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 Posted: Sun 28 Dec 2008 06:35 Post subject: Mixed-race identity in a nineteenth-century family |
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| Quote: | Michigan Historical Review > Spring, 1999
Mixed-race identity in a nineteenth-century family: the Schoolcrafts of Sault Ste. Marie, 1824-27
Jeremy Mumford
In the autumn of 1824 the Schoolcraft family set out from Sault Ste. Marie, at the mouth of Lake Superior in northern Michigan Territory, to visit New York City. For Jane, who had seldom left the remote village where she was born, this was her first visit. It was the first time Henry had returned to his home state since his appointment as federal Indian Agent in Sault Ste. Marie in 1822 and his marriage a year later. And everything was new, of course, for their son Willy who was only four months old. (1)
The Schoolcrafts were apprehensive about the reception they would meet in the metropolis. Jane was the daughter of Oshauguscodaywayqua, a Chippewa woman from an influential lakeshore family, and John Johnston, an Irish gentleman and fur trader. In the language of her time, both Jane and her child were half-breeds. (2) To her relief, Jane and Willy received only friendly attention on this visit. When Henry left to do some business in Washington, some friends, Mr. and Mrs. Conant, invited Jane to leave her lodging house and stay with them. She wrote to Henry of repeated visits, interesting conversation, and "marked kindness" from many acquaintances. (3) The strongest impression the Schoolcrafts took away from their visit was of kindly interest in Jane and Willy, who were received as "another Pocahontas" and her "bright American boy." (4)
In making a family excursion to the great eastern city, the Schoolcrafts signaled ambitions within a wider arena beyond their village. One purpose of the visit was to discuss a book of Indian oratory on which Henry intended to collaborate with Samuel Conant and in which Jane may have been involved. The other was to improve Henry's political contacts in Washington. Henry was ambitious for both literary and political fame, as well as for the prospects of his first child, William Henry Schoolcraft, the bright American boy.
For both parents, their sojourn in the East prompted reflection on their responsibilities and their future. Sick in bed, Jane wrote from New York to Henry in Washington that she was unused to being separated from him and missed him. He wrote to her of his prayer that their "sweet, interesting little boy [would] be permitted to grow up to man's estate, and that his mother may be spared to nurture him up." He mused: "What an interesting chain of thought is connected with the idea of a home, and a wife, and a child." (5)
Inevitably, this chain of thought had to take account of the meaning of Jane's and Willy's mixed race. The Schoolcrafts were starting their family in the shadow of a very different model of family-building: what was called in the upper Great Lakes la facon du pays or "the custom of the country." Traditionally, white men lived with and had children by Indian or mixed-blood women, only to leave their families behind when they returned east, entrusting them to other men's protection or abandoning them altogether. Jane's parents were unusual in the permanence of their relationship, but even they did not formalize their marriage until she was twenty. (6) In visiting the East together as a family, Jane and Henry (who were properly married by a visiting clergyman) broke the custom of the country and expressed their determination to start a family that was just as legitimate in New York as it was in Sault Ste. Marie. (7)
They were opposing not only the custom of the country but also the direction of educated opinion. Jane's and her children's mixed ethnicity, while not uncommon, was a subject of increasing distrust. When Jane was three years old, President Jefferson predicted that white and Indian people would "blend together, ... intermix, and become one people." But during her lifetime Americans moved toward a harsher theory of racial boundaries. By the 1840s some scientists argued that a mixed-race person was a "hybrid" of biologically separate species, "a degenerate, unnatural offspring, doomed by nature to work out its own destruction." (8) During the years of Henry's and Jane's marriage, mixed-race families became ever more suspect. (9)
To build a secure foundation for their family, the Schoolcrafts used whatever resources they could find. They looked hopefully to Jane's Chippewa connections, which promised substantial support. Her dowry of 2,000 pounds (about $10,000) came from her parents' business in Chippewa furs. (10) She and Henry stood to enlarge it through gifts of land made by the tribe to Jane and Willy as mixed-blood Chippewa. Jane also contributed to her family's fortunes in another way: by teaching Henry about Chippewa culture and folktales, she laid the foundation for Henry's later fame as an writer about Indians.
This essay will trace two attempts the Schoolcrafts made, in the first years of their marriage, to turn Jane's Chippewa inheritance into a family asset. These attempts were quite different, one in the realm of literature, the other in real estate. In each case, however, the nature of the inheritance made its use problematic. For Jane, her connection to the Chippewa culture she recorded undermined her position as a genteel woman of letters. For Willy, his connection to the Chippewa lands he stood to receive undermined his future as a citizen and a man of property. For the Schoolcrafts, mother and son, Indian legacies had apparent advantages but hidden liabilities. To follow them is to begin to unravel the question of race, and of mixed-race identity, in one American family.
In their correspondence during Henry's periodic travels as an Indian agent, Jane and Henry often expressed themselves in poetry. "My dearest friend," Jane wrote Henry,
Say do thy thoughts e'er turn on me? As mine do constantly to thee? And
when at eve in deserts wild Do'st thou think on our lovely child? (11)
Henry replied that he did, and urged her to govern their child
Not like Juno, or like Jove But by tender winning Love.
