Beschreibung:

SCHOOLCRAFT, Henry Rowe (1793-1864). Historical and Statistical Information Respecting...the Indian Tribes of the United States. Collected and Prepared Under the Direction of the Bureau of Indian Affairs . Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo & Co. 1851-1857. 6 volumes, 4 o. More than 300 engraved, etched, and lithographed plates and maps, all by and after Seth Eastman (views, portraits, maps, artifacts, pictographs etc.), a number hand-colored, several folding (some chipping and foxing, some paltes loose). Original blue-grey blindstamped cloth, gilt-lettered on spines; the last volume in modern green cloth (amateur library rebacking). FIRST EDITION OF SCHOOLCRAFT'S MONUMENTAL SURVEY OF THE NATIVE AMERICAN TRIBES. The work was commissioned under the administration of Millard Fillmore, initiated by the Department of the Interior. (Fillmore's message to Congress, dated 10 August 1850, is reprinted at front of vol. 1). Publication was continued and completed during Buchanan's term. "Schoolcraft's work was intended to be a great encyclopaedia of information relating to the American Aborigines. With great earnestness, some fitness for research, and a good degree of experience in Indian life, Mr. Schoolcraft had but little learning and no scientific training... A large number of beautiful steel engravings, representative of some phase of Indian life and customs, are contained in the work, but the most valuable of its illustrations are the drawings of weapons, domestic utensils, instruments of gaming and amusement, sorcery and medicine, objects of worship, their sculptures, paintings, and fortifications, pictograph writing, dwellings, and every form of antiquities, which have been discovered" (Field, quoted in Sabin). Bennett p. 95; Field p. 353; Howes S-183 ("b"); Sabin 77849. Sold as a collection of plates, not subject to return. (6)