HENRY R. SCHOOLCRAFT. 



309 



Providence, in 1835, notifies him of his election as an honorary 

 member of the Rhode Island Historical Society, and asks 

 about aboriginal inscriptions on rocks. The Massachusetts 

 Historical Society, in 1836, asks him to proceed with his 

 work on the Ojibway language, complete it, and let the society 

 publish it. John J. Audubon asks for aid in preparing his 

 work on American quadrupeds. There are numerous notices 

 of specimens that have been sent to Mr. Schoolcraft to pass 

 upon, and solicitations from persons representing the prin- 

 cipal magazines, to contribute of the results of his researches. 



A new disposition of official posts having been made, Mr. 

 Schoolcraft transferred his residence in 1837 to Michilimack- 

 inac or Mackinaw. Thence he removed, in 1841, to New 

 York, where he expected to find the surroundings more fa- 

 vourable to the collation and publication of the results of his 

 observations on the red race, whom he " had found in many 

 traits a subject of deep interest ; in some things wholly mis- 

 understood and misrepresented ; and altogether an object of 

 the highest humanitarian interest." But the publishers were 

 not yet prepared in their views to undertake anything corre- 

 sponding 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 re- 

 turn he made a tour through western Virginia, Ohio, and 

 Canada. In 1845 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 pub- 

 lished 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 vol- 

 umes is described in Duyckink's Cyclopaedia 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, man- 

 ners, and customs ; their physiological and ethnological pecul- 

 iarities as individuals and nations ; their intellectual and moral 