He expressed confidence in her childrearing and enumerated those qualities he believed equipped her for the task: "That delicacy of sentiment, modest deportment, equanimity of temper, benevolence of disposition, engaging simplicity, correct taste, and good understanding which did so much to captivate the father, will certainly suggest the best mode of directing the son." (12) This exchange of letters made reference to a style of womanhood which both Henry and Jane valued. It encompassed several elements: the impulses of uncorrupted nature; the discernment that came from the polish of culture; the dedication of these gifts to the service of her family; and their expression through the idioms of polite literature. (13)
Everyone who met Jane was struck by her refinement. Her childhood home, the Johnston household in Sault Ste. Marie, had a reputation among travelers as an outpost of civilization in the wilderness. Henry's first impression of his future in-laws, whom he met while on a government exploring expedition in 1820, was of the "blandishments of refined society," which he noted in his published report. (14) A succession of other travelers described the Johnston siblings as "polite, ... well-educated and accomplished," "highly accomplished," and "most accomplished & certainly of interesting manners." (15) Thomas McKenney, Henry's superior in the Indian Office, wrote in 1826 that the conversation at Mr. Johnston's table "would have done honour to those clubs of which Addison and Steele ... formed part," and that Jane was fit to "take a first rank among the best improved, whether in acquirements, in taste, or in the graces." (16)
Such visitors typically equated Jane's refinement with education. Several of them wrote that she had been educated in Europe. In fact, she had only visited England and Ireland briefly as a young girl, but her father had taken great pains with her education at home. "Under his delicate and well timed commendations and criticisms," wrote Henry, "she not only acquired more than the ordinary proficiency in some of the branches of an English education but also a correct judgment and taste in literary merit." (17) Henry and Jane courted by exchanging volumes of Oliver Goldsmith's poetry. (18) For Henry, Jane's education was a triumph of culture over geography. Praising her poetry, he wrote: "When ... we add the limited opportunities of her early life, and the scenes of seclusion [in] which so much of her time had been passed, we think there is still greater cause to appreciate and admire." (19)
Yet there was another way to assess the opportunities of Jane's background; refinement had its springs in nature as well as in culture. Henry also wrote that "there is a naivete in her productions which is often the concomitant of taste and genius." (20) And Samuel Conant, Henry's New York collaborator on the book of Indian oratory, noted with regard to Jane that "nature herself, not less than the culture of skillful hands, has much to do with the refinement and polish of the mind." (21)
Anna Jameson, an English author who later met the Schoolcrafts while touring the West, saw in Jane not polished refinement but natural--or Indian--domesticity. She noted Jane's "native taste for literature," but suggested a different literary tradition from that of Oliver Goldsmith in her description of Jane "bending over her sleeping children, waving off the mosquitoes, singing all the time a low, melancholy Indian song." (22) While other travel writers had ignored Jane's mother Oshauguscodaywayqua, who spoke little English, Jameson was drawn to this "genuine Indian squaw." Jameson wrote: "Simply, yet with something of motherly dignity," she "did the honors of her house with unembarrassed, unaffected propriety." (23) Jameson, like others, saw in Jane the same qualities for which Henry praised her in his letter of 1825: simplicity, modesty, delicacy, taste. But while other writers saw these traits as European acquirements, Jameson depicted them as virtues characteristic of Jane's Chippewa heritage.
The same question--that of the relationship between Jane's genteel virtues and her Chippewa background--was aired in the pages of "The Literary Voyager," a family magazine that Henry and Jane created in the winter of 1826-7. They did not publish the magazine but circulated it in manuscript among their friends. As its title suggested, it was the literary equivalent of the fur-trade voyageurs who carried European goods into Indian country and Indian wealth out of it. It was both a vehicle for literary culture in the wilderness and a forum for studies in language and culture. It laid the groundwork for Henry's later success as an ethnographic writer. (24)
Henry wrote the bulk of the magazine, but Jane contributed a number of pieces under two names, "Rosa" and "Leelinau." More than mere pen-names, they were personae, each representing a different version of Indian identity. "Rosa" was the Indian self as described by Anna Jameson: dignified, domestic, sentimental, and virtuous. One article, over the signature "R. A Native," described the etiquette of Indian feasts and noted that "there is a politeness existing in every human breast, and that an Indian feels it ... as well as the most refined and civilized among the whites." (25) Rosa associated herself, as "A Native," with Nature and the natural. In the first issue of the "Literary Voyager," she included a poem "By an Ojibwa Female Pen," inviting her sisters to enjoy the fresh air after a rainshower and comparing it to a divine "breeze of hope" opening "through sorrow's clouds." (26) A later contribution, entitled "Lines to a Friend Asleep," invited her hearer outdoors in the morning when
Nature is clad in best array, The woods, the fields, the flowers are gay.
As in the earlier poem, she concluded with an invitation
With joyful hearts, and pious lays, To join the glorious Maker's praise....
(27)
Rosa's poems combined a European idiom with an assertion of Indianness; her posture of invitation suggested that as part Indian she had a special or proprietary relationship to Nature and to Nature's God.
If "Rosa" was one statement of Jane's sense of her own Indianness, another was "Leelinau." Jane used this persona to communicate not the universal sentiments of natural religion but rather the exotic culture and folktales of the Chippewa people. In the first issue of the magazine, when Henry introduced both personae, he contrasted Rosa's "chasteness" and "pleasing versification" with Leelinau's more serious "investigation of Indian history and traditions." (28) He later noted that Leelinau's contributions derived "additional interest" from "the position she occupie[d] between the European and aboriginal races." (29)
One of Leelinau's contributions was "Moowis," a Chippewa folktale which stood out sharply from the magazine's largely sentimental fare. It told the story of a Chippewa "beau" who visited a "belle" in her bed at night and was rebuffed. Humiliated, the beau refused to accompany the other villagers when they moved camp at the onset of winter. Alone on the dirty and abandoned village site, he constructed a magical figure of trash and human feces.
