Schoolcraft, Henry Rowe

Schoolcraft, Henry Rowe

(1793–1864) explorer, ethnologist; born in Albany County, N.Y. At Union and Middlebury Colleges, he concentrated on geology and minerology, then set off to explore Missouri (1817–18) and the Northwest (with Lewis Cass) (1820); his particular goal was to discover the source of the Mississippi, and in 1832 he discovered and named the source, Lake Itasca, in Minnesota. His extensive relations with Native Americans—he married an Ojibwa woman—led to his appointment as Indian agent for the tribes around lake Superior (1822) and later as superintendent of Indian affairs for Michigan (1836–41). Among his many pioneer works on Indian ethnology is the Historical and Statistical Information Respecting the… Indian Tribes of the United States (6 vols. 1851–57).

The Cambridge Dictionary of American Biography, by John S. Bowman. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995. Reproduced with permission.