Pygmalion on the Frontier

Henry and Jane Schoolcraft met at a “sugaring-off party” in Sault Ste. Marie in 1822 and were married the following year. Maple syrup photo by Minnie Wabanimkee

By Kathleen Stocking
Sun contributor

Reprinted from Stocking’s book Lake Country (U-M Press 1994), this essay is part of our series on the living legacy of Native Americans in northern Michigan.

One of the most puzzling marriages in Michigan history, perhaps in American history, has to have been that between Henry Schoolcraft and his Native American wife, Jane. Henry, whose name now graces roads, schools, and counties in Michigan, was an explorer who worked for the United States Department of War. He was the Indian agent at Sault Ste. Marie from 1823 to 1833. Jane was the daughter of an aristocratic Irish fur trader, John Johnston, and his wife, Ozhaw-Guscoday-Wayquay, daughter of a powerful Chippewa chief.

Trying to imagine the Schoolcraft marriage is like trying to imagine Pygmalion married to Galatea, because like Pygmalion, Schoolcraft fashioned Jane after his idea of what she should be; and like Galatea, Jane was mysterious and silent.

The two of them met at a sugaring-off party in Sault Ste. Marie in 1822 and were married in 1823. Henry was 30. Jane was 23. Jane had been educated in Ireland by wealthy aunts and, by frontier standards, must have been something of a hothouse flower. Henry, who we are told had no interest in women until he met Jane, had been traveling around the interior of the country for years, sitting on the bottom of a canoe, taking notes, and was ready, as he said, for the blandishments of domestic life.

Jane’s family was the most powerful family at the Soo. “Naturally,” writes Mentor L. Williams, editor of Schoolcraft’s journals, “their connections with the Indians afforded an opportunity Schoolcraft could not neglect.”

Jane is described in the correspondence of the period as a great beauty. Thomas McKenney, a Washington official who visited the Soo, described Jane in a letter to his wife. “Mildness of expression, and softness, and delicacy of manner as well as of voice, characterize her,” he wrote. “You would never judge, either from her complexion or her language, that her mother was Chippewa.”

Around this time Henry wrote a poem entitled “The Choice,” dedicated to Miss J.J., wherein he congratulates himself on finding in her the retiring nature that qualifies her to be his bride: a person of “sweet, retiring, simple, modest mien … in virtue principled, in manners guarded; kind to all others in a just degree, but fixed, devoted, loving only me.”

Initially, perhaps as in all marriages, the Schoolcraft union seems to have been happy, and they appear to have succeeded in carving out a personal and even intellectual life for themselves amidst the chaos of the frontier. Henry engaged Jane in writing for his magazine, The Literary Voyager. In a coy address to the readers, he writes “The letters of our female correspondent ‘Leelinau,’ we have pursued with pleasure, and recommended to the attention of our readers. Her lines under ‘Rosa,’ possess chasteness in the selection of her imagines, united to a pleasing versification.” For himself, he took the names Damoetas and Ekedo. They worked together researching and compiling Indian legends.

Two of the accomplishments Henry Schoolcraft is most famous for occurred during the early years of his marriage to Jane and were the direct result of her assistance and connections. The first was the researching of many Chippewa legends, including those that became the basis of Longfellow’s Hiawatha. The second was the discovery of the source of the Mississippi. It is unlikely that either of these achievements would have been possible for him without her.

On 27 June, 1824, a son, William Henry, was born: “a beautiful, bright-eyed little stranger,” Henry Schoolcraft writes, “with a face of the purest Caucasian whiteness.” He must have loved this firstborn son. He writes tenderly of how his son “played with his shadow as a phenomenon … [and’ talked to his dog as if it possessed reason.” Soon after, Schoolcraft began planning to build his home at Elmwood, at the Soo where the river would “run majestically before our doors.”

But after that something went sour. In 1827, William Henry died suddenly of the croup just before he turned 3. The Schoolcrafts appear to have been overcome with grief. They moved out of the home where the child had died — leaving the furniture still standing — and moved in with Jane’s parents until fall. Eventually, under their own roof again, two more children were born. Janee in 1828 and Johnson in 1829, but the marriage seems to have suffered a permanent blow from which it could never recover.

During these years, Schoolcraft was gone constantly in his work, assaying Indian lands and converting them to the United States domain. Jane is reported as increasingly ill, her undiagnosed pain, according to one source, treated with morphine.