[He] gathered all the bits of clothing, and ornaments of beads and other
things, that had been left. He then made a coat and leggins of the same,
nicely trimmed with the beads, and the suit was fine and complete.... He
then collected the dirt of the village, and filled the garments he had
made, so as to appear as a man, and put the bow and arrows in its hands,
and it came to life.
The figure followed the beau to the villagers' new camp. The villagers were drawn to the figure, although when it came close to the fire they smelt it and said "some one has trod on, and brought in dirt." But the belle fell in love with the figure. She brought it home with her that night.
In the morning the figure told the belle, "I must go away." She followed behind. But the figure walked so fast that she could only see its footprints in the snow.
When the sun rose high, she found one of his mittens and picked it up, but
to her astonishment, found it full of dirt. She, however took it and wiped
it, and going on further, she found the other mitten in the same condition.
She thought, "fie!! why does he do so," thinking he dirtied in them. She
kept finding different articles of his dress, on the way all day, in the
same condition.
By evening, she had collected all the dirty clothes, and the day's sunshine had softened the snow both ahead and behind her. "She began to cry, not knowing where to go, as their track was lost, on account of the snow's melting. She kept crying Moowis has led me astray...." Alone in the winter wilderness, the belle was left to die. (30)
This story of sexual revenge and a homunculus of human "dirt" was strikingly different from the poetry of Rosa. One appeal was conventional, the other exotic; the one suggested a common ground between white and Indian culture which the other denied. Rosa's "Nature" is benevolent, but Nature in "Moowis" is Winter, killing anyone who leaves the group, and its supernatural force is a dark magic that betrays the belle into filth and death. The genre of the folktale and the persona of Leelinau gave Jane license to address topics she might have thought too coarse or shocking to write about in her own voice.
The context for this tale was Henry's ethnographic research. As Indian Agent, Henry considered himself as much a scholar as an administrator. While other ethnologists studied ancient ruins and the skulls of different races, Henry's particular interest was linguistic and cultural. He was fascinated by the "oral fictitious lore" to be found "in the circle of Chippewa wigwams." Henry was to make his reputation by collecting and publishing folktales such as "Moowis." (31)
In Henry's ethnographic career, Jane played a crucial role. She could translate from Chippewa, a language Henry never mastered. She also gave him entree into the circle of Chippewa wigwams. The folktales represented to Henry the Indians' realm of "feelings and affections." (32) As a recently arrived government functionary, he could have but little access to that intimate realm. But by marrying Jane he entered "the only family in northwest America who could, in Indian lore, have acted as my `guide, philosopher, and friend.'" (33) Henry did much of his research inside the Johnston house, a comfortable substitute for actual wigwams. But during a trip along the south shore of Lake Superior in 1824, he found that his connection to Jane's mother and her family won him "a degree of confidence and cordiality by the Indians, which [he] had not expected." (34)
In "Moowis," as in the "Nature" poems, Jane claimed authority by virtue of her Indian background. Where Rosa served as Indian guide to the beauties of Nature, Leelinau was a guide into the wigwams. But the nature of the authority was very different. First, as a native informant, Jane had authority without authorship. There was undoubtedly a creative aspect to her work, and the "Literary Voyager" gave her pseudonymous credit for "Moowis" just as for the poems. But Henry did not credit her when he published her folktales in book form. (35) Ultimately, Jane was just one link in a chain of transmission from the anonymous Chippewa wigwams to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who later reworked material from Henry's books into The Song of Hiawatha. (36)
There was another difference between the claims Jane made as Rosa and as Leelinau. In switching from one persona to the other, Jane surrendered her claim to a Christian moral authority. The values of the Nature poems were accessible to white readers; those of "Moowis" were not. As transmitter of "Moowis"--as a "half-breed" able to understand the story's language and logic, as someone to whom such a tale was not alien, but familiar-Jane became a disturbingly foreign figure. She left behind both the gentility of Jane Johnston and the chasteness of Rosa.
During the months when Jane was experimenting with her part-Indian identity in the "Literary Voyager," she and her infant son were in expectation of a tangible benefit from the Indian side of her family. In August 1826 Henry had traveled to the far end of Lake Superior to help negotiate the treaty of Fond du Lac. Congress wanted to define the Chippewa-Sioux boundary and to obtain the right to mine copper on Chippewa land; the Chippewa, their national lands still largely intact, agreed in exchange for government annuities. They also decided to award allotments of tribal land to "half-breeds ... in consideration of the affection they bear to these persons, and of the interest which they feel in their welfare." Land grants to individuals were common in contemporary Indian treaties, owing both to the interested motives of negotiators and to a need to provide for relatives of a tribe who were no longer part of it. The treaty of Fond du Lac included a list of some forty-five Chippewa women married to white men, each of whom was to receive land for herself and her children. Jane's mother, Oshauguscodaywayqua headed the list and was the only one to receive a further allotment for each grandchild. Her family's lands--which included 640 acres each for Jane and her son Willy--were to be on Sugar Island, a prime location for the production of maple sugar. (37)
Henry Schoolcraft, as Indian Agent for Lake Superior, helped negotiate the treaty which was to enrich his wife and son. By including them under the name of Oshauguscodaywayqua (a name probably unfamiliar in Washington, D.C.) he masked his conflict of interest. But even though his subterfuge was not exposed, the Senate struck down the "half-breed" land grants while ratifying the rest of the treaty. (38)
In the eyes of the Schoolcrafts, the intended grants to Jane and her child appeared not as corrupt profiteering but as a legitimate inheritance. Henry always emphasized his family's "diverse sources of pride of ancestry," which included Oshauguscodaywayqua's father Waubojeeg, a Chippewa leader whom Henry called "the ruling chief of the region, ... another Powhatan." (39) (Jane, more modestly, called him "a chief of fame," raised by his own talents to a "simple forest throne." (40)) Given this distinguished background, the generous land grant must have seemed only fair, a kind of royal inheritance.
