Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 37.djvu/131

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SKETCH OF HENRY R. SCHOOLCRAFT.
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interest; in some things wholly misunderstood and misrepresented; and altogether an object of the highest humanitarian interest." But the publishers were not yet prepared in their views to undertake anything corresponding to his ideas. In the next year he carried out a long-deferred purpose of visiting England and continental Europe, attending the British Association at Manchester. On his return he made a tour through western Virginia, Ohio, and Canada. In 1875 he was appointed by the Legislature of New York as a commissioner to take the census of the Indians of the State, and collect information concerning the Six Nations. The results of this investigation were embodied in his Notes on the Iroquois, a second enlarged edition of which was published in 1847. The latter part of his life was spent in the preparation—under an act passed by Congress in 1847—of an elaborate work on all the Indian tribes of the country, based upon information obtained through the reports of the Indian Bureau. This work—which was published in six quarto volumes—is described in Duyckink's Cyclopædia of American Literature as covering a wide range of subjects in the general history of the race; their traditions and associations with the whites; their special antiquities in the several departments of archaeology in relation to the arts; their government, manners, and customs; their physiological and ethnological peculiarities as individuals and nations; their intellectual and moral cultivation; their statistics of population; and their geographical position, past and present.

Mr. Schoolcraft became interested in religion at an early period in his career, and his journals show him ever more earnestly co-operating in local religious movements; furthering the progress of missionary effort among the Indians, by whatever denomination; laboring for the promotion of temperance among them; and taking the lead in whatever might contribute to their well-being or to the repression of wrong against them. His literary activity was prolific, and appears to have.been nearly evenly divided between poetry, Indian lore and ethnology, and the objects of his explorations and scientific investigation. Besides books of poems and the narratives already named, he published Algic Researches, a collection of Indian allegories and legends (1839); Oneota, or the Characteristics of the Red Race in America (1844-'45), republished in 1848 as The Indian and his Wigwam; Report on Aboriginal Names and the Geographical Terminology of New York (1845); Plan for investigating American Ethnology (1846); The Red Race of America (1847); A Bibliography of the Indian Tongues of the United States (1849); and American Indians, their History, Condition, and Prospects (1850). He received the degree of LL. D. from the University of Geneva in 1846; and was a member of many learned societies