We never learn the nature of Jane’s sickness. She is variously described as “living in her bed” and “appearing with damp, tremendous hands,” to greet visitors. Schoolcraft’s second wife, who presumably got her information from Schoolcraft, will tell us Jane’s illness was simply a fiendish addiction to opium. But it could also have been an undiagnosed disease, such as tuberculosis or cancer, complicated by a medically induced addiction to morphine, acquired during attempts at treatment. We never know. Taking Henry’s side, having a sick wife, let alone an addicted sick wife, if it was true, could not have been pleasant.

Henry Schoolcraft, it should be said here, was something of a cold fish. He was described as “lacking warmth” by one scholar and comes across in his writings as dull, pompous, and literal minded. One of his hobbies was collecting Indian skulls. He considered himself a student of craniology (an extant science), and at one point bragged that he had “211 Indian skulls in my possession,” which he was measuring with calipers. He could not ascertain why Indians, given that they were an inferior race, had larger heads. He concluded that it was the vigilance required of the savage’s wilderness existence that created a bigger brain and surmised that “even the Greeks, in their pre-Hellenic period,” probably had bigger heads.

He seemed to find Native Americans — as ultimately he was to find Jane — alternately fascinating and repulsive. On the one hand, he said he held his wife’s Indian heritage in “the highest possible honor,” and yet in his journals, he is unreservedly bigoted, describing the northern tribal groups as “untutored savages,” who were universally “lazy” and characteristically “cunning an deceitful.” Of the women, he says he “found little to admire, either in their collective morality or in their personal endowments.”

The question has to be asked: what was Jane doing married to someone whose business it was to take lands away from her Native American relatives? And, conversely, what was Henry doing married to a woman who was a member of a race of people he may have found interesting but basically didn’t respect?

They must have both been a little confused about their values, as people on frontiers in wartime are likely to be. They were not along in forming an interracial marriage, but their marriage, as interracial marriages go, did not occur at a propitious time. As recently as 1802, Thomas Jefferson had publicly advocated such marriages, and the practice was widespread in any event. However, by 1830, once most of the lands had been acquired and Andrew Jackson’s policy of removing indigenous peoples west of the Mississippi had come into play, the tide of public opinion against such marriages was turning.

The circumstances of Henry’s life also changed during this same time frame. Up until the time Henry met Jane, he had been an explorer and ethnographer, and his views on indigenous people had been slightly more sentimental and romanticized. After becoming an Indian agent, when his work often put him in opposition to Indian interests, he became more negative and critical.

He had initially been opposed to the removal of indigenous people from their lands but was to change his mind and become an active supporter of such policies. He came to believe that, more than education or money, Christianity was the key to helping them. “All our attempts in the way of agriculture, schooling, and the mechanical arts are liable to miscarry,” he wrote, “unless the Indian mind can be purified by gospel truth.”

Henry Schoolcraft became more religious with the passing years, according to ethnohistorian Robert Bieder, author of Science Encounters the Indian, 1820-1880: the Early Years of American Ethnology, a book published by the University of Oklahoma Press in 1989. In a letter to Jane in 1830, quoted in Bieder’s book, Henry exhorted Jane to make their household more devoutly Christian. He thought this would not be easy for Jane because of her background, “brought up in a remote place, without anything which deserves the name of a regular education: without the salutary influence of society to form your mind, without a mother, in many things to direct you, and with an overkind father.”

Being a woman would increase the difficulty for Jane, Henry writes, because “it is the domestic conduct of a female that is most continually liable to error, both of judgement and of feeling … Nothing is more clearly scriptural, than that a woman should forsake father and mother and cleave to her husband and look up to him with full confidence as, next to God, her guide philosopher and friend.”

In 1833 Henry Schoolcraft relocated the Indian agency to Mackinac Island. This further isolated Jane from her family, to whom she was very close — especially her mother — and who had provided her with both economic and moral support.

Henry spent more time now traveling away from home. One suspects that there must have been a growing realization on his part, at least, and perhaps an apprehension on hers, that the changing times made his marriage to Jane — and the children it had produced — a drawback to his advancement in his career beyond the wilderness.

Jane Schoolcraft may have realized on Mackinac Island, if not before, that Henry was uninterested in spending time with her or their children. She might have contemplated the possibility that his work negotiating treaties, if successful, would result in the end of their union. She perhaps had known, at the infant William Henry’s birth, that producing a child who looked Caucasian was her ticket to marital security and that the child’s death would be her undoing.

On Mackinac Island we know that the Schoolcraft children attended the mission school in which Jane was active. “This excellent and accomplished, and intelligent lady,” McKenney writes of Jane, “whose whole soul is in this work.”

One of the few intimate glimpses we get of Jane Schoolcraft is from Anna Jameson, an Irish writer who journeyed with Jane from Mackinac to Sault Ste. Marie by canoe. She tells of a night, when the mosquitoes were out in swarms, and Jane stayed up all night, singing to her children and waving the mosquitoes away.

