Henry Rowe Schoolcraft

PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A YANKEE IN CANADA:

HENRY ROWE SCHOOLCRAFT

“NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY

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PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A YANKEE IN CANADA: HENRY ROWE SCHOOLCRAFT

“A YANKEE IN CANADA”: The most interesting object in Canada to me was the River St. Lawrence, known far and wide, and for centuries, as the Great River. Cartier, its discoverer, sailed up it as far as Montreal in 1535, — nearly a century before the coming of the Pilgrims; and I have seen a pretty accurate map of it so far, containing the city of “Hochelaga” and the river “Saguenay,” in Ortelius’s THEATRUM ORBIS TERRARUM, printed at Antwerp in 1575, – the first edition having appeared in 1570,– in which the famous cities of “Norumbega” and “Orsinora” stand on the rough-blocked continent where New England is to-day, and the fabulous but unfortunate Isle of Demons, and Frislant, and others, lie off and on in the unfrequented sea, some of them prowling near what is now the course of the Cunard steamers. In this ponderous folio of the “Ptolemy of his age,” said to be the first general atlas published after the revival of the sciences in Europe, only one page of which is devoted to the topography of the Novus Orbis, the St. Lawrence is the only large river, whether drawn from fancy or from observation, on the east side of North America. It was famous in Europe before the other rivers of North America were heard of, notwithstanding that the mouth of the Mississippi, or even the Hudson, was known to the world. (Schoolcraft was misled by Gallatin into saying that Narvaez discovered the Mississippi. De Vega does not say so.) The first explorers declared that the summer in that country was as warm as France, and they named one of the bays in the Gulf of St. Lawrence the Bay of Chaleur, or of warmth; but they said nothing about the winter being as cold as Greenland. In the manuscript account of Cartier’s second voyage, attributed by some to that navigator himself, it is called “the greatest river, without comparison, that is known to have ever been seen.”

ABRAHAM ORTELIUS HENRY ROWE SCHOOLCRAFT ALBERT GALLATIN HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A YANKEE IN CANADA: HENRY ROWE SCHOOLCRAFT

1528

October: Henry Thoreau would be motivated, in “A YANKEE IN CANADA”, to dispel a myth that had grown up about this period in the history of the exploration of the North American continent: “Schoolcraft [Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, 1793-1864] was misled by Gallatin [Albert Gallatin, 1761-1849] into saying that Narvaez [the expedition of Pánfilo de Narváez, 1478-1528)] discovered the Mississippi. De Vega [Garcilaso de la Vega, 1539-1616] does not say so.”

ABRAHAM ORTELIUS HENRY ROWE SCHOOLCRAFT ALBERT GALLATIN HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A YANKEE IN CANADA: HENRY ROWE SCHOOLCRAFT

Thoreau seems to have been making reference to a footnote on page 32 of Volume III of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft’s and Seth Eastman’s HISTORICAL AND STATISTICAL INFORMATION, RESPECTING THE HISTORY, CONDITION AND PROSPECTS OF THE INDIAN TRIBES OF THE UNITED STATES: COLL. AND PREPARED UNDER THE DIRECTION OF THE BUREAU OF INDIAN AFFAIRS PER ACT OF CONGRESS OF MARCH 3RD 1847: “It has been stated by Mr. Gallatin, vide Am. Eth. Trans. Vol. II., p.—, that he [the 1528 expedition of Pánfilo de Narváez, 1478-1528)] discovered the mouth of the Mississippi; but this is not sustained by De Vaca, and there is no other authority” (we should make careful note of the fact that Thoreau has here substituted the name “De Vega,” which is to say “Garcilaso de la Vega, 1539-1616, author of the 1605 LA FLORIDA DEL INCA,” for Schoolcraft’s “De Vaca,” meaning “Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, circa 1490/1507-circa 1557/1559, author of the 1543 LA RELACIÓN” — because I do no myself know whether this amounts to Thoreau’s silent correction of an error, or, perhaps, his inadvertent introduction of an error). Here is the actual passage by Albert Gallatin containing that misunderstanding (it had appeared in Transactions of the American Ethnological Society for 1848):

1848 TRANS. AM. ETHN. SOC.

What the 1528 expedition of Pánfilo de Narváez did do was skirt the coast and note that they sailed through fresh water far at sea. This was however not a “first sighting by a white man,” not only because it was not a sighting, but also because already in June 1519, nine years earlier the four ships of Alfonsó Alvaréz Pinéda had reconnoitered the mouth of the Mississippi.

It was in this year that Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca and three others off the coast of Texas, at Galveston Island, became castaways from the expedition of Pánfilo de Narváez. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A YANKEE IN CANADA: HENRY ROWE SCHOOLCRAFT

1793

March 28, Thursday: Henry Rowe Schoolcraft was born at Guilderland near Albany, New York. His father was a glassmaker and he would study to become a glassmaker as well.

NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT

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PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A YANKEE IN CANADA: HENRY ROWE SCHOOLCRAFT

1800

Jane Johnston (Schoolcraft) was born in this year as one of eight children of an Irish fur trader and an influential Chippewa or Ojibwa (alternate Englishings of the same tribal name) woman, daughter of tribal leader Waub Ojeeb (White Fisher). Jane would grow up in Sault Ste. Marie and returned there after being educated in Ireland. She would learn tribal lore from her mother and would speak Ojibwa fluently. War Department agent Henry Rowe Schoolcraft would board with the Johnston family when he arrived in 1822, assigned to gain tribal cooperation in new policies concerning control of the Great Lakes area established after the War of 1812. The Johnstons would assist him in researching Indian culture. Jane would help him compile a Chippewa vocabulary and would draw his interest toward tales and legends. They would marry in 1823. With her husband, beginning in 1826, Schoolcraft would publish THE LITERARY VOYAGER OR MUZZENIEGUN (printed document or book), a weekly magazine distributed in eastern cities as well as locally, with articles on Ojibwa culture, history, and biography. Her writings, including Christian devotional poems, tributes to her grandfather, and poems on the death of her son, would appear in the magazine under the pseudonyms Rosa and Leelinau. Jane Johnston Schoolcraft would become widely known as “The Northern Pocahontas” and would be sought out by traveling public intellectuals, among them British authors Harriet Martineau and Anna B. Jameson. She would die in 1841.

LIFE IS LIVED FORWARD BUT UNDERSTOOD BACKWARD? — NO, THAT’S GIVING TOO MUCH TO THE HISTORIAN’S STORIES. LIFE ISN’T TO BE UNDERSTOOD EITHER FORWARD OR BACKWARD.

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PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A YANKEE IN CANADA: HENRY ROWE SCHOOLCRAFT

1808

Henry Rowe Schoolcraft matriculated at Union College in Schenectady, New York.1

William Learned Marcy graduated from Brown University and began practicing law in Troy, New York.

THE FUTURE IS MOST READILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

1. The name “Union” had been chosen for this new college in expression of a desire that the college never affiliate itself with any particular Protestant religious denomination, such as the Presbyterians or the Congregationalists; they would have named themselves after a major benefactor, as for instance Brown recently had done — except that as luck would have it no such major benefactor ever appeared. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A YANKEE IN CANADA: HENRY ROWE SCHOOLCRAFT

1810

Zanesville became the Ohio state capitol.

Abandoning his new glassmaking business in upstate New York, the young Henry Rowe Schoolcraft made a journey down the Ohio River to Missouri with his friend Alexander Bryan Johnson.

THE FUTURE CAN BE EASILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

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PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A YANKEE IN CANADA: HENRY ROWE SCHOOLCRAFT

1817

December 16, Tuesday: A notice appeared in the Patriot and Patrol of Utica, New York, “Will publish in May, 1818, if subscribers are enough, “Vitrology, or The Art of Making Glass,” by Henry R. Schoolcraft.”

CHANGE IS ETERNITY, STASIS A FIGMENT

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PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A YANKEE IN CANADA: HENRY ROWE SCHOOLCRAFT

1818

In Missouri during this year and the following one, Henry Rowe Schoolcraft made geographical, geological, and mineralogical surveys which would be recorded in A VIEW OF THE LEAD MINES OF MISSOURI.

DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? GOOD.

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PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A YANKEE IN CANADA: HENRY ROWE SCHOOLCRAFT

1819

Henry Rowe Schoolcraft’s A VIEW OF THE LEAD MINES OF MISSOURI. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A YANKEE IN CANADA: HENRY ROWE SCHOOLCRAFT

1820

January 14, Friday: J. Dickinson of Nash Mill in the parish of Abbots Laughley was granted a patent for a machine that could cut paper and other materials into single sheets or pieces.

US Secretary of War John Caldwell Calhoun authorized the governor of the Michigan Territory, General Lewis Cass, to lead a party of scientists, soldiers, Canadian voyageurs to manage the canoes, and native American guides and hunters into the wilderness, to survey the western portion of the Michigan Territory (present-day Minnesota)’s geography and topography for purposes of a new map clarifying a border dispute between the United States of America and Canada, evaluate the flora and fauna, ascertain the numbers of the tribes of natives and their customs (and their loyalties, whether to the United States or to Great Britain), search for commercially valuable deposits of minerals, discover the true source of the Mississippi River (Cass Lake would be determined, erroneously, to be that northern source), and select and purchase sites for forts (especially at the important strait of Sault Ste. Marie). The expedition would consist of 42 men. The geologist would be Henry Rowe Schoolcraft who would in 1821 issue A NARRATIVE JOURNAL OF TRAVELS … FROM DETROIT THROUGH THE GREAT CHAIN OF AMERICAN LAKES TO THE SOURCES OF THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER, and then in 1832 correctly identify the source of the great river as Lake Itasca.

In the diary of Thomas Nuttall we find: “This evening we arrived at the residence of the late Mr. Mosely, and about 20 miles below Harrington’s. His estates were said to be worth not less than 20,000 dollars, which had all been acquired during his residence in this territory. A proof that there is here also scope for industry, and the acquisition of wealth.”

