States of Inquiry: Social Investigations and Print Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the United States

• 7. Archives of Indian Knowledge
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• Johns Hopkins University Press
• pp. 243-272
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CHAPTER SEVEN
Archives of Indian Knowledge

Born in 1793 in Hamilton, New York and trained as a glassmaker, Schoolcraft traveled in 1818 down the Ohio River exploring the mineral resources of the Missouri and Arkansas regions. The following year, he returned as the geologist of the exploring expedition to the Northwest Territory under Lewis Cass, territorial governor of Michigan. In 1822, he arrived in Sault Ste. Marie, a frontier post, as an Indian agent to the tribes of Lake Superior. These rather modest appointments relied on the patronage of Secretary of War John C. Calhoun. Schoolcraft remained in government employment for the next two decades, later assuming the superintendency of Indian affairs in Michigan (1836) and gradually retreating from the frontier to Mackinac and finally Detroit. In Sault Ste. Marie, he married Jane Johnston, whose father, an Irish-born fur trader, was an important figure in the tiny frontier community. Jane’s mother Susan was the daughter of Wabojeeg, a Powhatan Chief. The Johnstons’ large household was equally conversant in Indian and western ways, and Schoolcraft’s initiation into ethnography took place within the confines of his new family. The Johnstons were able to verify and expand information he garnered in numerous daily encounters with Indians who frequented the town and his agency. In his diary, Schoolcraft gratefully recounted how his mother-in-law instructed him about Indian ceremonies and usages. “I have in fact stumbled ... on the only family in North America who could, in Indian lore, have acted as my guide, philosopher and friend.”1 In his first foray into ethnography, Schoolcraft also received guidance from a questionnaire written by Governor Cass. Cass was a leading proponent of fusing Indian policy with systematic accumulation of knowledge. He envisioned a “frontier ethnology” with which he sought to dismiss erroneous, mostly romantic (and in his view too charitable) views on the Indians’ character, conditions, and prospects. Andrew Jackson’s administration would endorse this line of investigation to elaborate the rationale for Indian removal. Cass regarded Indians as a “moral phenomenon” and rather bleakly judged them (primarily on the basis of linguistic analysis) to be lacking the capacity for improvement.

Schoolcraft accepted Cass’s work as an investigative template, embracing in the process his political views as well as the ambition to combat the ethnological establishment of the eastern seaboard by publicizing factual matter directly from the Indian frontier. For Cass, who in 1831 became Jackson’s secretary of war, Schoolcraft was the model ethnologist, a government field agent whose position provided him “favorable opportunities for investigating the character and condition of these people, and [surveying] them with the eyes of a cautious and judicious observer.”² According to the tradition exemplified in the life work of the statesman-ethnologist Gallatin, comparative philology was the main subject of inquiry. Schoolcraft’s initial step was to study the Chippewa language, which he found quite complex and difficult to master. (At one point, he solicited government to withhold Chippewa treaty money in order that a dictionary of Chippewa could be completed for use in missionary work.)

At the turn of the 1830s, Schoolcraft shifted his focus from philology to history and mythology, ostensibly seeking to probe the Indians’ “mental characteristics” and consequently to explain their somewhat puzzling reluctance to adopt Western civilization. “The whole mind is bowed down under these intellectual fetters, which circumscribe its volitions, and bind it, as effectually as the hooks of iron, which pierce a whirling Hindoo’s flesh.”3 Rather than language, legends, and myth, stories of reincarnation, transformation, magic, and sorcery provided the deepest insight into the Indian character. He subsequently collected tales of the Chippewa, Ottawa, the Pottawatomie, and other local bands, an effort that led to the publication of his Algic Researches (1839). Throughout his career as Indian expert, Schoolcraft coupled a deep-seated identification with the aboriginal and an overtly condescending approach. He shared the perception of the native people as children who had lost their previous (“Hunter Stage”) ability to govern themselves. These views were further fashioned by his religious conversion during one of the revivals that were common on the frontier during the early 1830s, the last decade of the Second Great Awakening. Once converted, the moral tone in his writing predominated.

Schoolcraft’s preoccupation with legends and religious beliefs coincided with a new public taste for things Indian. Algic Researches’ commercial success did not stem from any systematic effort to delve into the Indian mind but rather from the enthusiasm prompted by the discovery of an indigenous poetic style. The Detroit Free Press determined that the compilation was reminiscent of Greek mythology and had the originality of Arabian Nights. “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 un-adorned simplicity.”4

In 1841, with the advent of the first Whig administration, Schoolcraft lost his government position under a cloud of scandal and accusations of wrongdoing. Without federal employment, he decided to capitalize on his previous literary success and moved away from the frontier to the intellectual milieu of New York City. In response to a new archeological fad, he published in 1843 an article in the New York Commercial Advertiser on a visit to the Grave Creek Indian mound in Virginia where, reportedly, the first Indian inscriptions were discovered. Projects of such caliber could not secure his livelihood. The United States was still reeling from the economic panic of 1837, and a trip to England did not yield the expected revenue. Schoolcraft’s personal affairs worsened further when his wife died.

Schoolcraft developed a pattern of lobbying. He devised a grand plan for the investigation of American ethnology, which he sent to the regents of the Smithsonian Institution. His design included a “Museum of Mankind,” archaeological explorations, and a library of philology.⁵ He proposed to utilize the State Department and the navy in securing antiquities from Polynesia, Asia, and Africa. Ambitious schemes to establish ethnological museums abounded in the late 1840s. Lewis Morgan collected artifacts for a New York State cabinet. Ephraim Squier envisaged a national museum that would house a large collection from all over the world. Those enterprises were consistent with the universalistic principles that guided the establishment of Smithsonian in 1846 and the zeitgeist of the decade. America’s national mission was conceived in vast, grandiose terms that embraced the investigation and conquering of nature as well as the inquiry into the natural history of “Man.” A fine example of the popular reach of such national desires can be found in the well-plowed pages of P. T. Barnum’s autobiography. That apostle of nineteenth-century popular culture recalled that around 1849 he considered putting on an exhibition that “would excite universal attention.” “This was nothing less than a ‘Congress of Nations’—an assemblage of representatives of all the nations that could be reached by land or sea. I meant to secure a man and a woman, as perfect as could be procured, from every accessible people, civilized and barbarous, on the face of the globe. I had actually contracted with an agent to go to Europe to make arrangements to secure ‘specimens’ for such a show.”⁶ This creation of an ethnographic Noah’s Arc never materialized. Barnum found other means to satisfy the public’s racial curiosity.

