Signers

 

​Trained as a mineralogist, Henry R. Schoolcraft traveled through Missouri and Arkansas in 1818, and documented the area's geography and geology. His subsequent publication, A View of  the Lead Mines of Missouri, led to personal fame and the first mineral rush in US history into the lead mine region of Missouri, Illinois and Wisconsin. In 1820, Michigan Territorial Governor Lewis Cass hired Schoolcraft as a geologist for the famous Cass expedition to (unsuccessfully) locate the headwaters of the Mississippi. On the expedition, Schoolcraft bribed members of the Ho-Chunk nation near Prairie du Chien to show him the location of local lead deposits. In 1822, Cass appointed Schoolcraft to be the first Indian Agent of Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan. In 1828, he co-founded the Historical Society of Michigan. From 1828 to 1832, he served in the legislature of Michigan Territory, and in 1838, he managed the construction of the Indian Dormitory on Mackinac Island. The next yea​​​r, he was appointed to superintendent of Indian Affairs in the Northern Department, a vast area of the Upper Midwest. Schoolcraft fabricated words that were his imitations of Indigenous languages to serve as place nam​es, including the names of several Michigan counties and Lake Itasca. From his first wife, he collected Ojibwe legends that became the basis for Longfellow's "Love Song of Hiawatha;" he hired her brothers for positions in the Indian Affairs bureaucracy. With his second wife (who authored The Black Gauntlet, "the South's answer to Uncle Tom's Cabin"), he compiled a vast compendium of information on American Indian tribes.​​ For information on his family connections, see his family tree (in "more families") using the link below.