It is a great pity that Schoolcraft, with his valuable opportunities for ethnological research, should not have added a critical attitude and a habit of accuracy to his great industry.  The historian Parkman, a model observer and scholar, described Schoolcraft’s volumes on the Indian Tribes of the United States as

“a singularly crude and illiterate production, stuffed with blunders and contradictions, giving evidence on every page of a striking unfitness for historical or scientific inquiry."[199]

REALITY VERSUS ROMANCE

A few of the tales I have cited are not marred by superadded sentimental adornments, but all of them are open to suspicion from still another point of view.  They are invariably so proper and pure that they might be read to Sunday-school classes.  Since one-half of Schoolcraft’s assistants in the compilation of this material were women, this might have been expected, and if the collection had been issued as a Fairy Book it would have been a matter of course.  But they were issued as accurate “oral legends” of wild Indians, and from the point of view of the student of the history of love the most important question to ask was, “Are Indian stories in reality as pure and refined in tone as these specimens would lead us to suspect?” I will answer that question by citing the words of one of the warmest champions of the Indians, the eminent American anthropologist, Professor D.G.  Brinton (M.N.W., 160): 

“Anyone who has listened to Indian tales, not as they are recorded in books, but as they are told by the camp-fire, will bear witness to the abounding obscenity they deal in.  That the same vulgarity shows itself in their arts and life, no genuine observer need doubt.”

And in a footnote he gives this extremely interesting information: 

“The late George Gibbs will be acknowledged as an authority here.  He was at the time of his death preparing a Latin translation of the tales he had collected, as they were too erotic to print in English.  He wrote me, ’Schoolcraft’s legends are emasculated to a degree that they become no longer Indian.’”

No longer Indian, indeed!  And these doctored stories, artfully sentimentalized at one end and expurgated at the other, are advanced as proofs that a savage Indian’s love is just as refined as that of a civilized Christian!  What Indian stories really are, the reader, if he can stomach such things, may find out for himself by consulting the marvellously copious and almost phonographically accurate collection of native tales which another of our most eminent anthropologists, Dr. Franz Boas, has printed.[200] And it must be borne in mind that these stories are not the secret gossip of vulgar men alone by themselves, but are national tales with which children of both sexes become familiar from their earliest years.  As Colonel Dodge remarks