7 - The making of an American textual tradition: Henry Rowe Schoolcraft's Indian researches

Summary

Henry Rowe Schoolcraft (1793–1864) is accorded by intellectual historians a status similar to that of the Grimms, his close contemporaries, as a founding ancestor of folklore and anthropology. A. I. Hallowell has observed that “Historically viewed, Schoolcraft was a pioneer in the collection of the folklore of any non-literate people anywhere in the world” (1946: 137); Rosemary Zumwalt has called him “the first scholar of American Indian culture to collect and analyze a large body of Indian folklore” (1978: 44); and W. K. McNeil credits him with being “the man generally recognized as the father of American folklore and anthropology” (1992: 1). As with the Grimms, critics are divided or ambivalent concerning the scholarly validity of Schoolcraft's work. Some, like Stith Thompson, are strongly negative: “Ultimately, the scientific value of his work is marred by the manner in which he reshaped the stories to suit his own literary taste. Several of his tales, indeed, are distorted almost beyond recognition” (1929: xv; see also Thompson 1922). The vocabulary and rhetoric here are strikingly similar to some of the assessments of the Grimms cited in our earlier discussion. Others, like Zumwalt and William Clements, author of an illuminating study of Schoolcraft's textual practices, credit many of Schoolcraft's pronounced methodological principles, but fault him for his lack of adherence to those principles in practice (Zumwalt 1978: 49; Clements 1996: 117).