June 16, Friday: Another treaty with native Americans: 7 Stat., 206. Proclamation, Mar. 2, 1821. Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties. Vol. II (Treaties). Compiled and edited by Charles J. Kappler. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1904. Margin Notes: Cession by the Chippewas. Receipt of goods acknowledged. Perpetual right of fishing at the falls of St. Mary’s secured to Indians. Treaty binding when ratified. Articles of a treaty, made and concluded at the Saúlt de St. Marie, in the Territory of Michigan, between the United States, by their Commissioner Lewis Cass, and the Chippeway tribe of Indians. ART. 1. The Chippeway tribe of Indians cede to the United States the following tract of land: Beginning at the Big Rock, in the river St. Mary’s, on the boundary line between the United States and the British Province of Upper Canada; and, running thence, down the said river, with the middle thereof, to the Little Rapid; and, from those [*188] points, running back from the said river, so as to include sixteen square miles of land. ART. 2. The Chippeway tribe of Indians acknowledge to have HDT WHAT? INDEX

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received a quantity of goods in full satisfaction of the preceding cession. ART. 3. The United States will secure to the Indians a perpetual right of fishing at the falls of St. Mary’s, and also a place of encampment upon the tract hereby ceded, convenient to the fishing ground, which place shall not interfere with the defences of any military work which may be erected, nor with any private rights. ART. 4. This treaty, after the same shall be ratified by the President of the United States, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate thereof, shall be obligatory on the contracting parties. In witness whereof, the said Lewis Cass, commissioner as aforesaid, and the chiefs and warriors of the said Chippeway tribe of Indians, have hereunto set their hands, at the place aforesaid, this sixteenth day of June, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and twenty. Lewis Cass, Shingaubaywassin, his x mark, Kegeash, his x mark, Sagishewayoson, his x mark, Wayishkey, his x mark, Nenowaiskam, his x mark, Wasawaton, his x mark, Wemiguenacwanay, his x mark, Nabinois, his x mark, Macadaywacwet, his x mark, Shaiwabekaton, his x mark, Netaway, his x mark, Kaibayway, his x mark, Nawoquesequm, his x mark, Tawabit, his x mark, Augustin Bart, his x mark. Witnesses present: R. A. Forsyth, secretary, Alex. Wolcott, jr., Indian agent, Chicago, D. B. Douglass, captain U. S. Engineers, Æneas Mackay, Lieutenant corps artillery, John J. Pearce, lieutenant artillery, Henry R. Schoolcraft, mineralogist to the expedition, James Duane Doty, Charles C. Trowbridge, Alex. R. Chase, James Ryley, sworn interpreter.

WHAT I’M WRITING IS TRUE BUT NEVER MIND YOU CAN ALWAYS LIE TO YOURSELF

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PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A YANKEE IN CANADA: HENRY ROWE SCHOOLCRAFT

1821

Henry Rowe Schoolcraft’s A NARRATIVE JOURNAL OF TRAVELS … FROM DETROIT THROUGH THE GREAT CHAIN OF AMERICAN LAKES TO THE SOURCES OF THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A YANKEE IN CANADA: HENRY ROWE SCHOOLCRAFT

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PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A YANKEE IN CANADA: HENRY ROWE SCHOOLCRAFT

According to Mary Helen Dunlop’s SIXTY MILES FROM CONTENTMENT: TRAVELING THE NINETEENTH- CENTURY AMERICAN INTERIOR (NY: HarperCollins BasicBooks, 1995, pages 113-7), In a search for pleasant and understandable Indian material to distract them from contemporary conditions too painful to dwell on, numerous travelers turned to retailing legends — not tribal legends but white-concocted legends about Indians, sentimental European- style legends about thwarted romance and star-crossed lovers and death leaps. Because so much of the fakelore is about death, it can be read as a series of approaches to a culture under siege; furthermore, the legends are most unstable whenever they concern those matters of Indian life that travelers least comprehended — family structure, authority, and the position of women. The travel writer’s favorite among made-up legends was the story of Winona, which had a conveniently visible geographic location –a high bluff on the upper Mississippi– that travelers could easily view from a comfortable position aboard a steamboat or train.

She has captured and described a series of nine such mythifications, of which this is the 1st:2Mary Helen In Henry Schoolcraft’s 1821 telling, the Sioux Winona loves a “young chief” but her parents wish her to marry an “old chief.” Winona apparently accedes to their wishes, but while the wedding feast is in preparation, she exits “her father’s cabin,” makes a run for the cliff, throws herself off, and is “instantly dashed to a thousand pieces” on the rocks below. Schoolcraft’s tale is about both romantic love and European-style male authority over women’s lives; in his framing, a woman’s sole route of resistance to male authority is suicide. Schoolcraft kept his story contained within tribal society and admired it as an “instance of sentiment” that, in his view, elevated Sioux culture.

Dunlop points out that in the Wisconsin territory in this year, when Henry Rowe Schoolcraft wrote about his HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A YANKEE IN CANADA: HENRY ROWE SCHOOLCRAFT

observations of native American cultivation practices, he revealed to posterity more than he herself would have liked to understand, about the manner in which we go about creating racial Others who are, willy-nilly, going to be wrong, because they have been Othered — no matter what they do and no matter how they react to us. They are just the wrong people, so how could they ever be considered to have gotten anything right? This is from page 103 of her SIXTY MILES FROM CONTENTMENT: Some travelers, employing an established method of denying land ownership, asserted that Indians had no agriculture; meanwhile others were busy scorning Indians for eating from nature. In 1821, Henry Schoolcraft was so “surprised” to encounter cultivated fields of squashes, beans, and melons along the Turkey River in Wisconsin that he at once denied such evidence by pointing out that the fields were “without any enclosures” and thus not properly owned; when he came upon an asparagus patch, Schoolcraft hastened to assert that it was not evidence of cultivation: “the seeds,” he wrote, “had probably been dropped by some former traveler.” For a traveler to assign to another traveler's casual loss more evidence of cultivation than he would assign to the Indian population constituted an extreme effort at erasing visible facts. The ease, propriety, and delicacy of Indian table manners were ignored in favor of the assertion that Indians did not say thank-you when whites gave them food, and Indian concern that all should share equally in the food available was transformed into tales of guests forced to eat anything set before them. If one traveler claimed that Indians were forced to “eat their dogs when other food fails,” later travelers escalated that detail into claims that dog meat was an Indian idea of the “greatest delicacy to set before a guest” and that identifiable whole roasted puppies had been set before them by Indians.

2. The subsequent versions awarded this deep reading by Dunlop in her 1995 monograph are: the Fredrika Bremer 1848 construction of this Winona fakelore, contained in volume 2 of 1853’s THE HOMES OF THE NEW WORLD, the Mary Eastman 1853 construction of this Winona fakelore, contained in 1849’s DAKOTAH: OR, LIFE AND LEGENDS OF THE SIOUX, the Ida Pfeiffer mid-1850s construction of this Winona fakelore, contained in 1855’s A LADY’S SECOND JOURNEY ROUND THE WORLD, the Laurence Oliphant 1855 construction of this Winona fakelore, contained in MINNESOTA AND THE FAR WEST, the Harriet Bishop 1857 construction of this Winona fakelore, contained in FLORAL HOME: OR, FIRST YEARS OF MINNESOTA, the Aleksandr Lakier 1859 construction of this Winona fakelore, and, finally, the Mark Twain 1883 demolition of this Winona fakelore, as contained in his LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A YANKEE IN CANADA: HENRY ROWE SCHOOLCRAFT

1822

Henry Rowe Schoolcraft was appointed Indian agent with headquarters at Sault Ste. Marie and began his ethnological researches. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A YANKEE IN CANADA: HENRY ROWE SCHOOLCRAFT

1823

Henry Rowe Schoolcraft and Jane Johnston (whose father John Johnston was a fur trader in the Great Lakes region and whose mother, Ozhaw-Guscoday-Wayquay, was the daughter of Waub Ojeeg, headman of the Chequamegon or “Red Cliff” band of the Anishinabe Ojibway) were wed. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A YANKEE IN CANADA: HENRY ROWE SCHOOLCRAFT

1828

From this year into 1832, Henry Rowe Schoolcraft would be serving in the territorial legislature. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A YANKEE IN CANADA: HENRY ROWE SCHOOLCRAFT

1832

Henry Rowe Schoolcraft made a 2d journey to the Mississippi River. His account would be published in 1834:

Enoch Cobb Wines’s TWO YEARS AND A HALF IN THE NAVY; OR, JOURNAL OF A CRUISE IN THE MEDITERRANEAN AND LEVANT, ON BOARD OF THE U.S. FRIGATE CONSTELLATION, IN THE YEARS 1829, 1830, AND 1831. Henry Thoreau would read this book. The ship in question was the 36-gun frigate Constellation which had been built in 1797 and would in 1853 be broken up for scrap (the ship presently in Baltimore is a 22-gun sloop-of-war Constellation which would not be launched until 1854). HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A YANKEE IN CANADA: HENRY ROWE SCHOOLCRAFT

1833

The area of administration of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft as Indian agent was considerably increased, with new headquarters at Mackinac.

At Fort Snelling in the Minnesota Territory, Seth Eastman got married “in Indian form” with the daughter of Marpiyawicasta Cloud Man, Wakaninajinwin Stands Sacred (or, Stands Like a Spirit) who had borne him a child (initially known of course as “Winona,” meaning “firstborn girlchild,” in accordance with Dakotah practice) who would be christened Mary Nancy Eastman (this child would because of her involvement with Christianity be called “Holy Spirit woman,” and would additionally be known as Wakantankanwin Goddess).3 The bride was herself baptized under the christening name “Lucy.” Some of the children of this racial mingling, according to a book, would become “noted and useful characters” — imagine that, folks!4

(This seems to have been a parting gesture, since from 1833 to 1840 Eastman would be teaching drawing, useful in mapmaking, at the West Point Military Academy.)