The Sugar Island estate, furthermore, was well chosen. As the fur trade was rapidly stripping the beaver from the Chippewa lands, the region's economic future would lie with renewable resources such as maple sugar. (41) Henry Schoolcraft had no patrimony of his own to leave his son and would not get rich on government pay. He and Jane hoped to see their son well launched in the world on the varied gifts of his mixed background: a precocious intelligence, a "face of the purest Caucasian whiteness" (42) from his three white grandparents, and 640 acres of sugar maples from Oshauguscodaywayqua.
One of Willy's assets, however, his full citizenship under the government which his father served, was open to challenge. In the year before the treaty, Henry was involved in a political controversy over whether mixed-race men had the right to vote. In the 1825 election for Michigan's territorial delegate to Congress, most of the votes from Sault Ste. Marie village went to one candidate, a land office clerk named John Biddle who was a political ally of Henry Schoolcraft. Biddle beat the other two candidates in the election, defeating his nearest rival, Austin Wing, by just seven votes. Wing's allies protested, claiming that the votes from Sault Ste. Marie should not have been counted since some of the voters were part Indian. By law the Michigan franchise was reserved for white men. (43)
A two-man Board of Canvassers met to examine the question. They received affidavits from Sault Ste. Marie regarding the mixed-race voters. Wing's supporters claimed that these voters were "assimilated entirely to Indians of the full blood, and [had] no habits in common with the white population," living by hunting and fishing instead of farming. (44) Schoolcraft indignantly replied that "persons of mixed blood, usually called half-breeds" were "assimilated in their manners and customs to the most favored class of citizens," resembling white Americans in their clothing, religion, language, and employment. (45)
The two board members found themselves unable to agree on whether people of mixed blood could ever have the right to vote. One argued that "no one, having any Indian blood in his veins, can be entitled to vote.... Education does not alter the cast, nor any mixture of blood constitute of a part Indian, a `free, white citizen.'" The other member disagreed. He described a hypothetical mixed-blood man who lived with and in the manner of white Americans and was "in a condition of estrangement from all nations and tribes of Indians" -- "should such a case occur," he concluded, that man might be allowed to vote. (46)
The controversy went to the House Committee on Elections, which took up the "very delicate and important" question of mixed-blood voting. The committee sided with the second member of the territorial Board of Canvassers, declaring that a mixed-blood man who was "assimilated to, and associated with, the great body of the civilized community" could vote. If he was associated with an Indian tribe, however, "it would be a prostitution of the character of an American citizen" to let that man vote. (47) Though the point of law was somewhat doubtful, it appeared that the infant William Henry Schoolcraft might grow into full political membership in his country. For Henry Schoolcraft, an ambitious federal official, it was vitally important that Willy's racial background not limit him to second-class citizenship. The decision of Congress, it seemed, would ensure him full citizenship.
Yet Henry's strategy of acquiring land for Willy at the treaty of Fond du Lac put the child's full citizenship in jeopardy. The half-breed land grants were designed precisely to tie mixed-blood and full-blood Chippewa more closely together, to prevent what the Michigan canvassers called "estrangement from all nations and tribes of Indian." (48) In justifying the grants, Henry argued that mixed-race Chippewa were the tribe's "best and most constant friends." (49) Thomas McKenney, the Superintendent of Indian Affairs who supervised the treaty, was more specific: the allotments would enable the half-breeds to "grow potatoes and other things, and be able to feed, in part, the Indians of the lake." (50)
Willy's land on Sugar Island was not intended for potatoes but for the more lucrative production of maple sugar. As such, it was an invitation into his Indian grandmother's family business. Oshauguscodaywayqua had been making sugar on a large scale for years. Henry visited her sugar camp in 1823 and observed that "the whole air of the place resembled that of a manufactory." (51) She made over a ton of sugar each spring, which was her main source of income after her husband's death. The maple sugar, often set in small baskets called mokkuks, was a characteristic Chippewa product. Oshauguscodaywayqua doted on her grandson; Henry and Jane wrote that she "never failed to address him in the native tongue ... [calling him] penaysee or little Bird." (52) She may have requested the clause in the Fond du Lac treaty which designated Jane's and Willy's allotments on Sugar Island precisely in order to have them nearby. The purpose of the land grant was not to estrange him from the Chippewa tribe but to tie him to it.
One of the land grant's provisions, in particular, might have undermined Willy's claims to full citizenship: the treaty forbade the recipients from selling their land except by permission of the president. (53) This provision had symbolic as well as practical significance. Private property was at the heart of how Americans understood both civilization and citizenship. Henry himself, in arguing that the half-breed voters of 1825 were white in the eyes of the law, wrote that they adopted "the maxims of civilized communities with regard to the rights of individuals and the acquirement and possession of property." (54) In seeking to endow Willy with Indian lands that he (like the Chippewa tribe) had the right to hold but not to sell, Henry and Oshauguscodaywayqua undermined the child's membership and citizenship in a "civilized" community.
