Henry Schoolcraft - Marriages and Family

Marriages and Family

Schoolcraft met his first wife soon after being assigned in 1822 to Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan as its first US Indian Agent. Two years before, the government had built Fort Brady and wanted to establish an official presence to forestall any renewed British threat following the War of 1812. The government tried to ensure against British agitation of the Ojibwa.

Schoolcraft married Jane Johnston, eldest daughter of John Johnston, a prominent Scots-Irish fur trader, and his wife Ozhaguscodaywayquay (Susan Johnston), daughter of a leading Ojibwe chief, Waubojeeg. The Johnstons had eight children, and their cultured, wealthy family was well known in the area. Jane was also known as O-bah-bahm-wawa-ge-zhe-go-qua (or Obabaamwewe-giizhigokwe in modern spelling) (The Woman of the Sound Rushing Through the Sky).

Jane and Henry had four children together:

• William Henry (b. June 1824 - d. March 1827) died of croup at nearly three. Jane Schoolcraft wrote poems expressing her grief about his loss.
• stillborn daughter (November 1825);
• Jane Susan Ann (October 14, 1827 – November 25, 1892, Richmond, Virginia), called Janee; and
• John Johnston (October 2, 1829 – April 24, 1864), served in the Civil War but was wounded at the Battle of Gettysburg and disabled. He died at age 45 in Elmira, New York.

The Schoolcrafts sent Janee and John to a boarding school in Detroit for part of their education. Janee at eleven could handle the transition, but John at nine had a more difficult time and missed his parents.

The Schoolcrafts had a literary marriage, producing a family magazine, and including their own poetry in letters to each other through the years. Jane Johnston Schoolcraft suffered from frequent illnesses. She died in 1842 while visiting a sister in Canada, and was buried at St. John's Anglican Church, Ancaster, Ontario.

On January 12, 1847, after moving to Washington, DC, the widower Schoolcraft married again at age 53, to Mary Howard (died March 12, 1878), a southern slaveholder from an elite planter family of the Beaufort district of South Carolina. Her support of slavery and opposition to mixed-race unions created strains in her relationship with the Schoolcraft stepchildren. They became alienated from her and their father.

After Henry Schoolcraft became paralyzed in 1848, Mary devoted much of her attention to caring for him and helping him complete his massive study of the American Indian. In 1860 she published the novel The Black Gauntlet: A Tale of Plantation Life in South Carolina (which she said her husband had encouraged). One of many pro-slavery responses to Harriet Beecher Stowe's bestselling Uncle Tom's Cabin, such defenses of slavery became known as the anti-Tom genre, published in the decade before the American Civil War. Hers became a best-seller, although not on the scale of Stowe's.