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"It is to be hoped that Mr. S. will resume the course of inquiry
and research that he has marked out for himself; and that he will be
induced to give to the public the results of his long and intimate
familiarity with the Indian life and character."
17th. The Detroit Daily Advertiser, of this day, has
the following critical notice on the work of Algic Researches,
under the head of Indian Tales and Legends.
"This work has just been offered for sale at our book-stores, and we
strongly recommend it to all those who feel an interest in the
character of our aborigines. It is well known to many of us here,
that Mr. Schoolcraft has, for the last several years, been
industriously engaged in collecting facts which illustrate the
'mythology, distinctive opinions, and intellectual character' of the
Indians. His researches have embraced 'their oral tales, fictitious
and historical; their hieroglyphics, music, and poetry; and the
grammatical structure of their languages, the principles of their
construction, and the actual state of their vocabulary.' The
materials he has now on hand afford him the means of fulfilling this
extensive plan, and this 'first series' is only a leading
publication.
"When the position which Mr. S. has occupied for the last seventeen
or more years is recollected, as well as his fitness and exertions
to improve all its advantages, we shall at once see the benefit to
the literary and scientific world which his researches in these
various departments are likely to produce. The subjects which have
engaged his attention are regarded with deep interest by the
philanthropist, the philologist, the archaeologist, as well as many
other liberal inquirers, both in Europe and America, who, amid the
scanty facts, cursory observations, and hurried, random conjectures
of those who have been favored with a comparatively near view of
them, have lamented the want of such deliberate investigations and
comparative examinations, continued with sober judgment through a
long series of years, as are now offered to the public. We trust
that a proper and enlightened patronage will warrant Mr. Schoolcraft
in completing his design. No man, possessing his qualifications, has
enjoyed his advantages. He has been able to take up, at his leisure,
the scattered links of a broken chain, and fit them together. A
chaos of aboriginal facts will be reduced, under his hand, to some
degree of order.
"Mr. Schoolcraft and Mr. Catlin have done more to preserve the
fleeting traits of aboriginal character and history than all their
predecessors in this field of inquiry, and none can follow them with
the same success, as none can have the same range of subjects before
them. The scene is changing with each year, and the past, with
respect to the Savages, does not recur. They fall back with no hope
to recover lost ground; they diminish with no hope to increase
again; they degenerate with no hope to revive in physical or moral
strength. Those who have seen them most during the last few years,
have seen them best. After observers will find mere fragments, or a
heterogeneous mass, in which all original identity is distorted or
gone.
"The Tales now published must not be estimated for their intrinsic
merit alone. They may have less variety of construction, less beauty
of imagination, less singularity of incident, than belong to
oriental tales, the productions of more refined times, or more
excitable people. But the estimate must not be comparative. They are
to be regarded as the type of aboriginal mind, as the measure of
intellectual power of our Sons of the Forest; as speaking their
sentiments, their hopes and their fears, whatever they were or are,
whether elevated or depressed, whether raising the race or sinking
it in the scale of untutored nations. Whether they prove a poverty
of mental energy, a feebleness of imagination, a want of invention,
or the reverse, cannot affect the value of these volumes in the
opinion of those who look into them for evidences of the true
character of the Indians. Mr. Schoolcraft, or any other gentleman of
taste and skill, might have formed out of these materials a series
of Tales, highly finished in their unity and design, strikingly
colored by fancy, such as would have caught the popular whim. But
this was not his object. He has been honest in his renderings of the
aboriginal sense, whether pointed or mystical, of the Indian's
mythology, whether intelligible or obscure; of their shadowy
glimpses of the past and the future; of the beginning and end of
things, without alteration or embellishment. Such a work was wanted,
and such a work was expected from Mr. Schoolcraft.
"If we have room, we will quote one or two of the shorter tales,
such as 'Mon-daw-min, or the origin of Indian corn,' and the
'Celestial Sisters,' both of which are very characteristic, and
show, under the garb of much figurative beauty, how Indians
appreciate the blessings of a kind Providence, and, how his domestic
affections may glow and endure. Indeed, there are few of these tales
that would not give interest to our columns, and we shall be pleased
to give our readers an occasional taste, provided we thereby induce
them to supply themselves with the full feast in their power."
20th. It is stated that the oldest town in the United States
is St. Augustine, Florida, by more than forty years. It was founded
forty years before Virginia was colonized. Some of the houses are
yet standing which are said to have been built more than three
centuries ago, that is to say, about 1540. De Soto landed in Florida
in 1539. Narvaez, in his unfortunate expedition, landed in 1537.
Both these expeditions were confined to the exploration of the
country west and north of the Bay of Espiritu Santo, reaching to the
Mississippi. De Soto crossed the latter into the southeastern corner
of the present State of Missouri, and into the area of Arkansas,
where he died.
