Henry Schoolcraft

Henry Rowe Schoolcraft (March 28, 1793 – December 10, 1864) was an American geographer, geologist, and ethnologist, noted for his early studies of Native American cultures, as well as for his 1832 expedition to the source of the Mississippi River. He is also noted for his major six-volume study of Native Americans commissioned by Congress and published in the 1850s.

He served as United States Indian agent in Michigan for a period beginning in 1822. During this period, he named several newly organized counties, often creating neologisms that he claimed were derived from indigenous languages.

There he married Jane Johnston, born of a prominent Scotch-Irish fur trader and the daughter of Ojibwa war chief, Waubojeeg.

Jane taught Schoolcraft the Ojibwe language and much about her maternal culture. They had several children, two of whom survived past childhood. She is now recognized as the first Native American literary writer in the United States.

Schoolcraft continued to study Native American tribes and publish works about them. In 1833, he was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society.

By 1846 Jane had died. That year Schoolcraft was commissioned by Congress for a major study, known as ''Indian Tribes of the United States''. It was published in six volumes from 1851 to 1857.

He married again in 1847, to Mary Howard, from a slaveholding family in South Carolina. In 1860 she published the bestselling ''The Black Gauntlet'', an anti-''Uncle Tom's Cabin'' novel. Provided by Wikipedia