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Henry Rowe Schoolcraft Henry Rowe Schoolcraft (1793–1864) was an American ethnologist, born near Albany, N.Y. He gave enormous impetus to the study of American Indian culture and may be regarded as the foremost pioneer in American Indian studies. As a young man, Schoolcraft abandoned his family's glassmaking business and made a journey down the Ohio River to Missouri. There in 1818–19 he made valuable geographical, geological, and mineralogical surveys. As geologist on the expedition of Gen. Lewis Cass, Schoolcraft made topographical surveys of the country of present Northern Michigan and the upper Great Lakes. The expedition reached Cass Lake, which they incorrectly supposed to be the source of the Mississippi River. This voyage was described in A Narrative Journal of Travels...from Detroit through the Great Chain of American Lakes to the Sources of the Mississippi River (1821). In 1822, he was appointed Indian agent, with headquarters at Sault Ste. Marie, where he began ethnological researches. Having married the half-Ojibwa daughter of a fur trader, Schoolcraft learned the Ojibwa language and a great deal of Ojibwa lore. He made another journey to the Mississippi in 1832, this time correctly determining Lake Itasca as the river's source. When the Whigs came to power in 1841, Schoolcraft lost his Indian agency and moved to the East, where he wrote voluminously on Indians(1851–57).
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