Schoolcraft, Henry Rowe

(born March 28, 1793, Albany county, N.Y., U.S.—died Dec. 10, 1864, Washington, D.C.) U.S. explorer and ethnologist. He served as topographer on an expedition to the Lake Superior region (1820), then married a woman who was part Ojibwa and became an Indian agent. In 1832 he discovered the source of the Mississippi River at Lake Itaska, Minn. A treaty he concluded with the Ojibwa in 1836 ceded much of their land in northern Michigan to the U.S. Schoolcraft's six-volume Indian Tribes of the United States (1851–57) was a pioneering, though flawed, work.

Find more information on Schoolcraft, Henry Rowe. Upgrade to Britannica Online for more on Schoolcraft, Henry Rowe.