Census Marshal

Schoolcraft marketed both his government projects as policy-making devices conceived around a census of Indian tribes: subjugating Indian affairs to the modern, fact-finding tools of political economy. As importantly, he maintained that state and federal authorities had a responsibility to assure faithful and comprehensive scholarly representation of the tribes’ history and life. The statistical mission camouflaged the ethnographical nature of the New York project, for which the New York Historical Society served as a springboard. A society resolution called on the legislature to provide a census of the Indian population. George Folsom, a state senator and a member of the society, sponsored the campaign. In the spring of 1845, Schoolcraft became a census marshal for the Indian tribes of western New York. He would claim that this was the first time any American or European government commissioned a full census of a nation or tribe of Indians that addressed their material condition.7 The state agreed to include research into history and antiquities. However, the Secretary of New York State N. S. Benton instructed him to conduct his study in as brief a time as possible and to exercise caution in his dealings with the Indians, for he was likely to encounter suspicion. “You will assure our red brethren that in taking this enumeration of them and making the inquiries into their present condition and situation the Legislature, the Governor of the State, or any of the officers have no other objects in view but their welfare and happiness.”⁸ Schoolcraft was to assure his Indian interlocutors that the census had nothing to do with the federal government or the Ogden Land Company, with which the Iroquois (especially the Seneca) were in constant dispute.

Schoolcraft spent more than two months in upstate and western New York, negotiating with the Indians to secure their cooperation and investigating oral traditions and archeological sites. He dedicated most of July to the Oneidas and the Onondagas, bringing along his nephew to assist him with the census. He proceeded to the Tuscarora reserve, where he completed the count in early August, then paused for more than a month on the various Seneca reservations delegating canvassing to a few assistants. The new scientific research tool promoted by Schoolcraft proved inadequate. State officials had originally designed the elaborate statistical tables for a white farm or urban society, and the categories employed were, in a large part, irrelevant to the material conditions and life of the Iroquois, as “advanced” as these tribes were. The Seneca (then the largest among the descendants of the Six Nations of the Iroquois), especially the residents of the Tonawanda reservation, were reluctant to cooperate with the canvassers, causing serious delays. Schoolcraft attributed this attitude to their unfamiliarity with statistics and confusion as to the benefits of enumeration.

In truth, of all subjects upon which these people have been called on to think and act, during our proximity to them of two or three centuries, that of political economy is decidedly the most foreign and least known to them ... If I might judge, from the scope of remarks made both in and out of council, they regarded it as the introduction of a Saxon feature into their institutions, which, like the lever, by some process not apparent to them, was designed, in its ultimate effects, to uplift and overturn them ... Everywhere, the tribes exalted the question into one of national moment, Grave and dignified sachems assembled in formal councils, and indulged in long and fluent harangues to their people, as if the very foundations of their ancient confederacy were about to be overturned by an innovating spirit of political arithmetic and utilitarianism.9

Indeed, the census debacle seemed to expose the cultural gap between the investigator and the investigated more than any other method of observation and registration. The alien language of statistics precluded the exchange relations that were characteristic of other modes of sharing Indian knowledge, an aspect that might have contributed to the discord. However, notwithstanding School-craft’s patronizing sarcasm, rational and pragmatic motives were at the core of the Iroquois animosity. The tribes were then in the midst of a battle over the fate of two Seneca reservations. Their leaders suspected that the census was part of a sinister scheme to take over additional land or, equally threatening, a preliminary step to state taxation of their property. Thus they were particularly reluctant to tally their farm products and belongings. There was also an issue of pride at stake. Schoolcraft quoted one of the chiefs as claiming that they had little to exhibit, equating statistical representation with intrusive public scrutiny of private matters.

Like officially commissioned investigators on the other side of the Atlantic, Schoolcraft functioned as an intermediary, concurrently collecting and imparting information. A law that had been recently enacted granted the tribes the power to initiate suits in state courts and also provided that the chiefs should meet in council each year to elect a clerk and a treasurer by a plurality of votes. (Thus, in an attempt to overhaul the Iroquois system of self-government, majority rule was to replace traditional Indian requirements for unanimity.) The New York governor asked Schoolcraft to examine Indian attitudes on the subject. Schoolcraft apparently went a step further, trying to convince the Seneca that they should adopt the new system. Months later, several members of the tribe charged in a petition that Schoolcraft had threatened them that failure to embrace the new law in full and within the year would prevent them from ever benefiting from it.

In many respects, the Iroquois were model tribes. Their numbers were actually increasing. Reproducing yet close to cultural extinction, they simultaneously confirmed and defied the “vanishing Indian” trope, a point that Schoolcraft took as a sign of their reversal of fortune. In his report to the state of New York, Schoolcraft was optimistic about the Iroquois future on the path towards civilization. “It is by the numbers of the several tribes of our North American stocks of red men, compared with their means of subsistence, and their capacity of producing the supply, that we are to judge of their advance or declension in the scale of civilization.”10 In the expanded, private (and, significantly, illustrated) edition of his official account, titled Notes of the Iroquois, he developed a chauvinistic theme, insinuating that the Iroquois’s superior degree of manly democracy (in comparison with the indigenous civilizations of South and Central America) somehow reflected on the quality of the nation that subordinated and inherited them. “No nation of the widely spread red race of America,” he wrote, “has displayed so high and heroic a love of liberty, united with the true art of government, and personal energy and stamina of character, as the Iroquois.”¹¹ Their long resistance to European incursions and the durability of their institutions demonstrated Iroquois’s aptitude “as an active, thinking race of men.” During these years, Schoolcraft, among others, promoted the intensification of the native motif in the country’s public life; toying, at one time, with the idea of replacing America with an aboriginal name, Alleghenia. In his report, Schoolcraft suggested the Iroquois past, especially its history of warfare, was so intermingled with that of the colonies that it should be acknowledged as a branch of U.S. history.

Despite the partial nature of his research, Schoolcraft saw great hope in the evidence on “moral statistics.” Canvassers counted 350 church members of all denominations (although 3,081 still adhered to their native religion). Fourteen reservation schools enrolled nearly half the school-age children, while 870 individuals or more had signed the temperance pledge. Schoolcraft noted with satisfaction that for the most advanced group, hunting was, as in civilized communities, “an amusement, and not a means of reward.”12 The surveyors found a total of 371 farmers, 20 mechanics, 7 physicians, 17 teachers, 2 lawyers, and 151 semihunters. The remaining 400 adult males were largely unemployed but worked seasonally in farms, sawmills, or as unskilled laborers. Schoolcraft regarded these individuals together with the semihunters as a hindrance to the continued progress of the Iroquois and subsequently suggested their resettlement in the West. Otherwise, he urged the state to offer tribesmen full citizenship, arguing that nothing would benefit the Indian as much as his admission to the rights and immunities of citizens. He wrote against the annuities system. The periodic allocation of funds was an opportunity for reckless traders to exploit the Indians’ weaknesses and encourage dangerous consumption of “showy but valueless articles.”