Amazingly, although the white man was an artist, we have no artistic depictions by him of his bride or his child! What we do have is two rough sketches and a portrait sketch done later, in 1851, of the teenage halfbreed Mary Nancy or Goddess, by another white artist, Frank Blackwell Mayer:

3. This daughter “Mary Nancy” would marry in her tribe and bear five children, dying at the birth of the youngest, later known as Charles. After adopting Christianity, her red husband and two of their sons would also take the Eastman name. Mary Nancy Eastman’s eldest son, the Reverend John Marpiyawaku Kida Eastman, would become a Presbyterian missionary at Flandreau, South Dakota. Her 2d son, Dr. Charles Eastman, would make himself the 1st Native American to obtain certification as a medical doctor (he would earn his MD degree at Boston University). While practicing medicine Dr. Eastman also would work for Native American rights. He would author a memoir, INDIAN BOYHOOD, and several other popular books about his experience of Indian cultures, some of which would be translated and published in Europe. 4. It may surprise you that the commandant at the local military fortress, Fort Snelling, would permit such a miscegenation. If so, you should come to grips with the fact that such miscegenation, so long as it was by white men upon red women rather than by red men upon white women, was in fact part of the US military’s objective for the region. To appreciate this, you should take the time now to peruse the report on native populations that had been prepared for our War Department in 1822 by the Reverend Jedediah Morse. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1834

NARRATIVE OF AN EXPEDITION THROUGH THE UPPER MISSISSIPPI TO ITASCA LAKE, THE ACTUAL SOURCE OF THIS RIVER; EMBRACING AN EXPLORATORY TRIP THROUGH THE ST. CROIX AND BURNTWOOD (OR BROULE) RIVERS; IN 1832. UNDER THE DIRECTION OF HENRY R. SCHOOLCRAFT (New-York: Harper & Brothers, No. 82 Cliff-Street) TRUE SOURCE OF BIG RIVER

(In about 1852 Henry Thoreau would copy items from this into his Indian Notebook #6.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A YANKEE IN CANADA: HENRY ROWE SCHOOLCRAFT

1837

The outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease that had begun in 1834 in the farm animals with cloven hooves on the Hungarian plains, at this point had spread to Switzerland, Belgium, France, and Holland, affecting all cows, pigs, sheep, and goats. In a few years the infection would spread to the British Isles.

Henry Thoreau copied, from Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, into Volume V of his INDIAN NOTEBOOKS, the following paragraph:5 The small pox “swept through the Missouri Valley in 1837.” The first case was a colored [Thoreau’s change] mulatto man on board a steam boat 80 miles above Fort Leavenworth. “Every precaution appears to have been taken, by sending runners to the Indians, 2 days ahead of the boat; but, in spite of these efforts, the disease spread. It broke out among the Mandonis [?] about the 15th of July. This tribe, which consisted of 1600 persons, was reduced to 31 souls.” & other tribes lost one half of their number. VARIOLA

[In his Indian Notebook #7, Thoreau would make four sheets of extracts from Schoolcraft’s “Hiawatha, or the

5. Thoreau’s INDIAN NOTEBOOKS are now at the Pierpont Morgan Library. These notebooks together comprise in total 2,800 handwritten pages. There are 11 of them, the 1st probably being completed during Thoreau’s sojourn at Walden Pond: for instance, on the 1st sheet of his 1st volume Thoreau jotted “Bug ate out of a table in Williamstown 73 years after the egg was laid.” He noted that he had gotten this material which would find its way into the final chapter of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS from J.W. Barber’s MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COLLECTIONS. See: Fleck, Richard F. (ed). THE INDIANS OF THOREAU: SELECTIONS FROM THE INDIAN NOTEBOOKS. Albuquerque NM: Hummingbird Press, 1974 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Origin of the Onondaga Council-Fire,” which was also Longfellow’s source.] HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1839

From his wife Jane Johnston Schoolcraft (halfbreed daughter of fur trader John Johnston and Ozhaw- Guscoday-Wayquay), Henry Rowe Schoolcraft had been learning over the years the Anishinabeg language, and acquiring a store of Anishinabe Ojibway lore. In this year was published his ALGIC RESEARCHES: COMPRISING INQUIRIES RESPECTING THE MENTAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE NORTH AMERICAN INDIANS. FIRST SERIES. INDIAN TALES AND LEGENDS (New-York: Harper & Brothers, 82 Cliff-Street). ALGIC RESEARCHES, I ALGIC RESEARCHES, II HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A YANKEE IN CANADA: HENRY ROWE SCHOOLCRAFT

1841

When the Whigs came to power, Henry Rowe Schoolcraft lost his Indian agency and moved to the East, where he continued the Native American studies he had begun in 1839 with ALGIC RESEARCHES.

For this year and the following one Francis Joseph Grund, who had by authoring a campaign biography supported the winning Whig party in the general election, would be chosen for the cushy job of serving as US consul at Bremen, Germany. A political plum. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A YANKEE IN CANADA: HENRY ROWE SCHOOLCRAFT

1843

June 20, Tuesday-21, Wednesday: Frederick Douglass was at the Town Hall in New Bedford for the Bristol County Anti-Slavery Convention.

Henry Thoreau wrote to Mrs. Lidian Emerson from Staten Island:

June 20th 1843 My very dear Friend,

I have only read a page of your letter, and have come out to the top of the hill at sunset[,] where I can see the ocean to prepare to read the rest. It is fitter that it should hear it than the walls of my chamber. The very crickets here seem to chirp around me as they did not before. I feel as if it were a great daring to go on and read the rest, and then to live accordingly[—] There are more than thirty vessels in sight going to sea — I am almost afraid to look at your letter. I see that it will [make] my life very steep, but it may lead to fairer prospects than this. You seem to me to speak out of a very clear and high heaven, where any one may be who stands so high. Your voice seems not a voice, but comes as much from the blue heavens, as from the paper. My dear friend it was very noble in you to write me so trustful an answer. It will do as well for another world as for this. Such a voice is for no particular time nor person, but it makes him who may

Page 2 hear it stand for all that is lofty and true in humanity. The thought of HDT WHAT? INDEX

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you will constantly elevate my life[;] it will be something always above the horizon to behold, as when I look up at the evening star. I think I know your thoughts without seeing you, and as well here as in Concord. You are not at all strange to me. I could hardly believe after the lapse had of one night that I such a noble letter ^ still at hand to read — that it was not some [fine] dream. I looked at mid night to be sure that it was real. I feel that I am unworthy to know you, and yet they will not permit it wrongfully. I, perhaps, am more willing to deceive by appear- ances than you say you are[.] [It] would not be worth the while to tell how willing, — but I have the power perhaps [too much] to forget my meanness as soon as seen, and not be incited by permanent sorrow. My actual life is unspeakably mean, compared with what I know and see that it might be — Yet the ground from which I see and say this is some part of it. It ranges from heaven to earth and is all things in an hour. [T]he experience of every past moment but belies the faith of each present. We never conceive the greatness of our fates.

Page 3 Are not these faint flashes of light, which sometimes obscure the sun, their certain dawn? My friend, I have read your letter as if I was not reading it. After each pause I could defer the rest forever. The thought of you will be a new motive for every right action. You are another human being whom I know, and might not our topic be as broad as the universe. What have we to do with petty rumbling news? We have our [own] great [a]ffairs. Sometimes in Concord I found my actions dictated, as it were, by your influence, and though it lead almost to trivial Hindoo obser- HDT WHAT? INDEX

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vances, yet it was good and elevating. To hear that you have sad[]hours is not sad to me. I rather rejoice at the richness of your experience. Only think of some sadness away in Pekin — unseen and unknown there — What a mine it is. Would it not weigh down the [who] Celestial empire, with all its gay Chinese? [O]ur sadness is not [sad,] but our cheap joys. Let us be sad[] about all we see and are, for so we demand and pray for better. It is the constant prayer[]and whole Christian religion. I could hope that you would get well soon, and have a health[y] body for this world, but I know this cannot be — and the Fates, after all, are

Page 4 the accomplishers of our hopes — Yet I do hope that you may find it a worthy struggle, and life seem grand still through the clouds. What wealth is it to have such friend[s] that we cannot think of them without elevation. And we can think of them any time, and any where, and it {written perpendicular to text in center of page:

Address: Mrs. Lidian Emerson

Concord

Mass.

Postmark: NEW-YORK

JUN

25}

costs nothing but the lofty disposition. I cannot tell you the joy your letter gives me — which will not quite cease till the latest time. Let me accompany your HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A YANKEE IN CANADA: HENRY ROWE SCHOOLCRAFT

finest thought. I send my love to my other friend and brother, whose nobleness I slowly recognise.

Henry

Margaret Fuller would write of the events of the 20th in her SUMMER ON THE LAKES, IN 1843: Chicago, June 20. There can be no two places in the world more completely thoroughfares than this place and Buffalo. They are the two correspondent valves that open and shut all the time, as the life-blood rushes from east to west, and back again from west to east. Since it is their office thus to be the doors, and let in and out, it would be unfair to expect from them much character of their own. To make the best provisions for the transmission of produce is their office, and the people who live there are such as are suited for this, — active, complaisant, inventive, business people. There are no provisions for the student or idler; to know what the place can give, you should be at work with the rest; the mere traveller will not find it profitable to loiter there as I did. Since circumstances made it necessary for me so to do, I read all the books I could find about the new region, which now began to become real to me. Especially I read all the books about the Indians, — a paltry collection truly, yet which furnished material for many thoughts. The most narrow-minded and awkward recital still bears some lineaments of the great features of this nature, and the races of men that illustrated them. Catlin’s book is far the best. I was afterwards assured by those acquainted with the regions he describes, that he is not to be depended on for the accuracy of his facts, and indeed it is obvious, without the aid of such assertions, that he sometimes yields to the temptation of making out a story. They admitted, however, what from my feelings I was sure of, that he is true to the spirit of the scene, and that a far better view can be got from him than from any source at present existing, of the Indian tribes of the Far West, and of the country where their inheritance lay. Murray’s Travels I read, and was charmed by their accuracy and clear, broad tone. He is the only Englishman that seems to have traversed these regions as man simply, not as John Bull. He deserves to belong to an aristocracy, for he showed his title to it more when left without a guide in the wilderness, than he can at the court of Victoria. He has; himself, no poetic force at description, but it is easy to make images from his hints. Yet we believe the Indian cannot be looked at truly except by a poetic eye. The Pawnees, no doubt, are such as he describes them, filthy in their habits, and treacherous in their character, but some would have seen, and seen truly, more beauty and dignity than he does with all his manliness and fairness of mind. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A YANKEE IN CANADA: HENRY ROWE SCHOOLCRAFT

