The Mid-American frontier

“This is the autobiographical account of an explorer, government administrator, and scholar whose researches into the language and customs of the Chippewa and other Native American peoples of the Great Lakes region are considered milestones in nineteenth-century ethnography”. – American Memory Project. Henry Rowe Schoolcraft (1793-1864) left the family glass-making business in New York at the age of 25 to explore the western frontier. In 1818 he and a companion traveled into frontier Missouri, where he employed his interest in geology and mineralogy to write A View of the Lead Mines of Missouri. The expedition and publication brought him to the attention of Secretary of War John C. Calhoun, who recommended him to Michigan Territorial Governor Lewis Cass, who in turn invited Schoolcraft along on the 1820 Cass Expedition. That expedition traveled nearly 2,000 miles along Lake Huron and Lake Superior, down the Mississippi River, and back to Detroit. Schoolcraft chronicled the expedition in a book, which can be found on the Michigan-Explorers & Travelers page of this website. Schoolcraft was a prolific writer on a number of subjects, and also participated in more expeditions. In 1822 he was appointed the first U.S. Indian Agent, in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan. He married the daughter of an Ojibwa chief there, who helped teach him the Ojibwa language and assisted him in his ethnological studies of Native Americans. The couple moved to Mackinac Island in 1833 and remained there until 1840. Among his numerous accomplishments, he named many of Michigan’s counties. He created Indian-sounding county names by combining syllables from Native American languages. - Wikipedia was used as a source for this note.

Editor William T. Coggeshall (1824-1867) was a journalist and publisher, and editor of The Genius of the West, a literary magazine in Cincinnati. He served as State Librarian of Ohio from 1856 to 1862. The editor wrote in his Preface that it was his intention to include in the collection every person “…legitimately belonging to the West, who has gained recognition as a writer of reputable verse.” It contains selections, with biographical notices, from the writings of 97 men and 55 women. 60 were residents of Ohio, 23 of Indiana, 14 of Kentucky, 13 of Illinois, 5 of Michigan and 4 of Wisconsin. Not more than 10 of these poets pursued literature as a profession. The volume contains poems from about 1815 to the early 1860s. The book is very substantial in size and the biographies are sometimes surprisingly detailed. Entries are in chronological order, and the first ones contain valuable background detail about the early literary life of Cincinnati.