Henry Rowe Schoolcraft | Historical and statistical information, respecting the… Indian tribes of the United States. Philadelphia, 1851–1857 - photo 1
Henry Rowe Schoolcraft | Historical and statistical information, respecting the… Indian tribes of the United States. Philadelphia, 1851–1857 - photo 2
Henry Rowe Schoolcraft | Historical and statistical information, respecting the… Indian tribes of the United States. Philadelphia, 1851–1857 - photo 3

Henry Rowe Schoolcraft | Historical and statistical information, respecting the… Indian tribes of the United States. Philadelphia, 1851–1857

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£ 8 255
Auction dateClassic
28.11.2023 14:00UTC +01:00
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Sotheby´s
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United Kingdom, London
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ID 1076598
Lot 75 | Henry Rowe Schoolcraft | Historical and statistical information, respecting the… Indian tribes of the United States. Philadelphia, 1851–1857
Henry Rowe Schoolcraft

Historical and statistical information, respecting the history, conditions and prospects of the Indian tribes of the United States: collected and prepared under the direction of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo & Co. [vols. I-IV]; J. B. Lippincott & Co. [vols. V-VI], 1851–1857

FIRST EDITION, 6 volumes bound in 12, folio (325 x 248mm.), half titles, steel-engraved additional titles and portrait of the author, folding letterpress table, 329 ENGRAVED OR LITHOGRAPHED PLATES, PLANS, AND MAPS after Seth Eastman and others (including the “Map of Kansas River”), some tinted, many hand coloured or chromolithographed, dark brown half morocco over crimson cloth by Riviere & Son, spines gilt in compartments, marbled endpapers, top edges gilt, occasional minor foxing and offsetting, mostly marginal, some slight wear to bindings

THE MOST COMPREHENSIVE NINETEENTH-CENTURY ACCOUNT OF THE HISTORY AND CONTEMPORARY STATUS OF NATIVE AMERICAN TRIBES and, as such, an essential work of American ethnography, its “vast mass of really valuable material,” in Field’s words, performing “a very important service for Indian history in collecting and preserving an immense amount of historical data”.

Henry Schoolcraft (1793-1864) travelled west in 1820 as a mineralogist on the first American expedition exploring the Great Lakes region, and began life there as an Indian agent in Michigan two years later. His career as an ethnologist had its roots in his marriage to Jane Johnson, whose mother was Ojibwa. According to ANB, with the aid of his wife and her family, “Schoolcraft embarked on a pioneer study of Ojibwa language and oral literature. After publishing individual ethnological and literary papers, he presented the first collection of Indian myths and legends for American readers in a popular two-volume work, Algic Researches (1839), a source for Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha.

After a career as Superintendent of Indian Affairs for Michigan, Schoolcraft was appointed by the Secretary of War to “collect and digest such statistics and materials as may illustrate the history, present condition, and future prospects of the Indian tribes of the United States”, in accordance with a May 1847 act of Congress. Schoolcraft sent government-sanctioned questionnaires to current and former employees of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, fellow ethnologists who had studied American Indian tribes, traders who had travelled and worked among the Indians, and “teachers and missionaries to the aborigines”. He edited and compiled the responses into this vast survey published over a six-year period.

Howes says that the work collected and preserved “vocabularies of Indian languages, grammatical analyses, legends of various tribes, biographies of chiefs and warriors, narratives of captivities, histories of Indian wars, emigrations, and theories of their origin”.

In the introduction to the 1951 Index to this work produced by the Bureau of American Ethnology, director Matthew Stirling noted, “this opus will always remain a mine of source material. At the time of its compilation, aboriginal culture in the United States, although rapidly disintegrating, was still a living, vital reality”. The text’s value is much enhanced by the meticulous illustrations of Seth Eastman (1808-1875), whose work as a topographical artist for the U.S. Army had instilled a sharp eye for detail and an ability to produce images of near-photographic quality. According to Field, “a very large number of beautiful steel engravings, representative of some phase of Indian life and customs, are contained in the work, but the most valuable of its illustrations are the drawings of weapons, domestic utensils, instruments of gaming and amusement, sorcery and medicine, objects of worship, their sculpture, paintings, and fortifications, pictograph writing, dwellings, and every form of antiquities”.
Auction house category:Prints, graphics, books
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28.11.2023
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