However, his one fine old man is enough to redeem the rest, and is perhaps the relic of a better day, a Phocion among the Pawnees. Schoolcraft’s Algic Researches is a valuable book, though a worse use could hardly have been made of such fine material. Had the mythological or hunting stories of the Indians been written down exactly as they were received from the lips of the narrators, the collection could not have been surpassed in interest both for the wild charm they carry with them, and the light they throw on a peculiar modification of life and mind. As it is, though the incidents have an air of originality and pertinence to the occasion, that gives us confidence that they have not been altered, the phraseology in which they were expressed has been entirely set aside, and the flimsy graces, common to the style of annuals and souvenirs, substituted for the Spartan brevity and sinewy grasp of Indian speech. We can just guess what might have been there, as we can detect the fine proportions of the Brave whom the bad taste of some white patron has arranged in frock-coat, hat, and pantaloons. The few stories Mrs. Jameson wrote out, though to these also a sentimental air has been given, offend much less in that way than is common in this book. What would we not give for a completely faithful version of some among them! Yet, with all these drawbacks, we cannot doubt from internal evidence that they truly ascribe to the Indian a delicacy of sentiment and of fancy that justifies Cooper in such inventions as his Uncas. It is a white man’s view of a savage hero, who would be far finer in his natural proportions; still, through a masquerade figure, it implies the truth. Irving’s books I also read, some for the first, some for the second time, with increased interest, now that I was to meet such people as he received his materials from. Though the books are pleasing from, their grace and luminous arrangement, yet, with the exception of the Tour to the Prairies, they have a stereotype, second-hand air. They lack the breath, the glow, the charming minute traits of living presence. His scenery is only fit to be glanced at from dioramic distance; his Indians are academic figures only. He would have made the best of pictures, if he could have used his own eyes for studies and sketches; as it is, his success is wonderful, but inadequate. McKenney’s Tour to the Lakes is the dullest of books, yet faithful and quiet, and gives some facts not to be met with everywhere. I also read a collection of Indian anecdotes and speeches, the worst compiled and arranged book possible, yet not without clews of some value. All these books I read in anticipation of a canoe- voyage on Lake Superior as far as the Pictured Rocks, and, though I was afterwards compelled to give up this project, they aided me in judging of what I subsequently saw and heard of the Indians. In Chicago I first saw the beautiful prairie-flowers. They were in their glory the first ten days we were there, — HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A YANKEE IN CANADA: HENRY ROWE SCHOOLCRAFT

“The golden and the flame-like flowers.” The flame-like flower I was taught afterwards, by an Indian girl, to call “Wickapee”; and she told me, too, that its splendors had a useful side, for it was used by the Indians as a remedy for an illness to which they were subject. Beside these brilliant flowers, which gemmed and gilt the grass in a sunny afternoon’s drive near the blue lake, between the low oak-wood and the narrow beach, stimulated, whether sensuously by the optic nerve, unused to so much gold and crimson with such tender green, or symbolically through some meaning dimly seen in the flowers, I enjoyed a sort of fairy-land exultation never felt before, and the first drive amid the flowers gave me anticipation of the beauty of the prairies. At first, the prairie seemed to speak of the very desolation of dulness. After sweeping over the vast monotony of the lakes to come to this monotony of land, with all around a limitless horizon, — to walk, and walk, and run, but never climb, oh! it was too dreary for any but a Hollander to bear. How the eye greeted the approach of a sail, or the smoke of a steamboat; it seemed that anything so animated must come from a better land, where mountains gave religion to the scene. The only thing I liked at first to do was to trace with slow and unexpecting step the narrow margin of the lake. Sometimes a heavy swell gave it expression; at others, only its varied coloring, which I found more admirable every day, and which gave it an air of mirage instead of the vastness of ocean. Then there was a grandeur in the feeling that I might continue that walk, if I had any seven-leagued mode of conveyance to save fatigue, for hundreds of miles without an obstacle and without a change. But after I had ridden out, and seen the flowers, and observed the sun set with that calmness seen only in the prairies, and the cattle winding slowly to their homes in the “island groves,” — most peaceful of sights, — I began to love, because I began to know the scene, and shrank no longer from “the encircling vastness.” It is always thus with the new form of life; we must learn to look at it by its own standard. At first, no doubt, my accustomed eye kept saying, if the mind did not, What! no distant mountains? What! no valleys? But after a while I would ascend the roof of the house where we lived, and pass many hours, needing no sight but the moon reigning in the heavens, or starlight falling upon the lake, till all the lights were out in the island grove of men beneath my feet, and felt nearer heaven that there was nothing but this lovely, still reception on the earth; no towering mountains, no deep tree-shadows, nothing but plain earth and water bathed in light. Sunset, as seen from that place, presented most generally, low- lying, flaky clouds, of the softest serenity. One night a star “shot madly from, its sphere,” and it had a fair chance to be seen, but that serenity could not be astonished. Yes! it was a peculiar beauty, that of those sunsets and HDT WHAT? INDEX

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moonlights on the levels of Chicago, which Chamouny or the Trosachs could not make me forget.6 Notwithstanding all the attractions I thus found out by degrees on the flat shores of the lake, I was delighted when I found myself really on my way into the country for an excursion of two or three weeks. We set forth in a strong wagon, almost as large, and with the look of those used elsewhere for transporting caravans of wild beasts, loaded with everything we might want, in case nobody would give it to us, — for buying and selling were no longer to be counted on, — with, a pair of strong horses, able and willing to force their way through mud-holes and amid stumps, and a guide, equally admirable as marshal and companion, who knew by heart the country and its history, both natural and artificial, and whose clear hunter’s eye needed, neither road nor goal to guide it to all the spots where beauty best loves to dwell. Add to this the finest weather, and such country as I had never seen, even in my dreams, although these dreams had been haunted by wishes for just such a one, and you may judge whether years of dulness might not, by these bright days, be redeemed, and a sweetness be shed over all thoughts of the West. The first day brought us through woods rich in the moccason- flower and lupine, and plains whose soft expanse was continually touched with expression by the slow moving clouds which “Sweep over with their shadows, and beneath The surface rolls and fluctuates to the eye; Dark hollows seem to glide along and chase The sunny ridges,” to the banks of the Fox River, a sweet and graceful stream. We reached Geneva just in time to escape being drenched by a violent thunder-shower, whose rise and disappearance threw expression into all the features of the scene. Geneva reminds me of a New England village, as indeed there, and in the neighborhood, are many New-Englanders of an excellent stamp, generous, intelligent, discreet, and seeking to win from life its true values. Such are much wanted, and seem like points of light among the swarms of settlers, whose aims are sordid, whose habits thoughtless and slovenly.7 With great pleasure we heard, with his attentive and affectionate congregation, the Unitarian clergyman, Mr. Conant, and afterward visited him in his house, where almost everything bore traces of his own handiwork or that of his father. He is just such a teacher as is wanted in this region, familiar enough, with the habits of those he addresses to come home to their experience and their wants; earnest and enlightened enough to 6. “From the prairie near Chicago had I seen, some days before, the sun set with that calmness observed only on the prairies. I know not what it says, but something quite different from sunset at sea. There is no motion except of waving grasses, — the cattle move slowly homeward in the distance. That home! where is it? It seems as If there was no home, and no need of one, and there is room enough to wander on for ever.” — Manuscript Notes. 7. “We passed a portion of one day with Mr. and Mrs. — — , young, healthy, and, thank Heaven, gay people. In the general dulness that broods over this land where so little genius flows, and care, business, and fashionable frivolity are equally dull, unspeakable is the relief of some flashes of vivacity, some sparkles of wit. Of course it is hard enough for those, most natively disposed that way, to strike fire. I would willingly be the tinder to promote the cheering blaze.” — Manuscript Notes. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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draw the important inferences from the life of every day.8 A day or two we remained here, and passed some happy hours in the woods that fringe the stream, where the gentlemen found a rich booty of fish. Next day, travelling along the river’s banks, was an uninterrupted pleasure. We closed our drive in the afternoon at the house of an English gentleman, who has gratified, as few men do, the common wish to pass the evening of an active day amid the quiet influences of country life. He showed us a bookcase filled with books about this country; these he had collected for years, and become so familiar with the localities, that, on coming here at last, he sought and found, at once, the very spot he wanted, and where he is as content as he hoped to be, thus realizing Wordsworth’s description of the wise man, who “sees what he foresaw.” A wood surrounds the house, through which paths are cut in every direction. It is, for this new country, a large and handsome dwelling; but round it are its barns and farm-yard, with cattle and poultry. These, however, in the framework of wood, have a very picturesque and pleasing effect. There is that mixture of culture and rudeness in the aspect of things which gives a feeling of freedom, not of confusion. I wish, it were possible to give some idea of this scene, as viewed by the earliest freshness of dewy dawn. This habitation of man seemed like a nest in the grass, so thoroughly were the buildings and all the objects of human care harmonized with, what was natural. The tall trees bent and whispered all around, as if to hail with, sheltering love the men who had come to dwell among them. The young ladies were musicians, and spoke French fluently, having been educated in a convent. Here in the prairie, they had learned to take care of the milk-room, and kill the rattlesnakes that assailed their poultry-yard. Beneath the shade of heavy curtains you looked out from the high and large windows to see Norwegian peasants at work in their national dress. In the wood grew, not only the flowers I had before seen, and wealth of tall, wild roses, but the splendid blue spiderwort, that ornament of our gardens. Beautiful children strayed there, who were soon to leave these civilized regions for some really wild and western place, a post in the buffalo country. Their no less beautiful mother was of Welsh descent, and the eldest child bore the name of Gwynthleon. Perhaps there she will meet with some young descendants of Madoc, to be her friends; at any rate, her looks may retain that sweet, wild beauty, that is soon made to vanish from eyes which look too much on shops and streets, and the vulgarities of city “parties.” Next day we crossed the river. We ladies crossed on a little foot-bridge, from which we could look down the stream, and see 8. “Let any who think men do not need or want the church, hear these people talk about it as if it were the only indispensable thing, and see what I saw in Chicago. An elderly lady from Philadelphia, who had been visiting her sons in the West, arrived there about one o’clock on a hot Sunday noon. She rang the bell and requested a room immediately, as she wanted to get ready for afternoon service. Some delay occurring, she expressed great regret, as she had ridden all night for the sake of attending church. She went to church, neither having dined nor taken any repose after her journey.” — Manuscript Notes. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A YANKEE IN CANADA: HENRY ROWE SCHOOLCRAFT

