Archives of Aboriginal Knowledge. Containing all the Original Papers Laid before Congress Respecting the History, Antiquities, Language, Ethnology, Pictography, Rites, Superstitions, and Mythology, of the Indian Tribes of the United States. Vols. I-VI

Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott and Co, 1860. 6 volumes. Large 4to. (12 1/4 x 9 1/2 inches). Complete. 331 steel-engraved and lithograph plates on 329 sheets, 136 of the plates are hand-colored, with numerous woodcuts across 4,026 pages in six volumes. Vol. I: [2] [i]-xxviii 11-575. 76 plates, 32 colored. 594 pp. Vol. II: [2] [i]-xxiv 17-614. 79 plates, 29 colored. 624 pp. Vol. III: [2] [i]-xviii 19-642. 42 plates, 24 colored. Woodcuts on 89, 216-7, 305-8, 378, 382, 384-391. 644 pp. Vol. IV: [i]-xxvi 19-674. 42 plates, 19 colored. Woodcuts on 26, 29, 40, 150, 160, 164-8. 682 pp. Vol. V: [i]-xxiv 25-718. 35 plates on 33 sheets, including one folding map, 11 plates colored, with 9 woodcuts. 718 pp. Vol. VI: [4] [i]-xxviii 25-756. 57 plates, 21 colored, plus frontispiece and 6 woodcuts. 764 pp. Contemporary red half morocco ruled gilt over red marbled boards, spine in six compartments with elaborate gilt Native American motif with raised bands and gilt in second compartment, and volume number in gilt in third compartment, bound by R. Calvert with printed attribution, top edges gilt, others uncut, red marbled endpapers

Provenance: Bookplate of Brayton Ives (1840-1914), notable book collector and co-founder of the Grolier Club.

Schoolcraft's masterpiece with profuse hand-coloring in a handsome uniform binding. A cornerstone of ethnological studies in America, Archives of Aboriginal Knowledge is by far the most extensive single work on Native Americans issued in the 19th century. It contains a "vast mass of really valuable information." (Field)

"Schoolcraft's work was intended to be a great encyclopedia of information relating to the American Aborigines [for which he had] a great earnestness, some fitness for research, and a good degree of experience of Indian life." (Field) Schoolcraft was both the editor of Archives of American Aborigines and an agent of the U.S. Government's Bureau of Indian Affairs from 1822 to 1841, while also married to an Ojibwa woman and able to speak her language. Schoolcraft, who was also a Michigan politican and founder of the Michigan Historical Society, was in an ideal position to assemble the data found herein. Field, lauds his work: "[Archives] has indeed performed a very important service for Indian history, in collecting and preserving an immense amount of historical data. Vocabularies of Indian languages, grammatical analyses, legends of various tribes, biographies of chiefs and warriors, narratives of captivities, histories of Indian wars, emigrations and theories of their origin, are all related and blended in an extraordinary manner." The other principal who gave the Archives immense value was the artist Seth Eastman. Eastman, an officer in the U.S. Army, trained as a topographical artist, a discipline which necessitated a rigorous, almost photographic approach to its subject, one which is ideally suited to recording landscapes, objects, and individuals as accurately as possible. The vast majority of the plates in the present work are from Eastman's original drawings, or are from his copies of the drawings of others. The extensive labor and talent Eastman put forth in this work ensured that he would remain viewed as a leading pictorial historian of Native American culture and history. Archives of Aboriginal Knowledge's publication history is complex. This copy is the 1860 issue. This second edition was likely produced from the same text and plates as the first printing, but also contains slight changes, additional information, indexes, and new title pages. The first volume of Archives was first issued in 1851 under the title Historical and Statistical Information Respecting the History, Conditions, and Prospects of the Indian Tribes of the United States and it contained 65 color plates, including many chromolithographs produced by Bowen, Ackerman, and Duval. That volume was subsequently re-issued, with the same text, but with the title shortened to Information Respecting . . . and with the plates entirely redone, with black and white engravings replacing many of the chromolithographs, and nearly all of the plates included Lippincott's imprint. This second issue contains 136 colored plates and, unlike the first issue, they are hand-colored. There is confusion over the correct collation of the work, as the plate lists in each volume do not conform to what was actually published. The work should contain plates, not including the title pages, as follows: Vol. I, 76 plates; Vol. II, 79 plates (plate 30 skipped in the numbering); Vol. 3, 42 plates (plates 22-24 not issued in this volume); Vol. IV, 42 plates; Vol. V, 35 plates on 33 sheets (plate 9 not published, plates 17 and 36 on one sheet, plates 32 and 33 on one sheet); Vol. VI, frontispiece portrait and 57 plates. The book's numbering of the plates is haphazard, as some plates were re-used from earlier volumes without changes to the numbering.

Bennett, p.95. Dippie, Catlin and His Contemporaries, chs. 4 and 5. Field 353, 1379. Howes S183, aa, b. Reese, Best of the West, 122. Sabin 77839, 77855. Servies 3691. Stoddard, "Amiel Weeks Whipple," Chronicles of Oklahoma, vol. 28 (Autumn 1950). Wheat, Transmississippi, 780, 781, 782.

ON HOLD

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