Historical and ethnological material occupied the bulk of the Iroquois report. Schoolcraft provided historical sketches for each of the Six Nations, supplemented by Indian miscellany, from brief accounts of principles of government to pottery, archeology, language, and witchcraft—whatever he could find during short field trips, in his personal repository, or in books written by others. In the field and in the library, Schoolcraft was, as he fully admitted, a collector of facts; his cut-and-paste texts exhibited a multitude of retrieved Indian objects, whether a legend, an artifact, or a religious practice. What little he presented by way of relating these pieces to each other rested on drawing, or merely suggesting, broad-stroke comparisons and analogies with other native societies, ancient civilizations, or sometimes, biblical stories.

The concluding third of Notes on the Iroquois featured raw material, evidence, beginning with Schoolcraft’s letter of appointment and instructions. This trace of official authority preceded excerpts from Schoolcraft’s private journals under the title, “Extracts from a Rough Diary of Notes by the Way.”¹³ Entries had been recorded in an abrupt style while Schoolcraft surveyed archeological sites. In a manner reminiscent of western travelers’ (or urban social investigators’) reports, Schoolcraft reproduced many words in an abbreviated form, ostensibly lifted directly from the original handwritten notebook. The rest of the document featured transcripts of letters sent to Schoolcraft from local informants, among which was a communication from James Cusick, a Tuscarora, detailing his tribe’s history. Schoolcraft added a passage borrowed from a book published by Cusick’s brother some twenty years earlier. “As the work of a full blooded Indian, of the Tuscarora tribe, it is remarkable. In making these extracts, no correction of the style, or grammar is made, these being deemed a part of the evidence of the authenticity of the traditions recorded.”¹⁴ He also included reports sent by Lewis Morgan and George S. Riley, two members of the Grand Order of the Iroquois, on a Seneca council meeting they had attended. Schoolcraft acknowledged the incompleteness of his research yet emphasized the authenticity of the material he had amassed. Typically, he offered gratuitous remarks about the pristine quality of the information. “Notes and sketches were taken down from the lips of both white and red men, wherever the matter itself and the trustworthiness of the individual appeared to justify them. Many of the ancient forts, barrows and general places of ancient sepulcher were visited, and of some of them accurate plans, diagrams or sketches made on the spot, or obtained from other hands.”15 These were preliminary findings for future usage, and he associated them with other New York state ventures to commemorate and preserve its history by, among other means, obtaining historical documents in Europe on New York’s colonial past.

New York was not the only state that studied its aboriginal inhabitants. Following its neighbor, Massachusetts conducted in 1849 its own survey of its resident Indians. This modest effort was firmly rooted in the Victorian discourse of reform and registration rather than the ethnographical sensibility that propelled the New York project. Commissioners Francis W. Bird, Whiting Griswold, and Cyrus Weekers were appointed “to visit the several tribes ... of Indians, remaining within this Commonwealth, to examine into their condition and circumstances, and report to the next Legislature what legislation ... is necessary in order best to promote the improvement and interests of said Indians.” The inquiry took place at a time when the Indian population was so minuscule (847 individuals) that in the appendix, the committee listed the name and age of every Indian man, woman, and child in Massachusetts, most of who were “half breeds” and heavily mixed with the African American population. The commission dispatched questionnaires but emphasized its fieldwork: “We have seen them in their dwellings and on their farms, in their school-houses and meeting-houses, have partaken of their hospitalities of bed and board, have become familiar with their private griefs and public grievances.” Despite initial distrust, the commissioners reported that they received full cooperation.¹⁶

The report typified Massachusetts-style social reform, which was close in spirit to the British model. The committee recommended the integration of the aboriginals into white society, including the offer of citizenship. At the same time, it contemplated the appointment of a state Indian commissioner and various schemes to aid those who wished to stay within state guardianship, at least for a period of transition from dependency to citizenship. The report featured statistics on property, schools, and churches. Indians were asked about their relationship with the state and the prejudice they suffered from whites. This inquiry, much more than Schoolcraft’s, endeavored to integrate the opinion of the Indians themselves, brought in their own words, into the policy-making process. A memorial by one of the small tribes was published verbatim. The commissioners alluded to the experience of other oppressed peoples. Foreshadowing the Civil War–era freedmen’s debate, it maintained, “The history of all conquered and proscribed races and classes, illustrates the impossibility of elevating such races and classes, while under civil and political disabilities.”17 Drawing an implicit analogy between the experience of blacks and Indians, it quoted Frederick Douglass: “Take your heels off of our necks, and see if we do not rise.”¹⁸

Duties and Obligations

In February 1846, Schoolcraft completed supervising the printing of Notes on the Iroquois in Albany and arranged to send copies to various societies, libraries, and political figures. Two weeks later, he arrived in Washington and began mustering support for a new enterprise. Based on his New York experience, he proposed to Indian Commissioner William Medill to conduct a general census of the U.S. Indian tribes. No other measure would better substantiate Indian policy. “It is idle to suppose that we can perform the functions of government towards [the Indian tribes], in the best manners, without an exact knowledge of the facts on which the exercise of such governmental power depends.”¹⁹ With western expansion, contacts with indigenous tribes and the need for legislation and policy making were bound to increase. The census component of Schoolcraft’s plan had two related focal points: first, demography, or, more precisely, the ability of Indians to reproduce themselves in comparison with “European races”; second, the physical and moral condition of the Indian tribes. In a few years, he predicted, Indians would reside at the center of the Union and the question of their integration would become more acute.

Schoolcraft arranged for a member of the House Committee on Indian Affairs to introduce an amendment to the War Department appropriation bill providing for an Indian census. The amendment for $10,000 failed to survive a conference committee. The provision calling for a census was retained, but the appropriation itself was stricken out; the Indian administration was required to perform the task itself without external assistance. Schoolcraft intensified his lobbying campaign. He convinced a group of senators to send a letter to Secretary of War William Marcy on the importance of gathering materials relating to Indian history and languages. “These tribes are rapidly passing away, and much of what is most wanted, respecting them, will soon be out of reach. They are now concentrated, where these investigations can be conveniently made and the period is favorable for the inquiry,” wrote the senators.20 There was some tension (or, conversely, peculiar and rather strong causal relations) between the argument for the urgency of devising a new and comprehensive Indian policy to further the U.S. civilizing mission and the notion that ethnological knowledge should be recorded with the utmost speed because Indians were about to disappear. These seemingly incongruous purposes required recurrent explication and explanation. The origins and the characteristics of the tribes might not be as important as determining the right mode of governing them, Schoolcraft reasoned in another plea to Medill, but the means of accomplishing this purpose were rooted in this type of knowledge.²¹