the wagon pass over at the ford. A black thunder-cloud was coming up; the sky and waters heavy with expectation. The motion of the wagon, with its white cover, and the laboring horses, gave just the due interest to the picture, because it seemed, as if they would not have time to cross before the storm came on. However, they did get across, and we were a mile or two on our way before the violent shower obliged us to take refuge in a solitary house upon the prairie. In this country it is as pleasant to stop as to go on, to lose your way as to find it, for the variety in the population gives you a chance for fresh entertainment in every hut, and the luxuriant beauty makes every path attractive. In this house we found a family “quite above the common,” but, I grieve to say, not above false pride, for the father, ashamed of being caught barefoot, told us a story of a man, one of the richest men, he said, in one of the Eastern cities, who went barefoot, from choice and taste. Near the door grew a Provence rose, then in blossom. Other families we saw had brought with them and planted the locust. It was pleasant to see their old home loves, brought into connection with their new splendors. Wherever there were traces of this tenderness of feeling, only too rare among Americans, other things bore signs also of prosperity and intelligence, as if the ordering mind of man had some idea of home beyond a mere shelter beneath which to eat and sleep. No heaven need wear a lovelier aspect than earth did this afternoon, after the clearing up of the shower. We traversed the blooming plain, unmarked by any road, only the friendly track of wheels which bent, not broke, the grass. Our stations were not from town to town, but from grove to grove. These groves first floated like blue islands in the distance. As we drew nearer, they seemed fair parks, and the little log-houses on the edge, with their curling smokes, harmonized beautifully with them. One of these groves, Ross’s Grove, we reached just at sunset, It was of the noblest trees I saw during this journey, for generally the trees were not large or lofty, but only of fair proportions. Here they were large enough to form with their clear stems pillars for grand cathedral aisles. There was space enough for crimson light to stream through upon the floor of water which the shower had left. As we slowly plashed through, I thought I was never in a better place for vespers. That night we rested, or rather tarried, at a grove some miles beyond, and there partook of the miseries, so often jocosely portrayed, of bedchambers for twelve, a milk dish for universal hand-basin, and expectations that you would use and lend your “hankercher” for a towel. But this was the only night, thanks to the hospitality of private families, that we passed thus; and it was well that we had this bit of experience, else might we have pronounced all Trollopian records of the kind to be inventions of pure malice. With us was a young lady who showed herself to have been bathed in the Britannic fluid, wittily described by a late French HDT WHAT? INDEX

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writer, by the impossibility she experienced of accommodating herself to the indecorums of the scene. We ladies were to sleep in the bar-room, from which its drinking visitors could be ejected only at a late hour. The outer door had no fastening to prevent their return. However, our host kindly requested we would call him, if they did, as he had “conquered them for us,” and would do so again. We had also rather hard couches (mine was the supper-table); but we Yankees, born to rove, were altogether too much fatigued to stand upon trifles, and slept as sweetly as we would in the “bigly bower” of any baroness. But I think England sat up all night, wrapped in her blanket-shawl, and with a neat lace cap upon her head, — so that she would have looked perfectly the lady, if any one had come in, — shuddering and listening. I know that she was very ill next day, in requital. She watched, as her parent country watches the seas, that nobody may do wrong in any case, and deserved to have met some interruption, she was so well prepared. However, there was none, other than from the nearness of some twenty sets of powerful lungs, which would not leave the night to a deathly stillness. In this house we had, if not good beds, yet good tea, good bread, and wild strawberries, and were entertained with most free communications of opinion and history from our hosts. Neither shall any of us have a right to say again that we cannot find any who may be willing to hear all we may have to say. “A’s fish that comes to the net,” should be painted on the sign at Papaw Grove. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A YANKEE IN CANADA: HENRY ROWE SCHOOLCRAFT

1845

Henry Rowe Schoolcraft’s ONEÓTA, OR CHARACTERISTICS OF THE RED RACE OF AMERICA FROM ORIGINAL NOTES AND MANUSCRIPTS (New York & London: Wiley & Putnam). THE RED RACE

(In about 1851 Henry Thoreau would copy items from this into his Indian Notebook #4.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A YANKEE IN CANADA: HENRY ROWE SCHOOLCRAFT

1847

Between the Fort Snelling military base and the settlement of St. Paul, Minnesota, Wakantankanwin Goddess, or Mary Nancy Eastman, the daughter of Captain Seth Eastman with Wakaninajinwin Stands Sacred or “Lucy” and thus the granddaughter of Marpiyawicasta Man of the Clouds, became the bride of Itewakanhdiota Many Lightnings.

Henry Rowe Schoolcraft’s and Seth Eastman’s HISTORICAL AND STATISTICAL INFORMATION, RESPECTING THE HISTORY, CONDITION AND PROSPECTS OF THE INDIAN TRIBES OF THE UNITED STATES: COLL. AND PREPARED UNDER THE DIRECTION OF THE BUREAU OF INDIAN AFFAIRS PER ACT OF CONGRESS OF MARCH 3RD 1847 (this set of volumes would be most carefully considered, as it was being published over a series of years, by Henry Thoreau). THE INDIAN TRIBES, I, 1851 THE INDIAN TRIBES, II, 1852 THE INDIAN TRIBES, III, 1854 THE INDIAN TRIBES, IV, 1854 THE INDIAN TRIBES, V, 1855 THE INDIAN TRIBES, VI, 1857 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1850

Henry Rowe Schoolcraft’s INFORMATION RESPECTING THE HISTORY, CONDITION, AND PROSPECTS OF THE INDIAN TRIBES OF THE UNITED STATES (Archives of Aboriginal Knowledge). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Early in the year: At the age of 41, Captain Seth Eastman was commanded from Texas to Washington DC, where he would be assigned to work on the six volumes of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft’s HISTORICAL AND STATISTICAL INFORMATION, RESPECTING THE HISTORY, CONDITION AND PROSPECTS OF THE INDIAN TRIBES OF THE UNITED STATES: COLL. AND PREPARED UNDER THE DIRECTION OF THE BUREAU OF INDIAN AFFAIRS PER ACT OF CONGRESS OF MARCH 3RD 1847, to be published by Lippincott, Grambo and Company in Philadelphia HDT WHAT? INDEX

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between 1851 and 1857.

THE INDIAN TRIBES, I, 1851 THE INDIAN TRIBES, II, 1852 THE INDIAN TRIBES, III, 1854 THE INDIAN TRIBES, IV, 1854 THE INDIAN TRIBES, V, 1855 THE INDIAN TRIBES, VI, 1857 Henry Thoreau would be accessing these volumes, courtesy of the library of the Boston Society of Natural History and courtesy of the Harvard Library, and making extracts into his Canadian Notebook, and Indian Notebooks #6, #7, #8, and #11,9 as the successive volumes of the set would be published. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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9. The original notebooks are held by the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, as manuscripts #596 through #606. There are photocopies, made by Robert F. Sayre in the 1930s, in four boxes at the University of Iowa Libraries, accession number MsC 795. More recently, Bradley P. Dean, PhD and Paul Maher, Jr. have attempted to work over these materials. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A YANKEE IN CANADA: HENRY ROWE SCHOOLCRAFT

1851

Henry Rowe Schoolcraft dedicated his THIRTY YEARS WITH THE INDIAN TRIBES, 1812-1842 to his friend Alexander Bryan Johnson. In this year, also, Schoolcraft and the US Army artist Captain Seth Eastman began issuing, in six volumes, their HISTORICAL AND STATISTICAL INFORMATION RESPECTING … THE INDIAN TRIBES OF THE UNITED STATES. (The series would be completed in 1857.) THE INDIAN TRIBES, I, 1851

(Henry Thoreau would be checking out this volume from the library of the Boston Society of Natural History on July 26, 1852.)

In about this year Thoreau copied into his Indian Notebook #4 from Schoolcraft’s ONEÓTA, OR CHARACTERISTICS OF THE RED RACE OF AMERICA FROM ORIGINAL NOTES AND MANUSCRIPTS. THE RED RACE

Isaac Smith Homans’s, Alexander Bryan Johnson’s, James William Gilbart’s, John Barnard Byles’s, and John Ramsay McCulloch’s THE BANKER’S COMMON-PLACE BOOK (Phillips, Sampson & Company).

(In this publication, the contribution of “A.B. Johnson, Esq., President of the Ontario Branch Bank, Utica,” to wit “A Treatise on Banking, the Duties of a Banker, and his Personal Requisites therefor,” is foregrounded, and provides the basis for the various other contributions by the various other authors.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1852

Harland Coultas’s THE PRINCIPLES OF BOTANY, AS EXEMPLIFIED IN THE CRYPTOGAMIA; FOR THE USE OF SCHOOLS AND COLLEGES (Philadelphia).

Publication of the 2d volume of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft’s and Captain Seth Eastman’s HISTORICAL AND STATISTICAL INFORMATION RESPECTING … THE INDIAN TRIBES OF THE UNITED STATES: THE INDIAN TRIBES, II, 1852

It was probably in this year that Henry Thoreau copied into his Indian Notebook #6 from the initial volume of BIOLOGY a 1771 edition of Mark Catesby’s THE NATURAL HISTORY OF CAROLINA, FLORIDA AND THE BAHAMA ISLANDS: CONTAINING THE FIGURES OF BIRDS, BEASTS, FISHES, SERPENTS, INSECTS AND PLANTS: PARTICULARLY THE FOREST-TREES, SHRUBS, AND OTHER PLANTS, NOT HITHERTO DESCRIBED, OR VERY INCORRECTLY FIGURED BY AUTHORS. MARK CATESBY, VOL. I

Also, probably in this year, Thoreau copied into his Indian Notebook #610 from NARRATIVE OF AN EXPEDITION THROUGH THE UPPER MISSISSIPPI TO ITASCA LAKE, THE ACTUAL SOURCE OF THIS RIVER; EMBRACING AN EXPLORATORY TRIP THROUGH THE ST. CROIX AND BURNTWOOD (OR BROULE) RIVERS; IN 1832. UNDER THE DIRECTION OF HENRY R. SCHOOLCRAFT.

Also probably in this year, Thoreau copied into his Canadian Notebook11 from a chart of the gulf and river of

10. The original notebooks are held by the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, as manuscripts #596 through #606. There are photocopies, made by Robert F. Sayre in the 1930s, in four boxes at the University of Iowa Libraries, accession number MsC 795. More recently, Bradley P. Dean, PhD and Paul Maher, Jr. have attempted to work over these materials. 11. Henry Thoreau’s Canadian Notebook is now at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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St. Lawrence that had been made by British naval officer Henry Wolsey Bayfield.

