Henry Rowe Schoolcraft (1793-1864) glassmaker, explorer, politician, Indian Agent & author Born in New York in 1793, Henry Schoolcraft became one of America's earliest writers on Native American culture and history. He had learned his father's trade of glassmaking, that of firing sand, seaweed and lime, during his early years. Between ages 17 and 24 he managed factories in New York, Vermont, and New Hampshire, then wrote a treatise on glassmaking. At age 25 he headed west in pursuit of other mineral interests.
His View of the Lead Mines of Missouri (1819) established his name. He joined an expedition to the native copper mines of Lake Superior and made known this adventure in Travels through the Northwestern Regions of the United States at age 28. Writing voluminously on Native Americans, he was appointed Territorial Indian Agent. In 1857 Congress published his History, Condition and Prospects of the Indian Tribes. In it he traced Hernando de Soto's route between places similar in name to those he had learned. Unbeknownst to him and the sciences of his day, the names he learned were from displaced Midwestern tribes. They had been "moved" south and west by encroachment and war long before Schoolcraft visited them.
The effect on Schoolcraft's DeSoto trail positioning was, of course, a south and west displacement from reality. Unfortunately, Dr. John R. Swanton's 1936 Desoto Trail Commission ordained Schoolcraft's DeSoto route "Official." Today's students are, therefore, taught outdated information about America's history. Few contemporary authors, of note William Sanders, continue to expound Schoolcraft's virtue by using displaced Native American tribal names to track Hernando de Soto, thereby making the same mistakes which Dr. Swanton's Commission did.
Henry Rowe Schoolcraft's DeSoto Trail Map of 1857