Hi, I'm Ana, the Ethical Systems Nerd, with the
March 28th episode of Nerd Nodes.
Today is the birthday in 1793 of Henry Rowe
Schoolcraft, whose life's work you literally cannot
avoid in the state of Michigan, where I was born
and raised.
Not only does Schoolcraft have a county, several
townships, villages, roads, schools, a Liberty Ship
and even a food court named after him, he also
invented the faux Native American names which
were given to 9 of Michigan's 83 counties.
We're going back to glassmaking, which we
touched on in the March 21st episode.
Henry Schoolcraft's career started in his family's
glassmaking business, the Hamilton Glass Works,
located in the company town of Hamilton, both
named for the then Secretary of the Treasury
Alexander Hamilton.
The Hamilton Glass Works went through several
names over the years, starting out as the
Dowesburgh Glass House founded in 1785 by Jean
de Neufville and his son Leonard, members of a
bankruptcy-prone and scandal-prone family of
bankers, currency speculators, and opportunistic
war profiteers in Amsterdam.
Jean had bought land in Albany years earlier, one
of many property investments in the Americas,
including several commodity businesses
dependent on enslaved labor.
Jean also worked on a secret deal with American
Henry Laurens to provide Dutch loan financing to
the American revolution, which would eventually
lead to the Anglo-Dutch war when the British navy
intercepted Henry Laurens' ship and fished a damp
copy of the secret draft treaty out of the ocean
nearby.
Henry ended up in the Tower of London, the only
American to have had that honor, and was
eventually freed in a prisoner exchange.
This allowed Henry to return to financing the
American revolution, and also to his extremely
lucrative business selling enslaved human beings.
You might remember from the musical Hamilton
that Henry's son John Laurens, a close friend of
Hamilton, dies right at the end of the revolutionary
war.
John was an abolitionist who was able to convince
his father to admit privately that slavery was
morally wrong, but Henry Laurens was too invested
in slavery, financially and socially, to ever publicly
admit that slavery was ethically abhorrent, nor to
ever honor his dead son's request to free any of the
enslaved people who were considered the family's
property.
Back to Jean de Neufville.
Keeping to family tradition, Jean eventually went
bankrupt and decided to make a new life on that
piece of land he had previously purchased in
Albany, New York.
He decided to start a glass factory, one of the first
in the new United States.
Glassmaking seemed to be the hot, high-risk, high-
reward startup idea of the late 18th century for
people who could raise the capital and access the
expertise. de Neufville recruited glassmakers from
Germany and started the factory in Guilderlands,
near Albany, which was out of the way but had
access to the all important raw materials.
Like many such startups, de Neufville's venture
eventually failed, and he became ill and died
shortly thereafter.
Alexander Hamilton helped arrange a pension for
his widow, perhaps in part because the family was
still owed money for revolutionary war loans.
A group of investors then took over the glass
factory, and eventually Hamilton and his father-in-
law Philip Schuyler invested too.
The town of Hamilton was set up as a classic
company town, with workers being paid in script
they could only spend at the overpriced company
store.
Henry Schoolcraft's father Lawrence, a glassmaker,
was hired as superintendent, and young Henry
soon joined the family business, writing his first
scientific paper in 1814, with the title Vitreology.
Both Henry and his father later moved around
various New England glassworks, the age of 25.
The Hamilton Glassworks would close in 1815
since the local resources it relied upon, high
quality sand deposits and the trees to burn for
melting it, had run out.
Henry Rowe Schoolcraft started traveling west it,
had run out.
Henry Rowe Schoolcraft started traveling west and
writing about his travels, and the opportunities for
economic exploitation and resource extraction
from the lands he traveled to.
His first trip to the Ozarks resulted in publishing "A
View of the Lead Mines of Missouri", which
accurately described the potential for expanding
Missouri's lead mining industry, and "Journal of a
Tour into the Interior of Missouri and Arkansaw".
Many of the articles I read about these writings
bemoan the disappearance of the world which
Schoolcraft witnessed and explored, although of
course it was writings like Schoolcraft's, combined
with economic and cultural systems intended to
maximize both white settlement and resource
exploitation, which caused the dramatic ecosystem
changes seen in the last 200 years of North
American history.
Schoolcraft's reputation was made by his writings
about Missouri, and he subsequently was
recommended to the territorial governor of
Michigan, Lewis Cass, who was planning to
personally lead an expedition to explore Lake
Superior and find the headwaters of the
Mississippi.
Schoolcraft was appointed geologist to this
expedition, where once again he repackaged the
knowledge of local residents in formal scientific
language, and no doubt added some of his own.
The following year he would join a further
expedition to Illinois, Indiana and Ohio.
It's hard to know what Schoolcraft's legacy would
have been if he hadn't gone on to the next phase of
his career, and perhaps his earlier works would be
better known if he hadn't eclipsed them with the
best career move he could have made.