CAPTAIN BAYFIELD HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1853

November 28, Monday: Henry Thoreau checked out, from Harvard Library, the Reverend William Gilpin’s OBSERVATIONS ON THE COASTS OF HAMPSHIRE, SUSSEX, AND KENT, RELATIVE CHIEFLY TO PICTURESQUE BEAUTY: MADE IN THE SUMMER OF THE YEAR 1774 (London, Printed by A. Strahan for T. Cadell and W. Davies).12 He also checked out the Reverend’s THREE ESSAYS: ON PICTURESQUE BEAUTY; ON PICTURESQUE TRAVEL; AND ON SKETCHING LANDSCAPE: WITH A POEM ON LANDSCAPE PAINTING. TOTHESE ARE NOW ADDED, TWO ESSAYS GIVING AN ACCOUNT OF THE PRINCIPLES AND MODE IN WHICH THE AUTHOR EXECUTED HIS OWN DRAWINGS (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies), in its 3d edition issued in 1808.

THREE ESSAYS, 3D EDITION Having already perused the volumes for the years 1633-1638 and 1640, Thoreau checked out the JESUIT RELATION volumes for the years 1640-1641 and 1642.13

http://www.canadiana.org

At the Boston Society of Natural History, Thoreau checked out the 3d volume of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft’s and Captain Seth Eastman’s HISTORICAL AND STATISTICAL INFORMATION RESPECTING … THE INDIAN TRIBES OF THE UNITED STATES. THE INDIAN TRIBES, III, 1854

12. He would copy from this into his Fact Book, and use some of the material in CAPE COD. 13. Thoreau presumably read each and every volume of the JESUIT RELATIONS that was available in the stacks at the Harvard Library. We know due to extensive extracts in his Indian Notebooks #7 and #8 that between 1852 and 1857 he did withdraw or consult all the volumes for the years between 1633 and 1672. Thoreau took notes in particular in regard to the reports by Father Jean de Brébeuf, Father Jacques Buteux, Father Claude Dablon, Father Jérôme Lallemant, Father Paul Le Jeune, Father François Le Mercier, Father Julien Perrault, Father Jean de Quens, Father Paul Ragueneau, and Father Barthélemy Vimont. Cramoisy, Sebastian (ed.). RELATION DE CE QUI S’EST PASSÉ EN LA NOUVELLE FRANCE IN L’ANNÉE 1636: ENVOYÉE AU R. PERE PROVINCIAL DE LA COMPAGNIE DE JESUS EN LA PROVINCE DE FRANCE, PAR LE P. P AUL LE JEUNE DE LA MESME COMPAGNIE, SUPERIEUR DE LA RESIDENCE DE KÉBEC. A Paris: Chez Sebastian Cramoisy..., 1637 HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A YANKEE IN CANADA: HENRY ROWE SCHOOLCRAFT

Monday Nov. 28 Saw boys skating in Cambridge-Port the first ice to bear– Settled with J. Munroe & Co — and on a new Act placed 12 of my books with him on sale. I have paid him directly out of pocket since the book was published 290 dollars and taken his receipt for it — This does not include postage on proofsheets &c &c — I have received from other quarters about 15 dollars. This has been the pecuniary value of the book– Saw at the Nat Hist– Rooms the skeleton of a moose — with horns– The length of the spinal processes (?) over the shoulder was very great– The hind legs were longer than the front — & the horns rose about 2 feet above the shoulders & spread between 4 & 5 I judged– Dr Harris described to me his finding a species of Cicindela at the White mts this fall — (the same he had found there one specimen of som time ago–) supposed to be very rare — found at st Peter’s River & at Lake Superior — but he proves it to be common near the Wht. mts.

CAPE COD: To-day it was the Purple Sea, an epithet which I should not PEOPLE OF before have accepted. There were distinct patches of the color of a CAPE COD purple grape with the bloom rubbed off. But first and last the sea is of all colors. Well writes Gilpin concerning “the brilliant hues which are continually playing on the surface of a quiet ocean,” and this was not too turbulent at a distance from the shore. “Beautiful,” says he, “no doubt in a high degree are those glimmering tints which often invest the tops of mountains; but they are mere coruscations compared with these marine colors, which are continually varying and shifting into each other in all the vivid splendor of the rainbow, through the space often of several leagues.” Commonly, in calm weather, for half a mile from the shore, where the bottom tinges it, the sea is green, or greenish, as are some ponds; then blue for many miles, often with purple tinges, bounded in the distance by a light almost silvery stripe; beyond which there is generally a dark-blue rim, like a mountain ridge in the horizon, as if, like that, it owed its color to the intervening atmosphere. On another day it will be marked with long streaks, alternately smooth and rippled, light- colored and dark, even like our inland meadows in a freshet, and showing which way the wind sets. Thus we sat on the foaming shore, looking on the wine-colored ocean,—

Here and there was a darker spot on its surface, the shadow of a cloud, though the sky was so clear that no cloud would have been noticed otherwise, and no shadow would have been seen on the land, where a much smaller surface is visible at once. So, distant clouds and showers may be seen on all sides by a sailor in the course of a day, which do not necessarily portend rain where he is. In July we saw similar dark-blue patches where schools of Menhaden rippled the surface, scarcely to be distinguished from the shadows of clouds. Sometimes the sea was spotted with them far and wide, such is its inexhaustible fertility. Close at hand you see their back fin, which is very long and sharp, projecting two or three inches above water. From time to time also we saw the white bellies of the Bass playing along the shore.

WILLIAM GILPIN HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A YANKEE IN CANADA: HENRY ROWE SCHOOLCRAFT

November 29, Tuesday: Professor Sandra Harbert Petrulionis has described the entries of this day in the journal of Henry Thoreau in the following manner: On November 29, 1853, sandwiched in between the Journal’s discussion of a rare beetle and a local boy’s find of a Native American artifact, Thoreau records a story told to him by local farmer George Minott — a tale of a rabid dog which met its demise in Concord many years before. Francis H. Allen included this tale in his 1936 MEN OF CONCORD, a compilation of the Journal’s character sketches. As a way of leading in to it, Thoreau relates the fact that recently a boy in nearby Lincoln had been fatally bitten by a rabid dog. Thoreau — who calls what he’s about to write a “story” — justifies the digression as “worth telling for it shows how much trouble the passage of one mad dog through the town may produce” (Journal V 522). In classic storytelling fashion, Thoreau begins by establishing the time and setting: “It was when he [Minott] was a boy and lived down below the Old Ben Prescott House — over the Cellar Hole on what is now Hawthorne’s Land.” The following excerpts summarize Minott’s description of the dog’s progress through town:

... On Saturday, the 26th, a dog on whose collar the words “Milton Hill,” or equivalent ones, were engraved ran through the town, having, as the story went, bitten a boy in Lincoln. He bit several dogs in this town and was finally shot. Some of the dogs bitten have been killed, and rumor now says that the boy died yesterday. People are considerably alarmed. Some years ago a boy in Lincoln was bitten by a raccoon and died of hydrophobia. I observed to Minott to-night that I did not think that our doctors knew how to cure this disease, but he said they could cure it, he had seen a man bitten who was cured. The story is worth telling, for it shows ho much trouble the passage of one mad dog through the town may produce. It was when he was a boy and lived down below the old Ben Prescott house, over the cellar-hole on what is now Hawthorne’s land. The first he remembers a couple of men had got poles and were punching at a strange dog toward night under a barn in that neighborhood. The dog, which was speckled and not very large, would growl and bite the pole, and they ran a good deal of risk, but they did not know that he was mad. At length they routed him, and he took to the road and came on toward town, and Minott, keeping his distance, followed on behind. When the dog got to the old Ben Prescott Place, he turned up into the yard, where there were a couple of turkies, drove them into a corner — bit off the head of one, and carried the body off across the road into the meadow opposite. They then raised the cry of mad dog. He saw his mother and Aunt Prescott, two old ladies, coming down the road, while the dog was running the other way in the meadow, & he shouted to them to take care of them selves — for that dog was mad — The dog soon reentered the road at some bars and held on toward town. Minott next saw Harry Hooper — coming down the road after his cows ... & he shouted to him to look out for the dog was mad — but Harry, who was in the middle of the road, spread his arms out, one on each side, and, being short, the dog leaped right upon his open breast & made a pass at his throat, but missed it, though it frightened him a good deal; and Minott, coming up, exclaimed “Why, you’re crazy, Harry; if he’d ’a’ bitten ye, DOG ’t would ’a’ killed ye.” When he got up as far as the red house or Curtis place, the dog was about in the middle of the road, and a large and stout old gentleman by the name of Fay — dressed in small-clothes, was coming down the sidewalk. M. shouted to him also to take care of himself, for the dog was mad, and Fay said afterward that he heard him but he had always supposed that a mad dog would n’t turn out for anything; but when this dog was nearly abreast of him, he suddenly inclined toward him, and then again inclined still more, and seized him by the left leg just below the knee, and Fay, giving him a kick with the other leg, tripped himself up; and when he was down, the dog bit him in the right leg in the same place. Being by this time well frightened, and fearing that he would spring at his throat next, Fay seized the dog himself by his throat and held him fast, and called lustily for someone to come and kill him. A man by the name of Lewis rushed out of the red house with an old axe and began to tap on the dog’s nose with it, but he was afraid to strike harder, for Fay told him not to hit him. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A YANKEE IN CANADA: HENRY ROWE SCHOOLCRAFT

Minott saw it all, but kept still his distance. Suddenly Fay, not knowing what he did, let go, and the man, giving the dog a blow across the back, ran into the house, but, it being a dull meat axe, the dog trotted along, still toward town. He turned and went round the pond by Bowers’s and, going down to the brook by the roadside, lapped some water. Just then, Peter coming over the bridge, the dog reared up and growled at him and he, seeing that he was mad, made haste through the bars out of his way and cut across the fields to Reuben Brown’s. The dog went on, it being now between sundown and dark, to Peter Wheeler’s, and bit two cows, which afterward died of hydrophobia, and next he went to where Nathan Snow now lives, and bit a goose in the wing, and so he kept on through the town. The next that was heard of him, Black Cato, that lived at the Lee place, now Sam Wheeler’s, on the river, was waked up about midnight by a noise among the pigs, and, having got up, he took a club and went out to see what was the matter. Looking over into the pen, this dog reared up at him, and he knocked him back into it, and, jumping over, mauled him till he thought he was dead and then tossed him out. In the morning he thought he [would] go out and see whose dog he had killed, but lo! he had picked himself up, and there was no dog to be found. Cato was going out into the woods chopping that day, and as he was getting over a wall lined with brush, the same dog reared up at him once more, but this time, having heard of the mad dog, he was frightened and ran; but still the dog came on, and once or twice he knocked him aside with a large stone, till at length, the dog coming close to him, he gave him a blow which killed him; and lest he should run away again, he cut off his head and threw both head and body into the river.

