Inventing Iconography on the Accessible Frontier: Harriet Martineau, Anna Jameson, and Margaret Fuller on the Great Lakes

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 acanot du maîtrepaddled by Indians andvoyageurs— while he read Johnson'sLives 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).