"The Narrative Journal Of Travels From Detroit Northwest by Henry R. Schoolcraft was published in 1821. Schoolcraft accompanied the Cass expedition of 1820 which explored the southern shore of Lake Superior and water communications to the Mississippi River. Information supplied by Schoolcraft's journal hastened the flow of settlers into this region. His journal showed that the United States government could establish order among the Indians and that the land could support a considerable population"--Foreward.
Henry Rowe Schoolcraft (1793-1864) was an explorer, Indian agent, and early ethnologist of Native American culture who joined an expedition organized by Governor Cass of Michigan in 1819. Its purpose was to locate the Mississippi River's sources, to explore the Great Lakes region, and to describe its significant topographical features, natural history, and mineral wealth. Schoolcraft joined the expedition as a mineralogist, and this is the journal of his participation. He describes his preliminary journey from New York to Detroit, where the expedition embarks for Michilimackinac and presses on to Sault de Ste. Marie and Fond du Lac. Eventually the explorers locate Lake Itasca in Minnesota, where the Mississippi originates. Schoolcraft also highlights St. Peter's, Prairie du Chien, the lead mines at Dubuque, and Green Bay, and devotes a whole chapter to the Ontagenon River and its nearby copper mines. His journal blends narrative with historical, ethnographic and statistical information.
Start a journey through the early American frontier with 'Personal Memoirs of a Residence of Thirty Years with the Indian Tribes on the American Frontiers'. Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, a pioneer settler in Michigan, shares his firsthand experiences as a chief Indian agent responsible for tribal relations in the region. From the upper reaches of the Mississippi Valley to the remote corners of Missouri and Indiana, Schoolcraft's diary illuminates the complex interactions between early Americans and Native tribes. Delve into the cultural exchanges, challenges, and rapid settlement that shaped the Great Lakes region, while encountering the introduction of steamships and the influx of missionaries, settlers, and curious travelers. This intriguing memoir offers a unique perspective on a transformative era in American history.
First published in 1961, Early Midwestern Travel Narratives records and describes first-person records of journeys in the frontier and early settlement periods which survive in both manuscript and print. Geographically, it deals with the states once part of the Old Northwest Territory-Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota-and with Missouri, Iowa, Kansas, and Nebraska. Robert Hubach arranged the narratives in chronological order and makes the distinction among diaries (private records, with contemporaneously dated entries), journals (non-private records with contemporaneously dated entries), and "accounts," which are of more literary, descriptive nature. Early Midwestern Travel Narratives remains to this day a unique comprehensive work that fills a long existing need for a bibliography, summary, and interpretation of these early Midwestern travel narratives.
This is an account by Henry Rowe Schoolcraft (1793-1864) of his discovery of the Mississippi River's source, Lake Itasca, in 1832. Schoolcraft was an Indian agent for the region, and he assembled an expeditionary party of thirty, including Ozawindib (an Ojibway guide and interpreter), an army officer, a surgeon, a geologist, and interpreter, and a missionary. They set out with instructions from Secretary of War Lewis Cass to effect a permanent peace among the region's Native Americans, persuade them to be vaccinated against smallpox, acquire demographic and scientific information, and establish definitively the origin of the Mississippi. Expedition Through the Upper Mississippi contains anecdotes and observations about the beliefs, customs, and history of the Chippewa [Ojibway] as well as the Sioux [Dakota], the Fox [Mesquakie], the Sauk, the Menominee, the Mandans, and various other Native American groups. The narrative proceeds chronologically along the route the expedition followed, with detailed descriptions of geographical features. This volume also includes a short account of a trip along the St. Croix and Burntwood (Brule) River, and has an appendix containing statistical and linguistic data, a list of shells collected by Schoolcraft in the West and Northwestern territories, official reports, a speech by six Chippewa chiefs about the war delivered at Michilimackinac in July 1833, and a discussion of the Upper Mississippi's lead mining country.
