He was making progress with the language when, after months of patient work, his dog got hold of his Chippewa verbs and playfully tore them up. Schoolcraft painstakingly collected the scraps and glued them together (the grammar finally became part of a six-volume work).
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Monday, April 11, 2005
The Dog Ate My Homework
Henry Rowe Schoolcraft (1793-1864) was an American explorer and ethnographer. He discovered the source of the Mississippi River, and his books inspired Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to write Hiawatha. H.R. Hays, From Ape to Angel. An Informal History of Social Anthropology (1958; rpt. New York: Capricorn Books, 1964), p. 7, tells this story about Schoolcraft: