Great West; and his subsequent researches as an ethnologist, in
investigating the Indian languages and history, are well known to the
public, and may be appropriately referred to as the grounds of the
present design, in furnishing some brief and connected sketches of his
life, family, studies, and literary labors. He is an example of what
early and continued zeal, talent, and diligence, united with energy of
character and consistent moral habits, may accomplish in the cause of
letters and science, by the force of solitary application, without the
advantage of hereditary wealth, the impulse of patronage, or the
_prestige_ of early academic honors. Ardent in the pursuit of whatever
engaged his attention, quick in the observation of natural phenomena,
and assiduous in the accumulation of facts; with an ever present sense
of their practical and useful bearing--few men, in our modern history,
have accomplished so much, in the lines of research he has chosen, to
render science popular and letters honorable. To him we are indebted for
our first accounts of the geological constitution, and the mineral
wealth and resources of the great valley beyond the Alleghanies, and he
is the discoverer of the actual source of the Mississippi River in
Itasca Lake. For many years, beginning with 1817, he stirred up a zeal
for natural history from one end of the land to the other, and, after
his settlement in the West, he was a point of approach for
correspondents, as his personal memoirs denote, not only on these
topics, but for all that relates to the Indian tribes, in consequence of
which he has been emphatically pronounced "The Red Man's FRIEND."

Mr. Schoolcraft is a native of New York, and is the descendant in the
third generation, by the paternal line, of an Englishman. James Calcraft
had served with reputation in the armies of the Duke of Marlborough
during the reign of Queen Anne, and was present in that general's
celebrated triumphs on the continent, in one of which he lost an eye,