Schoolcraft got married to Jane Johnston.
Jane's father was John Johnston who was born
into a wealthy elite Protestant family in Belfast,
Ireland.
Not content with the opportunities made available
to him courtesy of his land-owning, well-educated,
ruling class family, which included an Attorney-
General and a Bishop, John went to Canada and
became a fur trader, an occupation which required
startup capital as well as social credibility.
John did what many successful European fur
traders did, and married into a high status Native
American family, which provided lucrative
networking and trade opportunities for all involved.
John and his wife Ozhaguscodaywayquay
(Ozhaawashkodewekwe) moved to Sault Ste Marie
and became a power couple in the cosmopolitan
multi-cultural trading hub.
Sault Ste Marie, formally founded American family,
as well as social credibility.
John did what many successful European fur
traders did, and married into a high status Native
American family, which provided lucrative
networking and trade opportunities for all involved.
John and his wife Ozhaguscodaywayquay
(Ozhaawashkodewekwe) moved to Sault Ste Marie
and became a power couple in the cosmopolitan
multi-cultural trading hub.
Sault Ste Marie, formally founded in 1668, was first
French, then British, and finally Canadian (or
American depending on which side of the river you
are on).
Their oldest daughter Jane Johnston grew up fully
fluent and immersed in her mother's culture and
her father's large library.
Jane would grow up to be a writer, poet, and
translator working in both English and Ojibwe, and
her marriage to Henry Schoolcraft would bring her
work, indirectly, Jane would grow up to be a writer,
poet, and translator working in both English and
Ojibwe, and her marriage to Henry Schoolcraft
would bring her work, indirectly, to global
prominence.
Henry was appointed the U.S. Indian Agent to the
Michigan territory in 1822, a job which put him in
Sault Ste Marie.
Henry and Jane married in 1823 and became, like
her parents, another Sault Ste Marie power couple.
Henry's job combined politics with cultural
anthropology, and his marriage to Jane was vital
for both.
Henry continued traveling and writing, publishing a
literary journal and building up the body of work
which would eventually become his six volume
"Historical and Statistical Information respecting
the History, Condition, and Prospects of the Indian
Tribes of the United States".
He also was involved in negotiating the treaty of
1836, one in which millions of acres of what is now
Northern Lower Michigan and the Upper Peninsula
of Michigan were ceded to the United States
Jane's written work sometimes appeared in the
handwritten literary journals which Henry
produced, and her work as a storyteller and as a
translator was also often behind the scenes as a
source for Henry's writing.
In 2007, a bilingual book of her poetry and writing
was published for the first time.
Jane died in 1842, and so she never witnessed the
phenomenal success enjoyed by Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow when he remixed her stories, by way of
Henry Schoolcraft's writings, in The Song of
Hiawatha, published in 1855.
Henry, however, was delighted and took the
opportunity to republish some of his earlier
material, going so far as to dedicate his 1856
volume to Longfellow.
Interestingly, it might have been Schoolcraft's idea
to apply trochaic tetrameter, or the Finnish Kalevala
meter, which Longfellow famously used.
As the 19th century continued, the relative
tolerance of the older multicultural Sault Ste Marie
changed, and mixed-race, Catholic, and
Francophone residents lost status.
In 1841, the Whig party came to power in the United
States and as a result Henry lost his job, so Henry
and Jane Schoolcraft moved to New York.
After Jane died, Henry moved to Washington, D.C.,
where in 1847 he married a woman named Mary
Howard, who was opposed to mixed-race
marriages and so pro-slavery that she wrote a book
about it.
Unsurprisingly, Henry and Jane's surviving
children, Janee and John, would stop speaking
with Henry.
Young John would be wounded at Gettysburg, and
would die of his injuries.
Henry would die six months later, at the age of 71.
Henry Schoolcraft's life connects so many strands
of American history.
Born right after the American revolution, which his
father fought in, he would die during the American
Civil War.
Much of his life would be spent in service to
science and knowledge, as he would have seen it,
but a particular form of extractive knowledge
gathering, both in its methods and in its goals.
Schoolcraft's life epitomized and facilitated the
ultimate American economic project with its
relentless Westward pressure to settle land with
white settlers, extract natural resources,
appropriate Native American cultures while
displacing and dispossessing Native Americans,
and grow the economy without heed to the
environmental or social consequences.
Processes which are still taking place today, and
which are within our power to stop.
The composer Modest Musorgsky was actually
born on March 21st, a birthday he shares with
Johann Sebastian Bach.
He left us with some used in Disney's Fantasia.
He was also apparently the inspiration for the
Alexander Lemtov character in the 2020 movie
Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga.
In declining health, he managed to pose for one
last painting before dying in 1881, on March