Adding a sharper political angle to his campaign, Schoolcraft wrote directly to President James Polk asking, in so many words, for a government position in lieu of the one he had lost. He claimed the Whigs had punished him for defending Martin Van Buren’s administration against a nasty press campaign that alleged injustice in the operation of the Indian bureaucracy.²² Meanwhile, a petition drive led by key members of the American Ethnological Society produced an appeal that emphasized the imperfect state of knowledge on the Indian race and the importance of this material “to enable government to perform its high and sacred duties of protection and guardianship over the weak and still savage race placed by Providence under its care.”²³ Secretary Medill joined the chorus, urging Congress to uphold the vision of a greater project that would include the history of the Indian, “explain their former, and account for their present condition; and afford some indication of their probable prospect in the future.”²⁴ If in New York Schoolcraft was able to conduct ethnographical research only as a supplement to the census, Medill’s letter legitimized the value of the historical and ethnological research to policy making. Congressional debates on the proposal featured the familiar exchange between those who argued that additional Indian research was necessary and others like Senator Thomas Hart Benton, who inveighed, “our papers [are already] teeming with all sorts of information that everybody had ever dreamed of.” Nevertheless, on March 3, 1847, an amendment to the War Department appropriation bill provided $5,000 for the project. Schoolcraft was to run the survey and receive a salary of $1,600 a year.²⁵

Government’s moral responsibility to record ethnological knowledge was argued for on multiple grounds. Schoolcraft and his backers referred primarily to the federal duty to secure the well-being of the aboriginal inhabitants. But they also conceived of the documentation of Indian culture as an obligation government had toward the Indians apart from any policy consideration, and, moreover, a duty the country had to itself and to humanity. “It is a duty we owe to the nations of the world,” wrote former secretary of war John Spencer, “to investigate the history, the language, the means of policy of the original inhabitants of this continent,—not merely, for their own sakes, but, as probably, shedding great light on the history of other nations.”26

A similar range of motives propelled the persistent but ultimately failed drives to persuade Congress to purchase painter George Catlin’s gallery of Indian portraits and curiosities. When Catlin returned from the West in 1837, he exhibited his collection in Washington, D.C., and worked hard to get Congress interested in procuring it. For the next fifteen years, there would be recurrent applications for congressional patronage while Catlin moved his elaborate collection to Europe, where it was presented to great effect, at least initially, in Paris, Versailles, and London. The collection included six hundred paintings covering forty-eight different tribes and featuring portraits, dresses, weaponry, and other artifacts, besides two tons of minerals and fossils hauled from the frontier. Catlin testified that he was guided by his vision of making his collection, “the nucleus of a museum of mankind, to contain eventually the records, resemblances, and manufactures of all the diminishing races of native tribes in various parts of the globe.”²⁷ The collection was also peddled as a monument for the Indian race.

A repeated argument in all solicitations was that every major country in Europe had one national site of the type that the United States was woefully lacking. Italians interested in the history of Rome could visit the Vatican. The French artist in search of the Gauls found their remnants in the Louvre. For the English, the Tower of London was the repository of the Saxons’ weapons and armor. America needed her own museum where artists might freely study this “bold race who once held possession of our country.”²⁸ This endemic Europe-envy suffused public discourse in nineteenth-century America. In contrast, the plan implicitly expressed the wish to disengage from a European past by demonstrating a special bond between Americans and Indians, that was, in a self-contradictory manner, to follow the example of, for instance, the French and the Gauls.

To add a sense of urgency, it was reported that a year after Catlin visited their camps, the Mandan Indians were extinct, victims of smallpox. The library committee pleaded on behalf of future generations, “The intelligent American of fifty years hence will go in search of them wherever they may be found, but it will be a subject of grief and shame to him, if he must seek them in the galleries of some European capital.”²⁹ By 1852, Catlin was incarcerated in an English prison for debt and was willing to reduce drastically the asking price of his collection. Prompted by a new campaign, a select committee asserted that in all countries but especially in a republic there was great responsibility on government to educate the people “in valor, wisdom, and virtue.” Here the two educational missions of the federal government—informing the populace and civilizing the Indian—seemed to merge. If Barnum conceived of his museum as a grand, universal spectacle, the congressional committee insisted that for the future of the United State, it was important to make Washington, D.C., spectacular. Employing a recognizable republican hype, it declared: “How shall we better strengthen the bonds of union, than by rendering the Capital an object of pride and interest to the people of every State! How shall we impress mankind with the excellence of the republican system more easily and more effectually than by exhibiting to them the achievements of art and science in the classic seat of republican authority.”30

Catlin’s campaign did not share the utilitarian dimension of Schoolcraft’s or the ethnographer’s political acumen. Still, both projects vied for government patronage for a national gesture that rested on a theme current in nineteenth-century evangelical philanthropy and expressed by the twin concepts of “lost” and “found.” The Indian soul would be saved by Christian compassion and civilization. Museums, galleries, and monumental publishing projects would preserve Indian culture. Another common denominator in Schoolcraft’s and Catlin’s (and Barnum’s) visions of museumification was the immersion of the American national theme, represented here in the figure of the Indian, in an imperial mission whose limits transcended the actual boundaries of the United States.

Indian Census

Schoolcraft’s Indian census and the ethnological survey relied heavily on statistical tables and questionnaires mailed to numerous current (and former) field agents, schoolteachers, missionaries, and other individuals knowledgeable about the Indians because of either lengthy contact or scholarly research. Local officials of the Indian Office were in charge of enumeration. Schoolcraft wanted the census to be so detailed as to list the names of the heads of every Indian family in the country. He planned to report periodically to Congress to assure continual public support, planting the seeds for enduring serial publication.³¹

Schoolcraft composed a comprehensive statistical schedule that included ninety-nine items for each Indian family and sixty-seven questions relating to tribal affairs. The statistical research recognized the Indian tribe and the extended Indian family, the band, as a social unit whose advancement should be measured in tandem. The charts specified thirteen male occupations. The quantity of household products such as knitted or woolen goods was a gauge for level of housewifery. Schoolcraft sought to list literary rates, to count teachers and students, and to follow the success of temperance societies. Another set of queries comprised a census of manufacturing and commercial intercourse, listing mills and machinery and the extent of the fur trade.

