing him to eventually finish his massive work.²

1To this day, southern Missouri remains the center of lead mining in the United States.

2In 1860 she gave full vent to her racist opinons, joining the ranks of a dozen or more “Anti-Tom” authors from the south who sought to “correct” the picture of slavery presented in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. The book was a “best seller,” though no where nearly as popular as Beecher Stowe's book. Mary claimed her husband fully supported and encouraged her, though it is difficult to imagine how the severely disabled and dependent Henry Schoolcraft would or could have objected.

 

 Marker  of  the Week -- A Man's Home is his Castle

Andrew Jackson Downing was one of America's first self-appointed arbiters of good taste. In the 1840's he railed against Americans building Gothic palaces or castles out of anything but stone. "If a man is ambitious of attracting attention by his house and can only afford wood let him...build a gigantic wigwam of logs and bark...but not attempt mock battlements of pine boards and strong towers of thin plank." (quoted in The Hudson, by Carl Carmer, p.177)  John L. Schoolcraft (Henry's Uncle) was unimpressed.

                       Western Ave (Rte. 20)  Guilderland