The period referred to, is one of considerable interest. It is the thirty years that succeeded the declaration of war by the United States, in 1812, against Great Britain, and embraces a large and important part of the time of the settlement of the Mississippi Valley, and the great lake basins. During this period ten States have been added to the Union. Many actors who now slumber in their graves are called up to bear witness. Some of the number were distinguished men; others the reverse. Red and white men alike express their opinions. Anecdotes and incidents succeed each other without any attempt at method. The story these incidentally tell, is the story of a people's settling the wilderness. It is the Anglo-Saxon people occupying the sites of the Indian wigwams. It is a field in which plumed sachems, farmers, legislators, statesmen, speculators, professional and scientific men, and missionaries of the gospel, figure in their respective capacities. Nobody seems to have set down to compose an elaborate letter, and yet the result of the whole, viewed by the philosophic eye, is a broad field of elaboration.
HENRY R. SCHOOLCRAFT.
PHILADELPHIA, Sept. 12th, 1851.
SKETCHES OF THE LIFE OF HENRY A. SCHOOLCRAFT.
The early period at which Mr. Schoolcraft entered the field of observation in the United States as a naturalist; the enterprise he has from the outset manifested in exploring the geography and geology of the Great West; and his subsequent researches as an ethnologist, in investigating the Indian languages and history, are well known to the public, and may be appropriately referred to as the grounds of the present design, in furnishing some brief and connected sketches of his life, family, studies, and literary labors. He is an example of what early and continued zeal, talent, and diligence, united with energy of character and consistent moral habits, may accomplish in the cause of letters and science, by the force of solitary application, without the advantage of hereditary wealth, the impulse of patronage, or the prestige of early academic honors. Ardent in the pursuit of whatever engaged his attention, quick in the observation of natural phenomena, and assiduous in the accumulation of facts; with an ever present sense of their practical and useful bearing--few men, in our modern history, have accomplished so much, in the lines of research he has chosen, to render science popular and letters honorable. To him we are indebted for our first accounts of the geological constitution, and the mineral wealth and resources of the great valley beyond the Alleghanies, and he is the discoverer of the actual source of the Mississippi River in Itasca Lake. For many years, beginning with 1817, he stirred up a zeal for natural history from one end of the land to the other, and, after his settlement in the West, he was a point of approach for correspondents, as his personal memoirs denote, not only on these topics, but for all that relates to the Indian tribes, in consequence of which he has been emphatically pronounced "The Red Man's FRIEND."
Mr. Schoolcraft is a native of New York, and is the descendant in the third generation, by the paternal line, of an Englishman. James Calcraft had served with reputation in the armies of the Duke of Marlborough during the reign of Queen Anne, and was present in that general's celebrated triumphs on the continent, in one of which he lost an eye, from the premature explosion of the priming of a cannon. Owing to these military services he enjoyed and cherished a high reputation for bravery and loyalty.
He was a descendant of a family of that name, who came to England with William the Conqueror--and settled under grants from the crown in Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire--three separate branches of the family having received the honor of knighthood for their military services.
In the reign of George the Second, consequently after 1727, he embarked at Liverpool in a detachment of veteran troops, intended to act against Canada. He was present in the operations connected with the building of Forts Anne and Edwards, on the North River, and Fort William Henry on Lake George.
At the conclusion of these campaigns he settled in Albany county, N.Y., which has continued to be the residence of the family for more than a century. Being a man of education, he at first devoted himself to the business of a land surveyor, in which capacity he was employed by Col. Vroman, to survey the boundaries of his tract of land in the then frontier settlement of Schoharie. At the latter place he married the only daughter and child of Christian Camerer, one of the Palatines--a body of determined Saxons who had emigrated from the Upper Rhine in 1712, under the assurance or expectation of a patent from Queen Anne.1 this marriage he had eight children--namely, James, Christian, John, Margaret, Elizabeth, Lawrence, William, and Helen.
For many years during his old age, he conducted a large school in this settlement, being the first English school that was taught in that then frontier part of the country. This appears to be the only tenable reason that has been assigned for the change of the family name from Calcraft to Schoolcraft.
When far advanced in life, he went to live with his son William, on the New York grants on Otter Creek, in the rich agricultural region south of Lake Champlain--which is now included in Vermont. Here he died at the great age of one hundred and two, having been universally esteemed for his loyalty to his king, his personal courage and energy, and the uprightness of his character.
After the death of his father, when the revolutionary troubles commenced, William, his youngest son, removed into Lower Canada. The other children all remained in Albany County, except Christian, who, when the jangling land disputes and conflicts of titles arose in Schoharie, followed Conrad Wiser, Esq. (a near relative), to the banks of the Susquehanna. He appears eventually to have pushed his way to Buchanan River, one of the sources of the Monongahela, in Lewis County, Virginia, where some of his descendants must still reside. It appears that they became deeply involved in the Indian wars which the Shawnees kept up on the frontiers of Virginia. In this struggle they took an active part, and were visited with the severest retribution by the marauding Indians. It is stated by Withers that, between 1770 and 1779, not less than fifteen of this family, men, women, and children, were killed or taken prisoners, and carried into captivity.2
Of the other children of the original progenitor, James, the eldest son, died a bachelor. Lawrence was the ancestor of the persons of this name in Schoharie County. Elizabeth and Helen married, in that county, in the families of Rose and Haines, and, Margaret, the eldest daughter, married Col. Green Brush, of the British army, at the house of Gen. Bradstreet, Albany. Her daughter, Miss Francis Brush, married the celebrated Col. Ethan Allen, after his return from the Tower of London.
JOHN, the third son, settled in Watervleit, in the valley of the Norman's Kill--or, as the Indians called it, Towasentha--Albany County. He served in a winter's campaign against Oswego, in 1757, and took part also in the successful siege and storming of Fort Niagara, under Gen. Prideaux 3 and Sir William Johnson, in the summer of 1759. He married a Miss Anna Barbara Boss, by whom he had three children, namely, Anne, Lawrence, and John. He had the local reputation of great intrepidity, strong muscular power, and unyielding decision of character. He died at the age of 64. LAWRENCE, his eldest son, had entered his seventeenth year when the American Revolution broke out. He embraced the patriotic sentiments of that era with great ardor, and was in the first revolutionary procession that marched through and canvassed the settlement with martial music, and the Committee of Safety at its head, to determine who was Whig or Tory.
The military element had always commanded great respect in the family, and he did not wait to be older, but enrolled himself among the defenders of his country.
He was present, in 1776, when the Declaration of Independence was read to the troops drawn up in hollow square at Ticonderoga. He marched