21st. The Detroit Free Press, of this day, has the
following remarks:--
"Much interest is manifested in this work of Mr. Schoolcraft, as a
timely rescue from oblivion of an important portion of the great
world of mind--important inasmuch as it is a manifestation of two
principles of human nature prominent in an interesting variety of
the human race, the sense of the marvelous and the sense of the
beautiful, or the developments of wonder and ideality. The character
of a people cannot be fully understood without a reference to its
tales of fiction and its poetry. Poetry is the offspring of the
beautiful and the wonderful, and much of it the reader will find
embodied in the Indian tales to which the author of the Algic
Researches has given an enduring record.
"Much of this work strongly reminds the reader of the Grecian
Mythology and the Arabian Nights Entertainments.
"According to one of the Odjibwa tales, the morning star was once a
beautiful damsel that longed to go to 'the place of the breaking of
daylight." By the following poetic invocation of her brother, she
was raised upon the winds, blowing from 'the four corners of the
earth,' to the heaven of her hopes:--
Blow winds,
blow! my sister lingers
From her
dwelling in the sky,
Where the
morn with rosy fingers,
Shall her
cheeks with vermil dye.
There, my
earliest views directed,
Shall from
her their color take,
And her
smiles, through clouds reflected,
Guide me on,
by wood and lake.
"The work abounds with similar beautiful thoughts and inventions.
"Catlin may be called the red man's painter; Schoolcraft his
poetical historian. They have each painted in living colors the
workings of the Indian mind, and painted nature in her unadorned
simplicity. They have done much which, without them, would, perhaps,
have remained undone, and become extinct with the Indian race. As
monuments of history for future ages, their works are not
sufficiently appreciated.
"The author of these volumes has stamped upon his page much of the
intellectual existence of the simple children of the forest, and
bequeathed us a detail map of their terra incognita--their
fireside amusements in legendary lore."
I am willing to notice this and some other criticisms of this work
as popular expressions of opinion on the subject. But it is
difficult for an editor to judge, from the mere face of the volumes,
what an amount of auxiliary labor it has required to collect these
legends from the Indian wigwams. They had to be gleaned and
translated from time to time. Seventeen years have passed since I
first began them--not that anything like this time, or the half of
it, has been devoted to it. It was one of my amusements in the long
winter evenings--the only time of the year when Indians will tell
stories and legends. They required pruning and dressing, like wild
vines in a garden. But they are, exclusively (with the exception of
the allegory of the vine and oak), wild vines, and not pumpings up
of my own fancy. The attempts to lop off excrescences are not,
perhaps, always happy. There might, perhaps, have been a fuller
adherence to the original language and expressions; but if so, what
a world of verbiage must have been retained. The Indians are prolix,
and attach value to many minutiae in the relation which not only
does not help forward the denouement, but is tedious and witless to
the last degree. The gems of the legends--the essential points--the
invention and thought-work are all preserved.
Their chief value I have ever thought to consist in the insight they
give into the dark cave of the Indian mind--its beliefs, dogmas, and
opinions--its secret modes of turning over thought--its real
philosophy; and it is for this trait that I believe posterity will
sustain the book.
A literary friend, of good judgment, of Detroit, writes (19th):
"Your tales have reached me, and I have read them over with a deep
interest, arising from a double source--the intrinsic value of such
stories and the insight they give of Indian intellect and modes of
thought. They form a truly important acquisition to our literary
treasures, as they throw a light oft the Indian character which has
been imparted from no other quarter. They form a standard by which
to determine what is true and what is false in the representations
made heretofore of the aboriginal nations on most prominent
subjects. No one will doubt that you render the genuine Indian mind
and heart. Those who conform to these renderings will pass muster;
the rest will be rejected. Let Mr. Cooper and others be thus
measured."
24th. Muk-kud-da Ka-niew (or the Black War Eagle), chief of
the coasts of Arenac, brought me an antique pipe of peculiar
construction, disinterred at Thunder Bay. It was found about six
feet underground; and was disclosed by the blowing down of a large
pine, which tore up a quantity of earth by its roots. The tree was
two fathoms round, and would make a large canoe. With the pipe were
found two earthen vases, which broke on taking them up. In these
vases were some small bones of the pickerel's spine. He saw also the
leg bones of an Indian, but the upper part of the skeleton appeared
to be decomposed, and was not visible. He thinks the tree must have
grown up on an old grave. The pipe consisted of a squared and
ornamented bowl, with a curved and tapering handle, all made solid
from a sort of coarse terra cotta. He says it was used by
taking the small end in the mouth, and thinks such was the practice
of the ancient Indians, although the mode is now so different by
their descendants. The chief ornament consists of eight dots on each
face, separated by longitudinal strokes, leaving four in a
compartment. If the tree was four feet diameter, as he states, it
denotes an ancient occupation of the shores of Lake Huron, which was
probably of the old era of the mining for copper in Lake Superior.
This site includes some historical
materials that may imply negative stereotypes reflecting the culture or language
of a particular period or place. These items are presented as part of the
historical record and should not be interpreted to mean that the WebMasters in
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Personal Memoirs of a Residence of Thirty Years with the
Indian Tribes on the American Frontiers, 1851
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