Are the Indians very prone to be deceived by professed dreamers, or the tricks of jugglers, or by phenomena of nature, of the principles and causes of which they are ignorant? Is not the surrounding air and forest, converted, to some extent, by this state of ignorance of natural laws, into a field of mystery, which often fills their minds with needless alarms? Are their priests shrewd enough to avail themselves of this credulity, either by observing this general defect of character, or by penetrating into the true causes of the phenomena? Do the fears and credulity of the Indians generally nourish habits of suspicion? Do they tend to form a character for concealment and cunning?32

He asked informants about dancing and amusements, sports, death and funerals, the “character of the race,” oratorical competence, practices of cleanliness, family government, discipline of children, and the proportion of work divided between husbands and wives. “How is Order Preserved in the Limited Precincts of the Lodge?” inquired Schoolcraft, “Casual observers would judge there was but little. Inquire into this subject, and state what are the characteristic traits of living in the wigwam, or Indian house. How do the parents and children divide the space at night? How are wives, and females of every condition, protected in respective places, and guarded from intrusion?” Schoolcraft wanted to know what were the Indians’ relations to property were, whether they had any notion of equity, and how such possessive rights were acquired and preserved over time and generations. He told his correspondents a story (most likely from his own tenure as an agent in Sault Ste. Marie). Years ago, the tale went, an Indian from the British dominions (Canada) applied to an American Indian agent for payment by the United States of a private debt contracted by a “North Briton,” a resident in Hudson’s Bay. “How did the mind operate in this case, and how does it operate generally, in tracing the claim of right and title in property, and of obligation in the affairs of debtor and creditor? Endeavor to trace the process of individuality in rights and property.”33 Although its enthusiastic application seems somehow at odds with Schoolcraft’s previous work, political economy enhanced the impression of science at work. Mid-nineteenth-century statistical practices were as suffused with moralism as Schoolcraft’s literary endeavors. Ultimately, in the effort to correct the misrepresentation of the Indian, Schoolcraft prepared his subject to be judged.

The last item in the questionnaire requested that prospective collaborators state whether they were acquainted with any substantial errors in popular accounts of “our Indian Tribes.” (If the respondent was unknown, Schoolcraft demanded references.) Previous inquiries, he maintained, were made chiefly by casual visitors to the Indian country (many of them foreigners, he emphasized), “who have necessarily taken hasty and superficial glances at their mere external customs and ceremonies.”³⁴ Circumspection should be applied whenever there appeared to be a clash of interest between the source of information and the Indians themselves. There was a great prejudice toward them, he warned, and preconceptions regarding their character. It was their due to be evaluated candidly by using the best sources, he maintained. Schoolcraft even provided a few examples of previous deceptions. An English popular writer had alleged that in 1837 the United States had borrowed money from a wealthy Indian chief to pay its annuities to his tribes. American policy had been challenged abroad because of such “ill-digested” or worthless information. Schoolcraft and the Indian office were also aware of potential resistance to the canvass. They ordered field agents not to alarm their aboriginal counterparts and appended minute details on the proper way to fill out the printed forms. He recommended that the time of the annual payments would afford a good opportunity for collecting much of the information.³⁵

The long list of questions betrayed a certain sense of grandeur—personal, institutional and national—but the heft of the questionnaire threatened to submerge the entire project. It was printed, bound as a book, and sent first to several hundred selected individuals; later it was coupled with the first volume of the survey. This became, as we saw in the case of British royal commissions, a common procedure of bureaucratic print culture; another gesture toward transparency intended to incorporate the reader into the process of investigation and to demonstrate the project’s quality, consistency, and impartiality. It was evident, however, that many of the questions presumed particular answers.

The national census of the Indian tribes failed more spectacularly than the earlier New York poll. Indian tribes were concerned that the census would eventuate unwanted change, including new efforts at their removal. A year and a half into Schoolcraft’s tenure, many of the major tribes had reported no data at all, although Schoolcraft was by then inundated with ethnological material from other sources. It became, once again, quite impossible to squeeze Indian existence into the uncompromising rubrics of statistical tables designed to display information such as school attendance and farming equipment. The census faced the combined antagonism of distrustful chiefs and government agents who did not want to bother with a tedious task that promised no remuneration. Writing to Secretary of War Marcy in early 1849, Schoolcraft acknowledged that the field-work faced strong difficulties, “owing to the misapprehensions, and objections of some of the Indians, and Indian agents, and the inaptitude, unpreparedness, or incapacity of the latter generally.”36 For reasons of health and work, Schoolcraft could not embark on his own tour of inspection. Only in 1854 did he consider simplifying the schedules by dividing tribes into advanced, intermediate, and nomadic bands. He planned this as a first step toward a new census in the spring of next year, but that census never materialized as Congress and the Indian Office lost patience with the subject.

Even earlier, with the arrival of a Whig administration in 1849 and the relocation of the Indian Office to the new Department of the Interior, Schoolcraft found himself pulling political strings to defend his position. His colleague (and lodger) Smithsonian secretary Joseph Henry wrote to the secretary of the Interior on his behalf that the scientific world was expecting the United States to provide a full account on the race it dispossessed. “We would urge especially that the investigations be actively prosecuted at the present tim[e] while Mr [Schoolcraft] is in the vigour of physical and mental power.”³⁷ Indeed, Schoolcraft’s failing health would prove detrimental to the character of the entire operation. An illness during the summer and fall of 1849 left him unable to use his right hand. His health gradually and irreversibly deteriorated. By 1851, he rarely went to the Indian Office and became isolated from its affairs. A few years later, complete paralysis took over. He could not write anymore and had to rely on the services of others, especially his second wife, Mary Howard Schoolcraft. Schoolcraft made his last journey in 1856 and routinely declined all scholarly and social invitations.

During those years, the ballast of the project shifted from accumulating statistics and ethnological information to publishing, which, taking lawmakers’ ambitions into consideration, he conceived as a serial project crowded with illustrations. In 1850, the department appointed Capt. Seth Eastman to make the engraved illustrations for the report. Schoolcraft wrote to Minnesota senator Henry Sibley that printing the account in the ordinary style of public documents was tantamount to doing injustice to the historical and ethnological research. It was a “national work” and ought to be presented in the same spirit. The document should not be confined to a single volume. In a letter to the social science pioneer Francis Lieber, Schoolcraft predicted that the material would fill at least fourteen quarto volumes of five hundred or more printed pages each.38 In October 1850, Schoolcraft signed a contract with the publisher Lippincott, Grambo and Co., previously known for publishing Bibles. He would spend a few months each year in Philadelphia to oversee the printing. An edition of twelve hundred copies finally appeared in January 1851, at a cost of $8,661, more than half of which was paid to three lithography firms that mounted large operations employing, among other methods, the innovative technique of chromolithography. Another edition of six hundred copies of the first volume was printed for new members of Congress in 1852 as part of their book privileges.³⁹ Congress then stipulated that subsequent volumes would appear annually until the completion of the project.

Besides closely supervising the printing, which had become a demanding task, the former field expert had to spend most of his time editing the bulky volumes. Schoolcraft wanted to make his final installment a summary of the findings and write a defense for the federal Indian policy, for which he received the special permission to take two years rather than one. His application for a leave of absence to visit European archives was denied. All in all, Congress would spend $126,711.59 on the Indian survey. Only a third of that sum went to amassing information and to editing. The rest funded printing and publishing. This production made Lippincott’s national reputation as a first-rate publisher and earned him a substantial sum of money. Schoolcraft’s wife and son received a salary and travel allowances. In 1850, during his negotiations with Lippincott, he arranged for the reissue of his private work, beginning with Personal Memoirs. Alas, this and similar books that he republished with Lippincott proved to be commercial failures.⁴⁰

Archives

The six volumes of Inquiries respecting the History, Present Condition, and Future Prospects, of the Indian Tribes of the United States were beautifully crafted quarto tomes with gilded fronts and covers embossed with an Indian motif. More than three hundred plates, mostly by Eastman, adorned the text, including eighty full-page illustrations of various aspects of aboriginal life such as buffalo hunting, wild-rice gathering, maple-sugar making, sports, and ceremonies. They rendered the production more exquisite and introduced an element of titillation. They included scenes of exotic religious practices and, possibly more inciting, depictions of half-naked females at work. Furthermore, the title page featured a detail from an iconic Eastman illustration (of which he produced a few versions) called the Death Whoop: a fierce warrior clasping in his raised hand the scalp of a slain white man who is lying on the ground. Opening an exuberant volume that documents Indian history, this image constituted another uncanny “bee in the book.”