For Willy the question proved moot. In March 1827, two months after the Senate rejected his ambiguous inheritance on Sugar Island, Willy suddenly became sick with croup and died. After building up so many dreams on "the interesting chain of thought ... connected with the idea of a home, and a wife, and a child," both parents became deeply depressed. They went on to have two more children: Jane Susan Anne Schoolcraft, called Janee, born in 1827, and John Johnston Schoolcraft, called Johnston, born in 1829. But the fresh hopes of the Schoolcrafts' early marriage did not return.
In 1830, while traveling to the session of the territorial legislature in Detroit, Henry had a religious conversion. He joined the Presbyterian church, gave up card playing, and began reading Calvin. Religion became a primary force in Henry's life, and he helped bring about a revival the following winter in the village of Sault Ste. Marie by paying for the establishment of a Presbyterian minister there. But Henry's new faith did not bring him closer to his family. In fact, he believed that William Henry's death was just retribution for the fact that he and Jane had loved the child too much and had committed the sin of "idolatry." He loved his younger children and hoped that his second son would grow up to be a minister. But Henry was in no danger of repeating his "idolization." (55)
Henry came to distrust the Indian part of Jane's background. Shortly after the beginning of his conversion--which took place, significantly, while they were apart--he wrote to her about the state of her soul. Her upbringing had been sadly deficient, he warned, since she had been "brought up in a remote place, without any thing which deserves the name of a regular education, ... without a mother, in many things, to direct, & with an overkind father, who saw every thing in the fairest light." (56) In Henry's new frame of reference, salvation demanded a strict training in Christian doctrine and practice. Sault Ste. Marie's remoteness from civilization impeded Christian education; and having a Chippewa mother, he seemed to say, was as bad as having no mother at all. In discounting any positive influence from Oshauguscodaywayqua, Henry surrendered one of the translation projects undertaken in their marriage. He no longer looked for genteel womanhood--for "delicacy of sentiment" and "correct taste"--in the joint heritage of Rosa and Leelinau.
The family moved to Mackinac in 1833 so that the children could attend a Presbyterian school; three years later they moved to Detroit when Henry was appointed Michigan's Superintendent of Indian Affairs. Jane was unhappy away from her village and family, and she found herself unwelcome in society. (57) A man who met the Schoolcrafts in Detroit, where they shared a boarding house with the governor, recalled that Jane "did not often appear at the table, though well-educated in England and a real lady in her manners. When she found herself cut by some of the white ladies when at Washington, she could never get over it, but rather retired from company." (58)
Jane's snubbing was part of a regional pattern. The daughters of Indian women and Anglo officials and traders grew up as the first ladies of the furtrade country. Jane had been that in Sault Ste. Marie, where so many visitors at her father's table had admired her grace and accomplishments. Her marriage to a rising government official might have assured her place in society had she stayed in Sault Ste. Marie: as late as 1831 there were only two married women there not of Indian descent. (59) But in the larger settlements, white ladies were beginning to arrive; for them, "half-breeds" were a lesser caste, unfit to be known or visited. Henry offered Jane little support in this trial. Anxious about the lack of Christian culture in Michigan, he had himself hoped for the arrival of "females of various European or American lineages, from educated and refined circles." (60)
Jane, furthermore, was not well. Her health had been poor for much of her life; even during their stay in New York in 1824 she had spent many days in bed. In Mackinac in 1835 she came down with whooping cough, for which she took the opium derivative laudanum. She remained a semi-invalid and dependent on the drug (then widely prescribed) to get through the day. She and Henry sent the children to boarding school in the East. The family suffered further blows. Henry, caught up in the western land boom of the mid-1830s, invested heavily in Detroit real estate and lost most of the family's savings when the market collapsed in 1837. Then as an outspoken Democrat he lost his position when a Whig administration took over in 1841. The next year, with the family scattered--Henry in England trying to publish a book, Jane visiting her sister in Ontario, the children in school in Albany--Jane suddenly died. She was only forty-two. (61)
Henry struggled to regain a government position in Indian Affairs. Attempting to trade on his children's Indian background, he wrote a sponsor: "I know no other means to get bread for my children, & you must recollect that they are of that race, who have peculiar claims on this branch of the government." (62) Eventually his efforts succeeded: he won an appropriation from Congress to conduct a large-scale statistical study of Indians in all parts of the United States which he published in six massive volumes from 1851 to 1857. Due to his own declining health, his lack of system, and the rapid publication schedule mandated by Congress, he produced a study that was too disorganized to be of much use to either scholars or administrators. It won him fame but little respect. (63)
Around the time Henry moved to Washington to begin his government study, he married a second wife, Mary Howard, a southern slaveowner. Her deep belief in slavery was informed by the new scientific theory of race that by midcentury had become the "American School of Ethnology." This held that races were separate species, essentially different and unfit to intermarry. Consequently, as she concluded, mixed-race unions were "sins against the laws of Nature," the children subject to "fixed laws of moral deterioration." (64) Mary's relations with her stepchildren were therefore strained. A crisis came when Mary's half-brother proposed to Janee and they married in 1855. Mary wrote: "My anguish was so great, that my high souled, morally elevated, & idolized brother was to be connected to that hateful Indian race, that it seemed, death to every ambition, every hope &c. I gave myself up to hopeless grief." (65)
Henry never accepted the theory that races were separate species, in part because his religious faith insisted on the shared descent of all people from Adam and Eve. He thus stood against the current of American race science. He continued to believe that mixed-race children might receive the best traits of both parents. (In 1820 he had praised the French Metis for combining "the natural taciturnity of the savage" with "the vivacity and suavity of the French character, producing manners which are sprightly without frivolity, and serious without becoming morose." (66)) But his opinion of the comparative value of European and Indian races became gradually more unbalanced. In 1839 he had written to Jane: "I am satisfied that I think more of my children than I should, were they simply of unmixed blood." But his greatest hopes, he explained, lay in "the Anglo-Saxon blood which they derive from their father: ... [without it,] the result is a want of foresight, and firmness--two traits that man cannot spare and excel in the sterner duties of human life." (67)
This essay began with Jane and Henry Schoolcraft's attempt to translate the cultural and material legacy she received from her Chippewa mother into a form their family could use. The deaths and vicissitudes that intervened give their attempt, in hindsight, a certain poignancy. The treaty provision which was to convey a landed estate from Oshauguscodaywayqua's tribe to Jane and to Willy fell through, and then the young boy died. And all the other wealth which had flowed from Jane's parents to the Schoolcraft family was incautiously invested and all lost. Like many other families, the Schoolcrafts had to pick up stakes and start again. Jane died poor and far from home.
