In 1846 he brought the subject of the American aborigines to the notice of the members of Congress, expressing the opinion, and enforcing it by facts drawn from many years’ experience and residence on the frontiers, that it was misunderstood, that the authentic published materials from which the Indians were to be judged were fragmentary and scanty, and that the public policy respecting them, and the mode of applying their funds, and dealing with them, was in many things false and unjust.  These new views produced conviction in enlightened minds, and, during the following session, in the winter of 1847, an appropriation was made, authorizing the Secretary of War to collect the statistics of all the tribes within the Union; together with materials to illustrate their history, condition, and prospects.  Mr. Schoolcraft was selected by the government to conduct the inquiry, in connection with the Indian Bureau.  And he immediately prepared and issued blank forms, calling on the officers of the department for the necessary statistical facts.  At the same time a comprehensive system of interrogatories was distributed, intended to bring out the true state and condition of the Indian tribes from gentlemen of experience, in all parts of the Union.

These interrogatories are founded on a series of some thirty years’ personal observations on Indian society and manners, which were made while living in their midst on the frontiers, and on the data preserved in his well-filled portfolios and journals; and the comprehensive character of the queries, consequently, evince a complete mastery of his subject, such as no one could have been at all prepared to furnish, who had had less full and favorable advantages.  In these queries he views the Indian race, not only as tribes having every claim on our sympathy and humanity, but as one of the races of the human family, scattered by an inscrutable Providence, whose origin and destiny is one of the most interesting problems of American history, philosophy, and Christianity.

The first part of this work, in an elaborate quarto volume, was published in the autumn of 1850, with illustrations from the pencil of Capt.  Eastman, a gentleman of the army of the United States, and has been received by Congress and the diurnal and periodical press with decided approbation.  It is a work which is national in its conception and manner of execution; and, if carried out according to the plan exhibited, will do ample justice, at once to the Indian tribes, their history, condition, and destiny, and to the character of the government as connected with them.  We have been reproached by foreign pens for our treatment of these tribes, and our policy, motives, and justice impugned.  If we are not mistaken, the materials here collected will show how gratuitous such imputations have been.  It is believed that no stock of the aborigines found by civilized nations on the globe, have received the same amount of considerate and benevolent and humane treatment, as denoted by its laws, its treaties, and general administration of Indian affairs, from the establishment of the Constitution, and this too, in the face of the most hostile, wrongheaded, and capricious conduct on their part, that ever signalized the history of a barbarous people.