As an encyclopedic publication, Schoolcraft’s tomes purported to cover every aspect of Indian life and research and thus relinquished the emphasis on new scholarship. Schoolcraft solicited contributions from a variety of experts and even published a posthumous piece on Indian skulls by his foe Samuel Morton. He also inserted an account of his own discovery of Lake Itasca, illustrated by a color engraving. In his expedition through the library, Schoolcraft retrieved accounts of the exploration of De Soto and Coronado, eighteenth-century travel sketches, and other such miscellany about the West. Fresher information included a study of Chippewa traditions by William Warren and George Gibb’s account of Redick McKee’s expedition through northwestern California. It took another century for a complete index to be prepared.41

Whenever possible, Schoolcraft made strong statements supporting his convictions about the unity of the human family. He forcefully endorsed manifest destiny as well as the federal treatment of the Indian tribes. This was a patriotic tract, and Schoolcraft reiterated his praise for the democratic inclinations of North American aboriginals as opposed to the feudalism he detected among the Incas and the Aztecs. His religiosity was also fully articulated. The decline of the Indian denoted his own moral failure, a fall from grace, and an attachment to misguided religious beliefs and rituals—all of which Schoolcraft explained by a curiously mechanical malfunctioning of the Indian mind. “If the Indian mind could be taken apart, as a piece of mechanism, it would be found to be an incongruous and unwieldy machine, which had many parts that did not match, and which, if likened to a watch, only ran by fits and starts, and never gave the true time.”42 The Indian was now facing a fateful dilemma. It was the white man’s duty to offer the route toward civilization. It was the red man’s burden to make the correct choice and to abandon his language, religion, hunting culture, and tribal identity. Ultimately, Schoolcraft’s argument for the removal policy was reminiscent of the utilitarian workhouse test, Bentham’s notion of less eligibility. While living in conditions of abundance, the Indian remained idle and attached to his misguided ways, leading to inevitable extinction. Moving the Indian away from the surplus of the bountiful regions would impose a regime of work and production and disengagement from the destructive life of hunting.⁴³

Schoolcraft appropriated his model of regeneration directly from the biblical narrative of Exodus. It took the Hebrews forty years to return to the civilized state from which they had fallen—forty years of desert education outside human society. He advocated terminating the independent status of the tribes and subjecting the aboriginal to the same moral, economical, and religious system in which whites lived. With the Indians placed on isolated reservations where they could live according to American social codes, their transformation at the hands of educators and missionaries would be made easier. History as a morality tale was Schoolcraft’s way of giving coherence to the disparate material he committed to print. Glowingly, he assumed the title of the Indian Historian to Congress and presented his official project as a work of history. That may have been prompted by Schoolcraft’s responsiveness to popular taste, as historical narratives enjoyed commercial success at the time. His notion of history as a comprehensive, all-encompassing archive and, at the same time, a narrative with a moral rudder befitted the grandiosity of the national undertaking. The printed archive was the proper monument to the vanishing race as well as a legacy that School-craft wanted to leave directly to the Indian tribes to whom he always felt obliged. The publication ameliorated a deficiency in Indian life. In Schoolcraft’s conception, the six volumes did not merely compensate for the lack of fully developed Indian historiography; they also literally brought the Indian to the stage of history. They made history.

It is worth much more, in a national point of view, than is usually achieved by any single session of Congress, consumed in no matter how many speeches. It is, mechanically, a beautiful specimen of book making. The engravings are finely executed, and the letter press is from the hands of an editor, than whom there is no one in the country more competent to the task of grouping the facts and elucidating the mysteries of Indian tradition and history ... The plan of this book is strictly national. It could only be achieved by a wealthy nation. To gather all the scattered proofs and traditions, in respect to the Indian races of America—to bring them together, in due relationship, for the future student—is to confer incalculable benefits upon science, history and art.44

The reviewer maintained that the publication’s most important aspect was the inspiration it could provide for national art. This project thus assumed the function (otherwise associated with Catlin’s gallery) of aestheticizing the Indian subject. Implicitly supporting Schoolcraft’s editorial style, the reviewer argued that the project should have included all records on the subject “without mutilation,” for no editor could know what part of a specific chronicle, tradition or artifact would invigorate art in the future, inspire the poet, painter, sculptor, or dramatist, for history’s best use is art. “The errors and misconceptions of tradition are still portions of history, and are themselves not infrequently seized upon by genius.” Even outlandish tales by early voyagers like the “Isles of Devils” were turned by the likes of Shakespeare into unsurpassed works of beauty. The reviewer further proposed that government should embrace another literary venture—a collection of all narratives ever written of discovery voyages to the New World. The publication of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha (1855), which was clearly based on material collected by Schoolcraft for his federal project, seemed to demonstrate the artistic need for access to raw historical material.

Two years later, Francis J. Bowen, the editor of the North American Review, attacked Schoolcraft’s editorial incompetence, especially the printing of random and unreliable information. He quoted Alexander von Humboldt, who reportedly dismissed the work as a valueless compilation. Bowen called for public scrutiny of federal appropriations. He contrasted the enormous resources that had been invested in this “sumptuous” work with the government’s parsimony in publishing Wilkes’s exploring expedition reports and other scientific accounts such as the Coast Survey, which “appear[ed] in a dingy pamphlet the typography of which would be a disgrace to a penny newspaper.”45 For political reasons, Schoolcraft’s project thrived at the expense of more valuable scholarly enterprises. In the wealth of information on the West’s geology, geography, and discovery, the Indian himself was pushed aside, almost disappearing, sneered Bowen, repeating the cliché about writing the character Hamlet out of the play that bears his name. Bowen, it seems, was right. Schoolcraft’s work did not so much commemorate the Indian as simulate his disappearance.