Jane's cultural inheritance, her translations from the Chippewa language, were the most durable asset that she brought to her marriage. If Henry Schoolcraft is remembered for anything today, it is for having supplied Henry Wadsworth Longfellow with the stories that make up The Song of Hiawatha--many of them told to Henry by Jane and her mother.
But for all Jane's success as an ethnographic informant, she was not able to translate her Chippewa background into a form that she could use effectively in her own family and social life. As a "half-breed," she found herself unwelcome among genteel ladies. And her descent into sickness and addiction followed the suspicion Henry formed after Willy's death that Jane was not quite fit to be a mother. In a letter to their children communicating the news of her death, he reiterated an opinion he had expressed to her long before: she "had not the advantages of a mother, (in the refined sense of the term) to bring her up.' He allowed that she was, "so long as her health permitted, a most devoted mother." (68) But her inadequate upbringing cast her own capacity for motherhood in doubt.
In the same letter, Henry wrote of Jane: "Her taste in literature was chaste. She wrote many pretty pieces, which I have carefully preserved." (69) In choosing the adjectives "pretty" and "chaste," he may have been thinking of the poems she wrote in the persona of "Rosa" but probably not of the violent and scatological "Moowis." Yet it was her ethnographic translations such as "Moowis" which advanced his career and their family fortunes. The fact that she had raised Jane on stories such as "Moowis" partly explained why Oshauguscodaywayqua was not, in Henry's eyes, a mother in the refined sense of the term. So while Jane's project of translation succeeded on an ethnographic level, she failed to translate the "native politeness" which she claimed as "A Native" into a language acceptable to her genteel white contemporaries--or, in the end, to her husband. Like the acres on Sugar Island, this inheritance was never ratified.
I would like to thank Elizabeth Blackmar and my fellow students in her seminar at Columbia University, as well as John Mack Faragher, Martin Kenner, and David Sewell for their help in revising this essay.
(1) For Jane, see Marjorie Cahn Brazer, Harps upon the Willows: The Johnston Family of the Old Northwest (Ann Arbor, MI: Historical Society of Michigan, 1993); Tammy Stone-Gordon, "The Other Schoolcraft," Michigan History 78, no. 2 (1994): 26-29. For Henry, see Richard Bremer, Indian Agent and Wilderness Scholar: The Life of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft (Mount Pleasant, MI: Clarke Historical Library, 1987); Brian Dippie, Catlin and his Contemporaries: The Politics of Patronage (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1990).
(2) While the Schoolcrafts and their contemporaries sometimes used the names "Ojibwa" and "Metis," they more often said "Chippewa" and "half-breed." "Half-breed" was used (not necessarily with derogatory intent) for people with any combination of white and Indian ancestry.
(3) Jane to Henry, 12 and 22 Jan. 1825, sheet 813, 828, container 5, Henry Rowe Schoolcraft Papers (hereafter Schoolcraft Papers), Manuscripts Division [available on microfilm], Library of Congress.
(4) Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, The Literary Voyager or Muzzeniegun, ed. Philip Mason (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1962), 144-45 (no. 14, 28 Mar. 1827). Years later, Henry wrote that "to introduce a descendant of one of the native race into society ... was not an ordinary event," but that "persons of intellect and refinement concurred in the wisdom of [his] choice" to marry Jane. Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, Personal Memoirs of a Residence of Thirty Years with the Indian Tribes on the American Frontiers (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo and Co., 1851), 236.
(5) Henry to Jane, 13 Jan. 1825, sheet 817, container 5, Schoolcraft Papers.
(6) Brazer, Harps upon the Willows, 162.