In 1836 Schoolcraft concluded the treaty with the Michigan tribes whereby they would cede most of the state. By 1838, Schoolcraft had taken the children, Janee, 10, and Johnson, 9, and placed them in eastern boarding schools.

In a poem written in Chippewa and translated into English, Jane writes of journeying away from her children through dark trees, a dark land. “I leave the bright land where my little ones dwell with a sober regret and a bitter farewell.” By all accounts, Jane was a devoted mother who was heartbroken at being separated from her children.

The Schoolcrafts, by this time, were almost never together. On 9 May, 1842, Henry left for England and on 28 May, 1842, in the arms of her sister, Jane died.

Henry Schoolcraft returned to New York after his trip to Europe and for a time changed his name to Colcraft. He had been accused of misappropriation of government funds, and now “his failure to secure remunerative employment,” biographer Richard Bremer writes, “contributed to the further deterioration of his financial condition.” Robert Bieder characterized this time in Schoolcraft’s life as “a time of debt and ravenous insecurity.”

Beyond Henry’s journals and letters and the few poems of Jane’s that survive in the literary magazine that Henry published when they were first married, there are only a few secondary sources that shed light on the Schoolcraft marriage. One is a 697-page hyperbolic tome of Michigan chauvinism entitled, Schoolcraft! Longfellow! Hiawatha!, written by Chase and Stellanova Osborn. “To the Indians Henry Rowe Schoolcraft was a sun god,” the Osborns note with no trace of facetiousness.

A more obscure book, written by Schoolcraft’s second wife, Mary Howard Schoolcraft, is called The Blank Gauntlet. This book, described by virtually everyone as memoirs or thinly disguised fiction — including the Osborns, who liked it — is a book about Henry’s relationship with his first wife and their children.

Henry Schoolcraft met Mary Howard in 1846, and they were married in 1847. She was a spinster from a family of southern planters. Mary Howard owned “at least 20” people as slaves, biographer Richard Bremer recounts, and adds, “This valuable asset no doubt enhanced her attraction to the Indian scholar.”

In The Black Gauntlet, subtitled, A Tale of Plantation Life in South Carolina, southern belle Mary Howard Schoolcraft fictionalizes herself as Musidora Wyndham and Henry as Roland Walshingham. She dedicates the book to Henry Schoolcraft, whom she calls by the pet name, Ne na Baim, which she says is an Indian word meaning husband.

Part of this book is a proslavery tract. “Fie! Fie! On that abolitionist scourge,” she writes. “It is a high moral vocation to civilize and Christianize the heathen … to keep them in bondage until compulsory labor has tamed their beastliness.”

The book is also a description of Henry’s marriage to his “northern Pocahantas,” which the author says took place in a burst of “ethnological enthusiasm.” The children of this union saw their mother “as an angel of kindness” compared to Musidora, and they greeted “poor Musidora” with “freezing inhospitality.” Relationships with Henry Schoolcraft’s children were never good after this second marriage.

The Schoolcrafts adopted an 11-year-old child who eventually married and gave birth, but both mother and child died soon after. There were no progeny of Henry Schoolcraft who survived. Johnston never married and, according to Mary Schoolcraft, fell prey to the weaknesses of his race. Janee became engaged to a man who lost his mind the week before they were to be married. She eventually married again, but never had children.

Henry Schoolcraft, as his biographers, the Osborns, put it in their inimitable style, “had his chain of new days on the earth come at last to its final links on December 10, 1864, in his 72nd year, of dry mortification of the parts.”

What is left of Jane and Henry’s life together that is visible is Sault Ste. Marie. I visited there one warm day and sat on the edge of the canal and watched as one ship after another came down through the locks.

The locks dominate this town — and with their uniformed guards and fences along the canal — give it the feeling of an army post, duplicating in aura, if not fact, what this town must have been like in its Fort Brady days when Henry built his Indian agency on the St. Marys River and negotiated treaties out of it.

I sat in the park near the canal and watched the waters of the St. Marys change color, in the way Anna Jameson described the waters of Lake Ontario changing color, like a dying fish, from gray to ruby to palest green, to silver and rose. Some students from Lake Superior State University came down to sun themselves by the canal, but they knew nothing of the Schoolcrafts and suggested I go up to the Soo Locks information center.

At the Locks there was no one on duty who knew about the Schoolcrafts. I ended up looking at photographs of the locks in various stages of construction: half-built, three-quarters built, all done. A lady outside on the steps, handing out brochures for tours of the locks, said she didn’t know, but she thought Schoolcraft was one of the founders of the town.