Cato succeeds where esteemed white citizens fail; his heroic act rids the town of danger. From the vantage of our safe hindsight, the story’s humor is inseparable from its potential tragedy. Anyone who comes in contact with this dog could, of course, be killed. Nevertheless, Thoreau has a bit of fun at the expense of the townsfolk. Mr. Fay was possibly Grant Fay, a local farmer whose son Addison was a contemporary of Thoreau. As “a large and stout old gentleman... dressed in small-clothes,” twice bitten by the dog largely through his own ineptitude, Fay suffers at Thoreau’s hands. Moreover, Thoreau concludes with the information that “Fay went home ... drank some spirit ... went straight over to Dr. Heywoods ... & ... was doctored 3 weeks ... cried like a baby. The Dr cut out the mangled flesh & ... Fay ... never experienced any further ill effects from the bite” (525). Thoreau’s recording of this incident may have been influenced by his reading of Henry Schoolcraft’s ONEÓTA, a book he had read two years prior, that details many customs and traditions of the Chippewa and Algonquin Indians (Sattelmeyer 266). Within it, Schoolcraft inserts a brief sketch entitled “The Rabid Wolf,” in which a diseased wolf enters a small town, and like Minott’s mad dog, bites various farm animals before sinking its teeth into “a gentlemen of standing... who came to a melancholy end.” The wolf, according to Schoolcraft, “seemed to have a perfect ubiquity — it was everywhere.” Finally, “old Colonel S.,” the town’s Revolutionary War hero, shoots and kills the animal (375- 379). Like Schoolcraft, Thoreau also posits a Revolutionary War veteran as the mad dog’s nemesis, except that his story’s hero is a black man rather than a venerated white citizen. Who was “Black Cato?” The former slave of prominent Concord citizen Duncan Ingraham, he had fought in the Revolution, after which HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A YANKEE IN CANADA: HENRY ROWE SCHOOLCRAFT

he continued to live in Concord, dying there in 1805 (Bartlett 129-130). Cato had obtained his freedom in 1795; from then on, like most free blacks in Concord at this time, he lived a hand- to-mouth existence. Thoreau memorialized him in the “Former Inhabitants; and Winter Visitors” chapter of WALDEN as one of a handful of blacks who had preceded Thoreau in Walden Woods (257). J. Lyndon Shanley has documented that Thoreau amplified this chapter in 1853, the same year he writes down the story of the mad dog (66-67, 87, 196-197). Prior to Thoreau’s portrayals, Cato had been depicted as a hapless albeit lucky slave: in one anecdote, he manages to avoid being shot during the war when British Major Pitcairn put a gun to his head; and in another, he begs for sustenance from his former master (Brooks 58-59, Bartlett 129). That Thoreau casts as his hero a free black man who lived — literally and figuratively — on the margins of town appears a purposeful decision — one that possibly modifies the details Minott told. Although of course we can’t know if Thoreau changed any of the particulars as Minott related them, it is certainly conceivable that Thoreau elevated Cato’s stature as he recorded the events. To be sure, little effort was needed to heroize Cato: he did kill the dog after several others failed to halt its progress. Yet Thoreau seems to juxtapose Cato’s bravado with the panic and incompetence of the white characters. In contrast to their near hysterics, Cato acts decisively to hinder and, at last, to decapitate the dog. Although he doesn’t realize initially that he’s wrestling a rabid dog, when he learns this fact, Cato has the wisdom (unlike Mr. Fay) to try to get away from it. But when forced to deal with the dog literally head- on, Cato deals it a death blow. His swift, instinctual response to the dog reflects Cato’s connection to a way of life that Thoreau respects — to a culture that lives closer to nature than do the white townsfolk. What other reasons might Thoreau have had in the fall of 1853 for enthroning a black man as the hero of his narrative? At this time, Concord’s antislavery residents — including those in the Thoreau household — were in the throes of revolt against the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law. That July, the Thoreaus had hidden a runaway slave in their home; and just weeks before Minott’s story, the Thoreau family provided lodging to a free black woman who was attempting to raise the money needed to purchase her husband, enslaved in Virginia. And six months later, in May and June 1854, Thoreau ranted in his Journal against the slave power when fugitive slave Anthony Burns was arrested in Boston (Journal 4 113, Journal V 472, Journal 8 163-210). Unquestionably, Thoreau was affected by the heroism of these black people whose lives were on the line in ways that he and Concord’s other white citizens could never comprehend. In his study of the black folk hero, John Roberts argues that authors usually create “heroes ... who ... appear to possess personal traits ... that exemplify our conception of our ideal self” (1). Roberts believes that “folk heroic creation occurs because HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A YANKEE IN CANADA: HENRY ROWE SCHOOLCRAFT

groups, at critical moments in time, recognize in the actions of certain figures ... qualities or behaviors that they have reason to believe would enhance culture-building” (5). At the juncture of what Thoreau may have perceived to be just such a “critical moment,” he elevated Cato to the status of a black folk hero, countering previous depictions of him in the annals of Concord history. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A YANKEE IN CANADA: HENRY ROWE SCHOOLCRAFT

1854

Mary Henderson Eastman’s CHICORA AND OTHER REGIONS OF THE CONQUERORS AND THE CONQUERED features the local color of the native tribes of the Pueblos in New Mexico.14

Publication of the 3d and 4th volumes of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft’s and Captain Seth Eastman’s HISTORICAL AND STATISTICAL INFORMATION RESPECTING … THE INDIAN TRIBES OF THE UNITED STATES. THE INDIAN TRIBES, III, 1854 THE INDIAN TRIBES, IV, 1854

Henry Thoreau would be checking out Volume III from the library of the Boston Society of Natural History on November 28, 1853 and Volume IV from Harvard Library on December 7, 1854.

14. If this author ever visited the Southwestern region of the United States, I don’t know of that. It seems to me to be more than likely that in constructing this volume she would have been relying on missives from her hubby, Captain Seth Eastman — whom the US Army had posted to Texas. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A YANKEE IN CANADA: HENRY ROWE SCHOOLCRAFT

Yet another publication by the indefagitable Connecticut publisher Henry Trumbull, INDIAN NARRATIVES: CONTAINING A CORRECT AND INTERESTING HISTORY OF THE INDIAN WARS, FROM THE LANDING OF OUR PILGRIM FATHERS, 1620, TO GEN. WAYNE’S VICTORY, 1794. TO WHICH IS ADDED A CORRECT ACCOUNT OF THE CAPTURE AND SUFFERINGS OF MRS. JOHNSON, ZADOCK STEELE, AND OTHERS; AND ALSO A THRILLING ACCOUNT OF THE BURNING OF ROYALTON (Claremont, N.H.:Tracy and Brothers; Stereotyped at the Boston Stereotype Foundry):

INDIAN NARRATIVES

(This edition would be found in the personal library of Henry Thoreau.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A YANKEE IN CANADA: HENRY ROWE SCHOOLCRAFT

January 19, Thursday: While visiting the metropolis to testify in a court case, Henry Thoreau stopped by Harvard Library to turn in the 3d volume of HISTORICAL AND STATISTICAL INFORMATION RESPECTING … THE INDIAN TRIBES OF THE UNITED STATES, THE INDIAN TRIBES, III, 1854

that he had checked out on the 28th of November, and check out the first of the three volumes of Sir Uvedale Tomkyns Price (1747-1829)’s ESSAYS ON THE PICTURESQUE, AS COMPARED WITH THE SUBLIME AND THE BEAUTIFUL, AND ON THE USE OF STUDYING PICTURES, FOR THE PURPOSE OF IMPROVING REAL ESTATE (London: Mawman, 1810) (1st edition, London: J. Robson, 1794). HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A YANKEE IN CANADA: HENRY ROWE SCHOOLCRAFT

Thoreau also checked out Dr. James H. McCulloh, Jr. (1793-1870)’s RESEARCHES ON AMERICA: BEING AN ATTEMPT TO SETTLE SOME POINTS RELATIVE TO THE ABORIGINES OF AMERICA, &C. (Baltimore: Joseph Robinson, 1st edition 1816, 2d edition 1817).

15 Thoreau also checked out John Josselyn’s ACCOUNT OF TWO VOYAGES TO NEW-ENGLAND (1674).

15. Refer to Philip F. Gura’s “Thoreau and John Josselyn” in NEQ 48 (December 1975), pages 505-18:

It is my contention that people tracing the sources of Thoreau’s singular literary development have overlooked influences very close to home.... Could it not be that Thoreau’s true affinity is not to people like Emerson, but to those seventeenth-century men who were, in Urian Oakes’s words, “the Lord’s Remembrancers or Recorders”?... Is it accidental that the excursion was Thoreau’s chosen form, or that he would compose a botanical index for his trips to the Maine woods? HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A YANKEE IN CANADA: HENRY ROWE SCHOOLCRAFT

THE MAINE WOODS: There may be some truth in what he said about the moose growing larger formerly; for the quaint John Josselyn, a physician who spent many years in this very district of Maine in the seventeenth century, says, that the tips of their horns “are sometimes found to be two fathoms asunder,” —and he is particular to tell us that a fathom is six feet,— “and [they are] in height, from the toe of the fore foot to the pitch of the shoulder, twelve foot, both which hath been taken by some of my sceptique readers to be monstrous lies”; and he adds, “There are certain transcendentia in every creature, which are the indelible character of God, and which discover God.” This is a greater dilemma to be caught in than is presented by the cranium of the young Bechuana ox, apparently another of the transcendentia, in the collection of Thomas Steel, Upper Brook Street, London, whose “entire length of horn, from tip to tip, along the curve, is 13 ft. 5 in.; distance (straight) between the tips of the horns, 8 ft. 8 1/2 in.” However, the size both of the moose and the cougar, as I have found, is generally rather underrated than overrated, and I should be inclined to add to the popular estimate a part of what I subtracted from Josselyn’s.

