Description
SCHOOLCRAFT, Henry Rowe (1793-1864) - EASTMAN, Seth (18081875). Information, respecting the History, Condition and Prospects of the Indian Tribes of the United States: Collected and Prepared under the Direction of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, per Act of Congress of March 3d, 1847... Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo & Company, 1853, 1854, 1854, 1854, 1855; and Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co. 1857. Comparable: Christie's, 1999 - $23,000. 6 volumes. 4to., (12 4/8 x 9 6/8 inches). Half-titles to all volumes, additional engraved title-page to volumes I-V: Volume I. Complete with 76 engraved plates, including: 3 full-page maps, 17 plates of artifacts engraved in colours, and 15 with original hand-colour (some leaves loose, some spotting and a few pale marginal stains. Original publisher's purple cloth, decorated in blind and gilt, uncut (spine faded to brown, extremities worn and head and foot of the spine strengthened). Second edition, first published in 1851. Volume II. Complete with 79 engraved plates, including: 6 maps (2 with original hand-colour), 23 plates of artifacts engraved in colour (some finished by hand), 5 engraved plates with original hand-colour, and 2 plates of Cherokee alphabet (some spotting and staining). Original publisher's blue cloth, decorated in blind and gilt, uncut (spine faded, extremities worn and head and foot of the spine strengthened). First published in 1852 Volume III. Complete with 42 engraved plates, including: 4 maps, including: that "Showing the location of the Indian Tribes within the United States" and a "Map of Oregon Showing the location of Indian Tribes", both 1852 and with original hand-colour in outline, and 22 plates of artifacts engraved in colour (some finished by hand) (some spotting and staining). Original publisher's blue cloth, decorated in blind and gilt, uncut (spine faded to brown, strengthened at the head and foot). First published in 1853. Volume IV. Complete with 42 engraved plates, including: 3 maps, 2 with original hand-colour in outline and including a "Map of the South western part of New Mexico" and a "Map of the Indian Colonies West of Missouri and Arkansas", both 1853, 15 plates of artifacts engraved in colour (some finished by hand), and one engraving with original hand-colour (some spotting and staining). Original publisher's blue cloth, decorated in blind and gilt, uncut (spine a bit faded, strengthened at the head and foot). First edition. Volume V. Complete with 33 engraved plates, and a large folding lithographed map Emanuel Bowen's "A New Map of Georgia, with part of Florida, Louisiana, and Carolina", 1764, listed as "A Map of the Creek Country in 1790", including 2 plates of artifacts engraved in colour, and 4 engravings with original hand-colour (some spotting and staining). Original publisher's purple cloth, decorated in blind and gilt (spine faded to brown, extremities worn and head and foot of the spine strengthened, front free endpaper cut with loss, first blank loose). First edition. Volume VI. Complete with folding letterpress table, 58 engraved or lithographed plates, including a frontispiece portrait of Schoolcraft, 2 maps, 9 plates of artifacts engraved in colour, and 3 chromolithographs, by and large all these plates have already appeared in previous volumes (some plates quite brown, occasional spotting and staining). Original publisher's purple cloth, decorated in blind and gilt, uncut (spine faded to brown, extremities worn and head and foot of the spine strengthened). First edition. Initially a mineralogist, in 1820 Schoolcraft joined the first American expedition through the upper Great Lakes, headed by Lewis Cass, governor of Michigan Territory. In August of 1821 he was secretary to a treaty council in Chicago for acquisition of Potawatomi and Ottawa land in southwestern Michigan. By 1822 he was employed by the federal Indian service, as the first Indian agent at Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan. In 1823 Schoolcraft married Jane Johnston, the daughter of trader John Johnston, whose wife, Oshawguscodawayqua, came from a respected Ojibwa family in LaPointe, Wisconsin. During the summer of 1831, Schoolcraft "investigated the continuing Sioux-Ojibwa boundary dispute in the Minnesota-Wisconsin district, then led the well-known expedition to the head of the Mississippi River, reported in Narrative of an Expedition through the Upper Mississippi to Itasca Lake . . . in 1832 (1834). With the closing of the Sault Ste. Marie agency in 1832, he was transferred to the agency at Mackinac Island in 1833. As commissioner representing the federal government, he secured Ottawa and Ojibwa lands in the eastern Upper Peninsula and northwestern Lower Peninsula of Michigan through terms of a treaty signed in Washington on 28 March 1836. Following this success he was appointed superintendent of the Michigan Indian Agency in July 1836. He subsequently negotiated four treaties with Ojibwa bands for the surrender of reservation lands in southeastern Michigan. Spending winters in Detroit, he was an active member of the Michigan Historical Society, which he had established in 1828. He also served as regent of the reincorporated University of Michigan from 1837 to 1841...In 1845 Schoolcraft conducted a state-sponsored census of New York Indians that is reported in Notes on the Iroquois (1846). Expanding his ideas for enumerating Indians, he next lobbied in Washington for a bill, passed in March 1847, to conduct a national Indian census ostensibly to provide the basis for future government legislation. In 1847 he married Mary Howard, a plantation-reared South Carolinian who promoted his career but alienated his children. Employed again by the Bureau of Indian Affairs from 1847 to 1857, he brought out the six-volume Historical and Statistical Information Respecting the . . . Indian Tribes of the United States (1851-1857), a miscellany of articles and data covering selected Indian tribes and archaeological investigations that included Captain Seth Eastman's exceptional lithographs. Though uneven in quality, the impressive volumes remain a standard reference work" (Helen Hornbeck Tanner for ANB). Schoolcrafts "work contains a vast mass of really valuable material. It has indeed performed a very important service for Indian history, in collecting and preserving an immense amount of historic data. 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, are all related and blended in an extraordinary and perplexing manner. 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 sculptures, paintings, and fortifications, pictograph writing, dwellings, and every form of antiquities, which have been discovered" (Field). Each volume of this monumental work, is divided into subject areas: General History; Manners and Customs; Antiquities; Geography; Tribal Organization; Intellectual Capacity and Character; Topical History; Physical Type of the Indian Race; Language; Art; Present Condition and Future Prospects; Daemonology, Witchcraft, and Magic; Medical Knowledge; Literature of the Indian Language; Statistics and Population; Biography; Religion; and Ethnology. Each section is illustrated with a variety of detailed maps and engraved plates by different artists, but the majority of the superb, detailed and dramatic engravings are by Captain Seth Eastman. Eastman, was one of the premier artists of the American West, he created some of the most memorable images of the frontier, its inhabitants and wildlife. The foremost pictorial historian of the American Indian and of frontier life in the nineteenth century, Eastman was a career army officer and talented artist widely appreciated today for his ethnographic detail. Eastman set out to preserve a visual record of Indian life, which was then undergoing rapid change. Enabled by his long-term military residence among the Indians to become familiar not only with their colorful external trappings but with the whole complex fabric of Indian culture, Eastman painted all of the commonplace activities of everyday Native American life with a rare degree of sympathy and understanding. Field 1379. Howes S183 ("b"); Sabin 77855, 77849.