(7) See Jennifer Brown, Strangers in Blood: Fur Trade Company Families in Indian Country (Vancouver: U.B.C. Press, 1980); Sylvia Van Kirk, "Many Tender Ties": Women in Fur. Trade Society in Western Canada, 1670-1870 (Winnipeg: Watson & Dwyer, 1980); John Mack Faragher, "The Custom of the Country: Cross-Cultural Marriage in the Far Western Fur Trade," in Western Women: Their Land, Their Lives, ed. Lillian Schlissel, Vicki Ruiz, and Janice Monk (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1988); Lucy Eldersveld Murphy, "To Live among Us: Accommodation, Gender, and Conflict in the Western Great Lakes Region, 1760-1832," in Contact Points: American Frontiers from the Mohawk Valley to the Mississippi, 1750-1830, ed. Andrew R. L. Cayton and Fredricka J. Teute (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). For a fascinating interpretation of Jane's mother's marriage as the result of a vision-quest see Jacqueline Peterson, "Women Dreaming: The Religiopsychology of Indian White Marriages and the Rise of a Metis Culture," in Western Women, 49-68.
(8) Thomas Jefferson and Josiah Nott, quoted in Robert Bieder, "Scientific Attitudes Toward Indian Mixed-Bloods in Early Nineteenth Century America," Journal of Ethnic Studies 8, no.2 (1980): 17-30, quotations on 19, 24.
(9) See William Stanton, The Leopard's Spots: Scientific Attitudes Toward Race in America, 1815-59 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960).
(10) Bremer, Indian Agent, 97.
(11) Jane to Henry, 4 July 1825, sheet 881, container 5, Schoolcraft Papers.
(12) Henry to Jane, 27 July 1825, sheet 889, container 5, Schoolcraft Papers.
(13) On the genteel worldview see Richard Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Vintage Books, 1992).
(14) Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, Narrative Journal of Travels Through the Northwestern Regions of the United States ... in the Year 1820 [1821], ed. Mentor Williams (East Lansing: Michigan State College Press, 1953), 95. On Jane's household as a regular stop for travelers see Patricia Jasen, Wild Things: Nature, Culture and Tourism in Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 86.
(15) Journals of James Doty and Charles Trowbridge, printed in Schoolcraft, Narrative Journal, 412, 468; Robert McElroy and Thomas Riggs, eds., The Unfortified Boundary: A Diary of the First Survey of the Canadian Boundary ... by Joseph Delafield [1822] (New York: privately printed, 1943), 370.
(16) Thomas McKenney, Sketches of a Tour to the Lakes, of the Character and Customs of the Chippeway Indians, and of Incidents Connected with the Treaty of Fond Du Lac (Baltimore: Fielding Lucas, 1827), 201, 185.
(17) Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, "Notes of a Memoir of Mrs. Henry Rowe Schoolcraft," ed. J. Sharpless Fox, Michigan Pioneer and Historical Collections 36 0908): 95-100, quotation on 96.
(18) Brazer, Harps upon the Willows, 157.
(19) Literary Voyager, 84, no. 7 (Feb. 1827).
(20) Ibid.
(21) Schoolcraft, Personal Memoirs, 236-37.
(22) Anna Jameson, Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada (London: Saunders and Otley, 1838), 2: 148, 214. Here and elsewhere I have not added an ellipsis when omitting the final words of a quotation.
(23) Ibid., 2: 224-25.
(24) See Vernon Kinietz, "Schoolcraft's Manuscript Magazines," Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 35 (1941): 151-54. Although the Schoolcrafts left "The Literary Voyager" in manuscript, it has been collected and published in a modern edition by Philip Mason, which is the version I cite in this article. (See note 4 above.)
(25) Literary Voyager, 48, no. 4 (12 Jan. 1827). The author is not identified but is probably Jane writing as Rosa, since no other name beginning with "R" appears in the magazine.
(26) Ibid., 8, no. 1 (Dec. 1826).
(27) Ibid., 71, no. 5 (Jan. 1827).
(28) Ibid., 5, no. 1 (Dec. 1826).
(29) Ibid., 38-39, no. 3 (Jan. 1827).
(30) Ibid., 56-57, no. 4 (12 Jan. 1827).
(31) Schoolcraft, Personal Memoirs, 196. See William M. Clements, "Schoolcraft as Textmaker," Journal of American Folklore 103 (1990): 177-92. For contemporary efforts in physical anthropology see Bernard Peters, "Indian-Grave Robbing at Sault Ste. Marie, 1826," Michigan Historical Review 23, no. 2 (Fall 1997): 49-80; Stanton, The Leopard's Spots, 24-44. For the study of ruins see Dippie, Catlin and His Contemporaries, 234.
(32) Schoolcraft, Personal Memoirs, 196.
(33) Ibid., 107-8 (journal entry, 28 July 1822).
(34) Ibid., 194 (journal entry, 30 May 1824).
(35) "Moowis, or the Man Made up of Rags and Dirt," in Henry R. Schoolcraft, Western Scenes and Reminiscences: Together with Thrilling Legends and Traditions of the Red Men of the Forest (Buffalo, NY: Derby, Orton & Mulligan, 1853), 164-67. In this later version both the sexual and the excremental aspects of the story were toned down.
(36) See Chase Osborn and Stellanova Osborn, Schoolcraft, Longfellow, Hiawatha (Lancaster, PA: Jacques Cattell, 1942); Helen Carr, "The Myth of Hiawatha," Literature and History 12 (1986): 58-78.
(37) "Treaty With the Chippewa, 1826," Article 4 in Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties, vol. 2, ed. Charles Kappler (Washington: GPO, 1904), 268-73.