Coming at this phase, the criticism threatened to abort the project, which relied on annual appropriations. Schoolcraft believed that the polygenist camp was conspiring against him and that the archeologist Ephraim Squier stood behind a few hostile reviews. (Schoolcraft had criticized Squier’s work in unflattering terms.⁴⁶) One way or another, Schoolcraft was by then branded by many as a vestige of old amateurish ethnology. In January 1858, a particularly nasty review appeared in the New York Herald, attacking not just Schoolcraft but congressional excess as well. “Year after year massive quartos ... fall like mud avalanches upon an unoffending public; provoking infinite mirth among those acquainted with aboriginal subjects at home, and astonishing scientific men abroad, by their crudity and incoherence. They are printed on costly paper, in luxurious type, and are full of sprawling outlines of beast and bird, smeared with bright yellow or dirty red, which for any scientific value they possess might be copied from the walls of a country schoolhouse; and the text is to match.”⁴⁷

The anonymous writer called Schoolcraft “a garrulous old man who should have been left to mumble his rubbish ... under the porch of the corner grocery.” A tone of bitterness and paranoia crept into Schoolcraft’s correspondence during this period. In October 1853, he assured Indian commissioner George Many-penny that he had systematically organized the project according to a preconceived plan and that the material was untainted by the speculations and theories that had muddied public judgment of the Indian. They couldn’t be expected to become political economists over night and manage their affairs. “There are persons in America who believe that our duties to the unenlightened aboriginal nations are overrated,” he wrote about his polygenist foes. These individuals would not feel great sadness if the Indian race should soon perish.48

Property

In 1858, the ailing Schoolcraft appealed to Congress to compensate him for services rendered during his decade of work on Indian history. The following year, Schoolcraft’s wife secured the passage of a private act under which Congress granted her and her husband an exclusive fourteen-year copyright for his Indian history. She had written to the Committee on Indian Affairs. “Congress determining to print no more of the “Indian History” consigns said plates, to the vandalism of rust, in the ghostly vaults of the capitol, with other ... rubbish while to the author’s deeply venerating wife, these souvenirs, would be inestimable, & cherished with all a woman’s adhesiveness ... and pride of a husband, who has spent a long life of dignified research in science, literature, & art & commands immortal fame as the only consecutive historian of the Red Race, known to the world’s traditions.”⁴⁹

The copyright included the exclusive use of the engraved plates. Mary Howard then began arranging the publication of a commercial edition with which she hoped to recoup the family’s fortunes. She recruited Spencer Fullerton Baird of the Smithsonian to help her find buyers for her husband’s work in the scientific community at home and in Europe. There had been an earlier initiative to issue a private edition of the work. After the first volume was printed, the School-crafts obtained permission to use the steel plates. In endorsing this project, Senator James Pearce, chairman of the library committee, wrote, “The only motive the Gov. had in ordering the publication was to preserve and diffuse the information it contained of a people fast fading away. A private edition would more completely effectuate this object by more widely diffusing this great national memorial.”⁵⁰ Pearce claimed that the committee had always allowed such privileges to authors of “timely publications” under its supervision and that no special copyright was required. However, without copyright the Schoolcrafts had to spend more money and to charge fifteen dollars per volume. Mary Howard hoped, “Now that the book is no longer a ‘Public Document’ and the market cannot be overstocked by congressional presentations, of it, at home & abroad; we think it can be plausibly sold at $10 per volume.”⁵¹ Congress’s unprecedented decision to concede by law to a private citizen an exclusive copyright of one of its formal publications showed the absence of a strict distinction between private and public ownership of official reports. Moreover, Lippincott, who was hired to execute the report, became in the early 1850s the Schoolcrafts’ private publisher. He republished some of Schoolcraft’s old writings and (quite reluctantly) the pro-slavery manuscript, The Black Gauntlet: A Tale of Plantation Life in South Carolina (1860) written by Mary Howard as a response to Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

In another twist that exemplified the confusion over governmental and personal stakes in intellectual property, illustrator Seth Eastman claimed that Congress had wronged him and demanded proper compensation for his artwork. In a memorial prompted by Schoolcraft’s copyright, Eastman argued that prior to his appointment as the project’s artist he had contemplated a literary undertaking of his own, based on the knowledge of the Indian subject he had acquired in his leisure time.52 He had made a great effort “perfecting himself in his art,” acquiring material, and drawing sketches. He had in his possession sixty-seven paintings and sketches, which he eventually used for the six-volume enterprise. Government paid the engraver $325 for each of these plates, but Eastman received no compensation beyond his salary as an officer of the U.S. army. He now asked Congress to pay him for his property, which it had unduly granted to another person.

The congressional committee that examined the matter was sympathetic to Eastman’s complaint. It recommended paying seventy-five dollars for the copyright of each of the sixty-seven pictures, a total of $5,025. The bill, however, never passed, and seven years later, the Senate Committee on Claims considered again compensating Eastman. This time, senators were less obliging. It was brought to the committee’s attention that the illustrator’s wife, Mary Eastman, published a book, Chicora, and other Regions of the Conqueror and the Conquered (1854) that featured twenty-one of Eastman’s drawings; most, if not all of them, were identical to those in the official publication. As far as these twenty-one pictures were concerned, the committee argued, the Eastmans had already secured a priority of rights. As for the rest of the application, Eastman was employed by government and received a salary. He also had used, without pay, government-owned plates for his wife’s book. The illustrator, the committee concluded, was not entitled to any special compensation.⁵³

Ancient Monuments

In his oration before the Grand Order of the Iroquois, Schoolcraft commended his young listeners for banding together for the cause of scholarship. In Europe, he remarked, literary institutions depended on the benevolence of monarchs but republicans relied on the ability of individuals. Among the aboriginals, the totemic bond secured the tie between men and society. The union the Grand Order formed was just as noble, a totemic union of minds. “It is a band of brotherhood, but a brotherhood of letters ... You aim at general objects and results, but pursue them, through the theme and story of that proud and noble race of the sons of the Forest, whose name, whose costume and whose principles of association you assume. Symbolically, you recreate the race.”54

The following year, the brotherhood of science in America would have its own totem and grand order in the form of the Smithsonian Institution. The institution soon decided to inaugurate its most prestigious publication forum, the Smithsonian Contribution to Knowledge, with a work on an Indian “theme and story,” Ephraim G. Squier and Edwin H. Davis’s Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley (1848). Like Schoolcraft, Squier, the monograph’s primary author, regarded his archaeological work as a first step in a prospective national project. The monograph did much to bolster the institution’s standing as a leading scientific force.

