AMERICAN INDIAN FAIRY TALES.....
With no written language, Native Americans living in the Lake Superior region passed their cultural identity down through the generations by way of stories. Far more than mere tales to amuse children, they passed along the collective wisdom of the tribes. In the 1830s, government Indian Agent and ethnologist Henry R Schoolcraft learned the language of these people and went out to collect and preserve their stories before the tribes disappeared under the westward rush of American civilization. Though these stories were recast as children’s fairy tales in the 1920s, they contain much of the old wisdom of a culture which has largely disappeared
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY.....
Henry Rowe Schoolcraft (March 28, 1793 – December 10, 1864) was an American geographer, geologist, and ethnologist, noted for his early studies of Native American cultures, as well as for his 1832 expedition to the source of the Mississippi River. He married Jane Johnston, whose parents were Ojibwe and Scots-Irish. Her knowledge of the Ojibwe language and of Ojibwe legends, which she shared with Schoolcraft, formed in part the source material for Longfellow's epic poem, The Song of Hiawatha. Schoolcraft's second wife Mary Howard was from the planter elite in South Carolina. In response to the abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe's bestselling Uncle Tom's Cabin, Mary Howard Schoolcraft wrote and published The Black Gauntlet: A Tale of Plantation Life in South Carolina (1860), one of many anti-Tom novels in the years before the American Civil War. Hers was a bestseller. Schoolcraft was born in Guilderland, Albany County, New York, the son of Lawrence Schoolcraft and Anne Barbara (Rowe) Schoolcraft.
He entered Union College at age fifteen and later attended Middlebury College. He was especially interested in geology and mineralogy. His father was a glassmaker, and Henry initially studied and worked in the same industry. Schoolcraft wrote his first paper on the topic, Vitreology (1817). After working in several glass works in New York, Vermont and New Hampshire, the young Schoolcraft left the family business at age twenty-five to explore the western frontier.
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