(38) Quotation from ibid., Article 7. The ratification proceedings are in Senate Journal, 19th Cong., 2nd sess., 5 Jan. and 11 Jan. 1827, 307-9. Although they were never ratified, the half-breed land grants repeatedly appeared in the published text of the treaty: American State Papers: Indian Affairs, vol. 2 (Washington: Gales and Seaton, 1834), 677-78; U.S. Statutes at Large, vol. 7 (Washington, 1848), 290-95; Kappler, Indian Affairs, 272-73. See Bremer, Indian Agent, 74, and Robert Keller, "The Chippewa Treaties of 1826 and 1836," American Indian Journal 9, no. 3 (1986): 27-32.
(39) Schoolcraft, Personal Memoirs, 236; Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, Summary Narrative of an Exploratory Expedition to the Sources of the Mississippi River, in 1820 (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo & Co., 1855), 77n.
(40) Literary Voyager, 138-9, no. 13 (10 Mar. 1827).
(41) An Indian agent in 1843 estimated the annual value of Chippewa sugar above that of Chippewa furs. In season maple sugar made up as much as one-sixth of the local food supply. Robert Keller, "An Economic History of Indian Treaties in the Great Lakes Region," American Indian Journal 5, no. 1 (Feb. 1978): 2-20, statistics from 6, 11.
(42) "Notice of William Henry Schoolcraft," Literary Voyager, 144, no. 14 (28 Mar. 1827).
(43) See Wallace Genser, "`Habitants,' `Half-Breeds,' and Homeless Children: Transformations in Metis and Yankee-Yorker Relations in Early Michigan," Michigan Historical Review 24, no. 1 (1998): 23-48; William Dunbar, Michigan: A History of the Wolverine State (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1965), 276-80. On the history of part-Indian, mixed-race voting rights see Jeremy Mumford, "Metis and the Vote in Nineteenth-Century America: A Westward Journey," Journal of the West (forthcoming).
(44) "A Report of the Proceedings in Relation to the Contested Election for Delegate to the Nineteenth Congress, from the Territory of Michigan ..., "[1825] in The Territorial Papers of the United States, vol. 9, The Territory of Michigan 1820-1829, ed. Clarence Edwin Carter (Washington: GPO, 1945), 742.
(45) Ibid., 752.
(46) Ibid., 731.
(47) House Committee on Elections, Michigan Election, 19th Cong., 1st sess. 13 Feb. 1826, H. Rept. 69. The Sault Ste. Marie votes were rejected on other grounds, however, and the election went to Austin Wing.
(48) "Report of the Proceedings in Relation to the Contested Election," 731.
(49) Literary Voyager, 30-31, no. 2 (Dec. 1826); Schoolcraft, Personal Memoirs, 244 (journal entry from 10 July 1826).
(50) McKenney, Sketches of a Tour to the Lakes, 376n (journal entry from 21 Aug. 1826).
(51) Personal Memoirs, 162-63 (journal entry from 26 Mar. 1823).
(52) Literary Voyager, 146, no. 14 (28 Mar. 1827).
(53) Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties, 2: 269.
(54) Deposition of John Agnew and Henry Schoolcraft, in "Report of the Proceedings in Relation to the Contested Election," 752. On the historical relationship between freehold property, male authority, and political citizenship, see Nancy F. Cott, "Marriage and Women's Citizenship in the United States," American Historical Review 103 (1998): 1440-74.
(55) Bremer, Indian Agent, chaps. 6 and 8. The religious revivals throughout Michigan in 1830-31 were part of a nationwide movement, centered in the "Burned-Over District" of western New York from which many Michigan immigrants had come.
(56) Henry to Jane, Thanksgiving 1830, quoted in Brazer, Harps upon the Willows, 228.
(57) Jane to Henry, 12 Oct. 1833, sheet 2015, container 11, Schoolcraft Papers.
(58) Autobiography of John Ball [1925], in Recollections of the Early Republic: Selected Autobiographies, ed. Joyce Appleby (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1997), 37. Thanks to Anwen Hughes for this reference.
(59) Bremer, Indian Agent, 104.
(60) Quoted in Robert Bieder, Science Encounters the Indian, 1820-1880: The Early Years of American Ethnology (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986), 166. See Van Kirk, "Many Tender Ties"; idem, "`The Reputation of a Lady': Sarah Ballenden and the Foss-Pelly Scandal," Manitoba History 11 (Spring 1986): 4-11.
(61) Bremer, Indian Agent, 196-206, 216-21,255.
(62) Henry to Lewis Cass, 1845, quoted in Bremer, Indian Agent, 270.
(63) Bremer, Indian Agent, 300-1; Dippie, Catlin and his Contemporaries, 224.
(64) Mary Schoolcraft, The Black Gauntlet: A Tale of Plantation Life in South Carolina (Philadelphia: J. P. Lippincott & Co., 1860), 540. This was an autobiographical novel by the second Mrs. Schoolcraft, written as a defense of slavery on the eve of the Civil War. On the "American School of Ethnology," see Stanton, The Leopard's Spots.
(65) Quoted in Bremer, Indian Agent, 310.
(66) Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, Narrative Journal of Travels From Detroit Northwest through the Great Chain of American Lakes to the Sources of the Mississippi River in the Year 1820 (Albany: E. & E. Hosford, 1821), 338.
(67) Quoted in Bremer, Indian Agent, 219.
(68) Quoted in ibid., 256.
(69) Quoted in Brazer, Harps upon the Willows, 315. |
"Mixed Blood Indians" are very similar to "Mulatto Elites." Both prize their European descent and culture, but are often financially and politically dependent upon the stigmatized nonwhite ancestral group. |
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