JOHN JOSSELYN

Jan 19th 54 Went to Cambridge to Court. Dr Harris says that my coccoons found in Lincoln in Dec. are of the Atticus Cecropia. the largest of our emperor moths. He made this drawing of the 4 kinds of Emperor moths which he says we have– The Cecropia is the largest The coccoon must be right end uppermost when they are ready to come out. The A. Promethia is the only moth whose coccoon has a fastening wound round the petiole of the leaf & round the shoot — the leaf partly folded round it. That spider whose hole I found — & which I carried him, he is pretty sure is the Lycosa fatifera. In a large & splendid work on the insects of Georgia by Edwards & smith (?) near end of last century upstairs, I found plates of the above moths — called not atticus but phalaena — and other species of phalaena. He thinks that small beetle slightly metallic which I saw with grubs &c on the Yellow lily roots last fall — was a Donax or one of the Donasia? In Josselyn’s account of his voyage from London to Boston in 1638 he says “June the first day in the afternoon, very thick foggie weather, we sailed by an inchanted island,” &c This kind of remark to be found in so many accounts of voyages — appears to be a fragment of tradition come down from the earliest account of Atlantis & its disappearance– COLL.MASS.HIST.SOC. 1833 Varro having enumerated certain writers on Agriculture says accidentally that they wrote soluta ratione [should be soluta oratione] i.e. in prose. This suggests the difference between the looseness of prose & the precision of poetry. A perfect expression requires a particular rhythm or measure for which no other can be substituted– The prosaic is always a loose expression LIBRIS GRAMMATICIS Varro makes Fundanius say “I could not live [in Italy?] in a summer day of non diffinderem meo insititio [should HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A YANKEE IN CANADA: HENRY ROWE SCHOOLCRAFT

be insiticio] somno meridie — if I did not split it with my inserted sleep at noon” — i.e. on account of the heat– DE AGRI CULTURA LIBER Cato makes much account of the leaves of elms & poplars for sheep & oxen & Varro particularly recommends to plant elms along the confines of a farm because this not merely preserve the boundary & the fence but bear some baskets of grapes & afford the most palatable leaves for sheep & oxen. Varro divides fences into four kinds — unum naturale, alterum agreste, tertium militare, quartum fabrile. (many kinds of each)– The first is the living hedge– One kind of sepes agrestis is our rail fence — & our other dead wooden farm fences would come under this head– The military sepes consists of a ditch & rampart — is common along highways — sometimes a rampart alone. The 4th is the mason’s fence of stone — or brick (burnt or unburnt) or stone & earth together. DE AGRI CULTURA, I Seges dicitur quod aratum satum est; arvum, quod aratum necdum satum est: novalis, ubi satum fuit ante, quam secunda aratione renovetur. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A YANKEE IN CANADA: HENRY ROWE SCHOOLCRAFT

December 7, Thursday: Louis Pasteur was appointed as Dean of the new Faculty of Sciences in Lille. The advice he offered in his inaugural address has been variously translated into the English as “In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind” and “Chance favors the prepared mind” and “Fortune favors the prepared mind” and “In the field of observation, chance favors the prepared mind” and as “Where observation is concerned, chance favors only the prepared mind” and as “Prepare your mind so when your one big break come along, you will be ready to seize it” and as “Prepare yourself for opportunity.” I prefer a bumper-sticker- style: “Prepare for it.”

PREPARE FOR IT

“Dans les champs de l’observation le hasard ne favorise que les esprits préparés.” — Louis Pasteur, at the University of Lisle on December 7, 1854 HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A YANKEE IN CANADA: HENRY ROWE SCHOOLCRAFT

1 Henry Thoreau walked through Olneyville in Johnston, Rhode Island, 2 /2 or 3 miles west of Providence. On the way back from Providence to Concord he stopped at Harvard Library and checked out:

— John Dunn Hunter’s MEMOIRS OF A CAPTIVITY AMONG THE INDIANS OF NORTH AMERICA, 16 FROM CHILDHOOD TO THE AGE OF NINETEEN (Philadelphia, 1823)

MEMOIRS OF A CAPTIVITY http://www.merrycoz.org/adults.htm

16. Thoreau would register his notes on this reading in his Indian Notebook #8 and in his Fact Book. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A YANKEE IN CANADA: HENRY ROWE SCHOOLCRAFT

— Cadwallader Colden’s THE HISTORY OF THE FIVE INDIAN NATIONS OF CANADA, WHICH ARE DEPENDENT ON THE PROVINCE OF NEW-YORK IN AMERICA... (London: Printed for T. Osborne, 1747)

CADWALLADER COLDEN CADWALLADER COLDEN CADWALLADER COLDEN CADWALLADER COLDEN CADWALLADER COLDEN CADWALLADER COLDEN CADWALLADER COLDEN CADWALLADER COLDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A YANKEE IN CANADA: HENRY ROWE SCHOOLCRAFT

— the 4th volume of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft’s and Captain Seth Eastman’s HISTORICAL AND STATISTICAL INFORMATION RESPECTING … THE INDIAN TRIBES OF THE UNITED STATES

THE INDIAN TRIBES, IV, 1854 17 — JESUIT RELATIONS FOR 1639 http://www.canadiana.org

17. Thoreau presumably read each and every volume of the JESUIT RELATIONS that was available in the stacks at the Harvard Library. We know due to extensive extracts in his Indian Notebooks #7 and #8 that between 1852 and 1857 he did withdraw or consult all the volumes for the years between 1633 and 1672. Thoreau took notes in particular in regard to the reports by Father Jean de Brébeuf, Father Jacques Buteux, Father Claude Dablon, Father Jérôme Lallemant, Father Paul Le Jeune, Father François Le Mercier, Father Julien Perrault, Father Jean de Quens, Father Paul Ragueneau, and Father Barthélemy Vimont. Cramoisy, Sebastian (ed.). RELATION DE CE QUI S’EST PASSÉ EN LA NOUVELLE FRANCE IN L’ANNÉE 1636: ENVOYÉE AU R. PERE PROVINCIAL DE LA COMPAGNIE DE JESUS EN LA PROVINCE DE FRANCE, PAR LE P. P AUL LE JEUNE DE LA MESME COMPAGNIE, SUPERIEUR DE LA RESIDENCE DE KÉBEC. A Paris: Chez Sebastian Cramoisy..., 1637 He had already perused the volumes for 1633-1638 and 1640-1642. Harvard Library had just obtained this 1639 volume from Québec. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A YANKEE IN CANADA: HENRY ROWE SCHOOLCRAFT

WALDEN: The Jesuits were quite balked by those Indians who, being PEOPLE OF burned at the stake, suggested new modes of torture to their WALDEN tormentors. Being superior to physical suffering, it sometimes chanced that they were superior to any consolation which the missionaries could offer; and the law to do as you would be done by fell with less persuasiveness on the ears of those, who, for their part, did not care how they were done by, who loved their enemies after a new fashion, and came very near freely forgiving them all they did.

THE JESUITS HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A YANKEE IN CANADA: HENRY ROWE SCHOOLCRAFT

1855

Mary Henderson Eastman’s THE AMERICAN ANNUAL: ILLUSTRATIVE OF THE EARLY HISTORY OF NORTH AMERICA.

Publication of the 5th volume of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft’s and Captain Seth Eastman’s HISTORICAL AND STATISTICAL INFORMATION RESPECTING … THE INDIAN TRIBES OF THE UNITED STATES: THE INDIAN TRIBES, V, 1855

December 7, Friday: Henry Rowe Schoolcraft rose to the defense of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow by writing to the Washington DC National Intelligencer that all the episodes of THE SONG OF “HIAWATHA” derived from Native American lore as it was understood by him, and that he had himself never so much as heard of this Finnish KALEVALA thing (if anyone ought to be accused of plagiarism in this regard, it would be Schoolcraft for the manner in which he here dissimulated in describing as his own without giving due credit native American materials collected in 1843 and supplied to him by another researcher, Joshua V.H. Clark). HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A YANKEE IN CANADA: HENRY ROWE SCHOOLCRAFT

1857

Henry Rowe Schoolcraft and Captain Seth Eastman completed, at six volumes, their HISTORICAL AND STATISTICAL INFORMATION RESPECTING … THE INDIAN TRIBES OF THE UNITED STATES. (The series had begun in 1851.) THE INDIAN TRIBES, I, 1851 THE INDIAN TRIBES, II, 1852 THE INDIAN TRIBES, III, 1854 THE INDIAN TRIBES, IV, 1854 THE INDIAN TRIBES, V, 1855 THE INDIAN TRIBES, VI, 1857

Royal B. Stratton, LIFE AMONG THE INDIANS: BEING AN INTERESTING NARRATIVE OF THE CAPTIVITY OF THE OATMAN GIRLS, AMONG THE APACHE AND MOHAVE INDIANS ... San Francisco CA: Whitton, Towne & Company’s Excelsior Steam Power Presses. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A YANKEE IN CANADA: HENRY ROWE SCHOOLCRAFT

Here is what San Francisco, California looked like in this year: HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A YANKEE IN CANADA: HENRY ROWE SCHOOLCRAFT

1864

December 10, Saturday: Henry Rowe Schoolcraft died.

“MAGISTERIAL HISTORY” IS FANTASIZING: HISTORY IS CHRONOLOGY

People Mentioned in A Yankee in Canada “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A YANKEE IN CANADA: HENRY ROWE SCHOOLCRAFT

COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2010. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at .

“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST

Prepared: December 9, 2014 HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A YANKEE IN CANADA: HENRY ROWE SCHOOLCRAFT

ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested that we pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (as above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such a request for information we merely push a button. HDT WHAT? INDEX

PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A YANKEE IN CANADA: HENRY ROWE SCHOOLCRAFT

Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and recompile the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.

First come first serve. There is no charge. Place requests with . Arrgh.