Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 July 2009
In 1820, three decades before Henry Rowe Schoolcraft would comment on the inabilities of tourists to experience the frontier without reference to European culture, he had accompanied a Gov. Lewis Cass expedition on the upper Great Lakes as mineralogist, traveling through the wilderness in a canot du maître paddled by Indians and voyageurs — while he read Johnson's Lives of the Poets. Although Schoolcraft's later relationship to Native cultures complicates any facile imperialist-other dichotomies, the Cass expedition to explore the lakes preparatory to securing more land cessions from the Indians was prophetic. When Schoolcraft returned to the East in 1841, by then a tourist attraction himself, 200,000 steamship and schooner passengers a season passed his post on Mackinac Island, crossing the upper lakes while bound for the settlements, prairies, and mineral– producing regions of the United States and Canada. Immigrants came via the Erie Canal; wealthy tourists booked passage to New Orleans, traveled up the Mississippi, and crossed to Chicago and thence through to Buffalo on palatial steamships (Ashworth, 10).