SKETCH OF HENRY R. SCHOOLCRAFT. 121 



interest ; in some things wholly misunderstood and misrepresent- 

 ed ; and altogether an object of the highest humanitarian inter- 

 est." 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 Man- 

 chester. On his return he made a tour through western Vir- 

 ginia, Ohio, and Canada. In 1875 he was appointed by the Legis- 

 lature 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 de- 

 scribed in Duyckink's Cyclopaedia of American Literature as cov- 

 ering 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 phys- 

 iological and ethnological peculiarities as individuals and na- 

 tions ; 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 pe- 

 riod in his career, and his journals show him ever more earnestly 

 co-operating in local religious movements ; furthering the prog- 

 ress of missionary effort among the Indians, by whatever de- 

 nomination ; 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. Be- 

 sides books of poems and the narratives already named, he pub- 

 lished 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 Ameri- 

 can Ethnology (1846) ; The Red Race of America (1847) ; A Bib- 

 liography 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. 



