How Schoolcraft County got its name

This land was Ojibwe country long before it had a courthouse, and the county’s name comes from the man who stood at the meeting point of those two worlds. Henry Schoolcraft arrived at Sault Ste. Marie in 1822 as the federal government’s first Indian agent in the region, and spent nearly twenty years among the Ojibwe — recording their language, stories, and history, leading the 1832 expedition that reached the source of the Mississippi River, and negotiating the 1836 treaty by which the Ojibwe ceded millions of acres of the Upper Peninsula, including the land that became this county.

But the fuller story includes the family behind his fame. In 1823 Schoolcraft married Jane Johnston — Bamewawagezhikaquay, “Woman of the Sound the Stars Make Rushing Through the Sky” — the daughter of an Ojibwe mother and a fur-trading father, and the granddaughter of the war chief Waubojeeg. Jane taught her husband the Ojibwe language, and she and her family supplied much of the knowledge his celebrated books were built on. She was a gifted writer in her own right, in both English and Ojibwe, and is recognized today as one of the first Native American literary writers. The Ojibwe stories the Schoolcrafts recorded later inspired Longfellow’s famous poem “The Song of Hiawatha.”

The county was set apart and given Schoolcraft’s name in 1843, while he was still living, and formally organized in 1876, with Manistique as its seat.