Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, who spent decades as an Indian agent and explorer around the Great Lakes and the Mississippi valley, gathers his notes on Native American peoples: their family life and customs, tales of the wigwam, early biographies of chiefs and Native women, and a gazetteer of tribes and settlements. His language and judgments are those of an 1850s official, and should be read as such.
A source on what white Americans knew and believed about Native peoples in the mid-nineteenth century, by the collector behind Longfellow’s Hiawatha. Download the free EPUB.