LAUSR

Imagine the surprise of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft when, on a humid July day in 1846, he picked up a copy of the Albany Argus, a New York state Democratic Party newspaper, only to learn that he had been murdered. The paper carried an obituary which reported that Schoolcraft had been shot in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan by a ‘half breed’ named John Tanner. Reports of Schoolcraft’s death had, indeed, been greatly exaggerated: but for Gregory Evans Dowd, the falseness of the report illuminates the significance, power, and function of rumor in early American culture. Dowd is especially interested in what rumor can tell us about the interactions and relationships between white settler colonists and Indians in the history of early America. In the case of the report of Schoolcraft’s assassination, the allegation that the murderer was half Indian though false fueled polemical arguments in the press justifying Jacksonian-era Indian removal. In Groundless: Rumors, Legends, and Hoaxes on the Early American Frontier, Dowd explores the significance of rumors such as those surrounding the Schoolcraft murder in over the long arc of early American history, especially as these rumors impinged upon the relationship between colonists and natives in frontier regions. Well known for his magisterial histories of native peoples in early America, Dowd here reveals – in both illuminating and sobering terms – the deeply significance of rumor to the making of early America and to the meanings we have made of its history.