Born in 1821 in Bethlehem, New York, Squier was editing a weekly newspaper in Chillicothe, Ohio, when in 1845 he and Davis, a local physician, began exploring archaeological sites in the region. The following year he became the Clerk of the Ohio House of Representatives and, embarking on a political career that would later lead to a short appointment (1849–50) as chargé d’affaires to Guatemala. The two budding archeologists explored large artificial mounds, ostensibly shrines or burial sites whose ancient builders’ ties to contemporary Indians was uncertain. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, there was much debate over the identity of the mound builders. Their enigmatic origins and mysterious disappearance stirred the taxonomic imagination of American scholars and fiction writers. Were they survived by or destroyed by Indians? Were they more advanced? Did they come from South America or had they migrated there? Some thought that the answer to these and other questions could refute or affirm Morton’s controversial ideas. The most prevalent among the contending views was that the mounds were constructed by a superior civilization. As an additional justification for his Indian removal policy, President Jackson employed the speculative theory that inferior Indians had driven the more sophisticated mound builders away.⁵⁵

At the conclusion of two years of research, Squier was looking for public patronage for publishing their survey. In March 1847, he wrote Smithsonian secretary Joseph Henry, boasting that he and Davis might finally solve the “grand ethnological problem” presented by the mounds.⁵⁶ Squier had already described his findings to Gallatin, who offered the support of the American Ethnological Society. Henry decided to adopt the project and to utilize this manuscript as a model for all future publications in terms of scientific protocol, stylistic uniformity, and production value. It was uncharacteristically risky of him to sponsor a monograph on such an incendiary topic. Yet he was keen on demonstrating that, despite his own training as a physicist, the new institution would address diverse scholarly interests. (The Smithsonian was charted to engage social research into topics such as penal reform in addition to natural science.) This account, moreover, presented an opportunity to display the might of science, not so much in resolving questions of origin as in properly representing the aboriginal subject matter in print. It was essential that Squier’s finding would follow the acceptable scientific procedures that were the norm in the most admirable European institutions: peer review by an expert panel ostensibly unaware of the author’s identity or affiliation. Through the Smithsonian series, Henry devised an apparatus of official publication very different from the unprincipled, haphazard patronage Congress bestowed on literary and scientific projects.

In a letter to Squier, Henry delineated a procedure for reviewing his monograph. The authors would apply to the Smithsonian for publication. The Smithsonian secretary then would refer the memoir to the Ethnological Society to determine whether it was an original contribution to knowledge. If the committee of the society replied in the affirmative, the memoir would be accepted for publication. Subsequently, Henry referred the study to the society for a blind examination and in response received Gallatin’s endorsement for publication. As a gesture to scientific transparency, Henry published the entire exchange of letters between himself, Squier, and the Ethnological Society, as a preface to Squier’s volume and later in the Smithsonian’s annual reports. This approach became a template for the treatment of scholarly work.57 Alas, the correspondence was heavily altered to fit the review process. The society was well acquainted with Squier and his work before the review began. Henry even dictated changes in the society’s “independent” report, claiming, “I am obliged to be very cautious in conducting the first business of the Institution in order that I may not establish precedents which may embarrass my future operations.”⁵⁸ He asked Squier to add to the preface (in fact, to fabricate) a mock application for the Smithsonian’s assistance in making public his scholarship. In many respects, the first secretary of the Smithsonian was the moral compass of American science, but in his zeal to formalize the rituals of scientific publication, he falsified the record and presented a misleading account of the correspondence that had taken place. Employing this masquerade, the Smithsonian rendered the description of an indigenous past as a form of pure scientific endeavor (in the tradition of natural history), a process through which the Indian himself, once again, disappeared and the Smithsonian came to regulate and stratify the fraternal world of American science.

Squier was in charge of supervising the report’s production. New York City artists made most of the engravings and woodcuts. From Washington, Henry followed the process carefully. He was preparing for a strictly uniform serial publication. Dictating the little details of the page outlay, he demanded, for instance, that Squier use only one column for the text’s footnotes. “I am responsible for the style of the work,” he insisted, “as this is the beginning of a series of volumes each [volume] of which must be on the same plan it is highly important that we start aright.”59 A few weeks before the monograph appeared, he wrote to Asa Gray, “I think it will make one of the most beautiful books ever published in this country.”⁶⁰ In his view, only the Smithsonian could conduct a project of such quality.

In short, with the rise of the Smithsonian, the authoritative voices of the institution and science, in many ways mightier than that of the executive or Congress, were to overshadow the scholar’s own authorial presence. Correspondingly, Henry censured Squier for the arrogant tone of his prose.⁶¹ He also forbade him to add any theoretical speculation to the description of the mounds and their contents. Squier, a polygenist, was initially defiant but ultimately conformed to Henry’s preferences.

The monograph’s introduction carries a familiar assurance to the reader, “Care was exercised to note down, on the spot, every fact which it was thought might be of value ... [n]o exertion was spared to ensure entire accuracy, and the compass, line, and rule were alone relied upon.”⁶² Otherwise, the preface was of a fresh character. It commenced with a short overview of previous literature on the mounds, at the conclusion of which the authors maintained that because of deficiencies in previous studies they had decided to start over, to jettison any preconceptions, and to devise a new plan of investigation. The main text was structured around visual representations (maps, woodcuts, engravings) of the mounds and the relics found in them, further enhancing the impression of a methodical survey focused on description and classification. Any direct mention of contemporary Indians was avoided. Three stock aboriginals occupied the front left corner of the frontispiece, which depicted “Ancient Works, Marietta, Ohio,” but it seems that they were placed there for aesthetic reasons only, merely to frame the picture. The engraving of another famous site, Grace Creek Mound in western Virginia, which in the 1840s became a tourist attraction, depicted the mound in its modern condition: fenced and covered with trees, with a group of visitors enjoying a picnic at its base. Most of Squier and Davis’s text was occupied by detailed description of artifacts and places. The run was modest (1,000 copies) and sumptuously bound in red morocco. It was categorically decided that only institutions would receive copies. As a work of science, the publication was distributed in exchange for the transactions of literary and scientific societies. Additional copies were given to all the colleges and principal libraries in the country.

Why did Congress bother, for nearly a decade, to allocate substantial sums to what would become one of the costliest antebellum publication enterprises? This project was certainly an early attempt by the state to engage in a large-scale social survey (outside the census) based on detailed and rather intrusive statistical returns and canvassing performed by government officials. More importantly, Schoolcraft’s work corresponded with political and national sentiment and with previously published exploration reports established an official history of the West. The federal government did not need scientific tools to devise a new policy, but Democratic administrations were interested in a strong endorsement of their existing policy. With this goal in mind, the ethnological material was as efficacious as statistics. This may also explain why, even after the exceedingly partial outcome of the poll became apparent to all, the project was not aborted. Schoolcraft’s surveys thrived on party politics (although the support of Senator Charles Sumner—no friend of the Democratic Party—indicates a somewhat broader appeal.) In the midst of toiling over the first volume, Schoolcraft supported Lewis Cass’s candidacy for the 1848 presidential election. He even wrote Cass’s campaign biography. The ultimate failure of Schoolcraft’s Indian census featured a tacit collaboration between native groups, who refused to be enumerated and be known to the federal government through detailed statistics (and thus exercised a measure of control over their representation), and federal field agents, who, for a variety of reasons, were strongly reluctant to conduct the survey and to impose the will of the Indian Office on their local interlocutors.