Henry Schoolcraft

Henry Schoolcraft

Henry Rowe Schoolcraft (March 28, 1793 – December 10, 1864) was an American geographer, geologist, and ethnologist, noted for his early studies of Native American cultures, as well as for his 1832 expedition to the source of the Mississippi River. He married Jane Johnston, whose parents were Ojibwe and Scots-Irish. Her knowledge of the Ojibwe language and of Ojibwe legends, which she shared with Schoolcraft, formed in part the source material for Longfellow's epic poem, The Song of Hiawatha.

Schoolcraft's second wife Mary Howard was from the planter elite in South Carolina. In response to the abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe's bestselling Uncle Tom's Cabin, Mary Howard Schoolcraft wrote and published The Black Gauntlet: A Tale of Plantation Life in South Carolina (1860), one of many anti-Tom novels in the years before the American Civil War. Hers was a bestseller.