This topic seems a bit separate from your other academic work. What got you interested in these two authors in the first place, and at what point did you feel like this interest could be turned into a full book?

About six years ago, stuck at home with a bit of extra time on my hands, I went looking for projects I could do on my own, and that might permit me to write beyond the confines of the work I do for my day job. Among my interests were the history of territorial expansion in the Great Lakes, treaties with the Ojibwe, the question of who has claim to the land. This led me to Henry Schoolcraft, who worked as a United States Indian Agent during the Monroe, Jackson, and Van Buren administrations.

I had heard of Schoolcraft of course. Every kid in Minnesota learns that Schoolcraft discovered the source of the Mississippi River and named it Lake Itasca. As I grew older I found his name kept turning up. We shared some interests you could say—in the region, in natural science. But if you scratch just a tiny bit below the surface of his career you learn that he was married to this amazing woman, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft. I was enthralled and began to think about how to tell their story. 

If you read enough about the Schoolcrafts you learn that Anna Jameson, an Anglo-Irish woman, visited them in 1837 and wrote about the couple. I thought this might make an interesting frame for a story about the Schoolcrafts, about Ojibwe land, about how Michigan was made—that is to tell it from the perspective of an outsider who goes on this little odyssey through the Great Lakes and describes it all quite vividly. 

Then you read about Anna Jameson. You see she was broad minded, industrious, bold, charming, connected, ridiculously talented—she could write, draw, paint, sing, play guitar. And she had this incredible eye for detail. If you want to envision Mackinac Island and Sault Ste Marie in 1837, she was as close as we might come to a documentarian’s camera. 

A camera can manipulate too, and Jameson was far from an objective observer—even a cursory look at her work will show that. There’s a nakedness in her bias that makes her quite flawed—she could be snobbish and offensive, she made mistakes. But there’s an honesty in the way she describes her prejudices being challenged by her experiences on the frontier that seemed contemporary to me—she would hear out new ideas, and shared her thought process with her readers.

Naturally the draft of what I thought might be a long narrative essay kept expanding, and soon enough I realized it might make an interesting little book, a nonfiction novella as I thought of it.

Could you talk us through how Belt acquired this book? What was the editing process like after that point, from your perspective?

I worked up a few drafts of this nonfiction novella, submitted it here and there, received a bit of interest but no takers. It sat in a drawer for about a year before I decided to give Belt Publishing a try. I had my eye on them for a while and liked what Anne Trubek had to say about the business. Our interests seemed well aligned, both in terms of regional focus, and in their series of compact, adventurous nonfiction books, titles like Midwest Futures by Phil Christman. I made a few adjustments, sent in a query, and things went astonishingly fast from there—I was caught off guard by how fast things started moving. 

It is such a privilege to have an outstanding editor like Phoebe Mogharei take an interest in your work. She offered notes that deepened the project, transforming Anna Jameson from a sort of quirky tour guide into more of the complex, vibrant human she was. Phoebe was also quite patient with me as I tested some of the boundaries of nonfiction writing, and she really helped me tighten key episodes in the narrative. 

Sometimes you hear people say that books aren’t edited anymore, but I can tell you that this isn’t the case at Belt. There were months of intensive editing, and I gave it everything I had. I think that ethic is very much to the benefit of the writers who work with Belt, and the readers who pick up their books.

What was the most surprising thing you encountered during your research for this book, and at what stage did you find that information?

This project surprised me from start to finish so it is difficult to narrow that down. There are unannounced visits. There’s a thinly veiled tell-all novel that is very very bad. There’s murder. Many marriages are strange but I found Anna Jameson’s especially so—her husband Robert Jameson remains an elusive figure to me, just as he was to Anna. Shortly before her death, a carpetbag of Jane’s writings went missing and was never recovered. Henry Schoolcraft’s widow (his second wife Mary Howard Schoolcraft) exhumed his corpse and spent the day with it. I’m drawn to the startling and uncanny and this project kept offering up surprising details, so I packed as many of them into the book as I could. 

What do you hope people take away from this book? A renewed interest in Jameson’s work? Schoolcraft’s work? Something else entirely?

Anna Jameson is long overdue for a revival. Initially I had the same reaction to her that I think a lot of observers have had, as far back as her frenemies Margaret Fuller and Harriet Martineau—that Jameson had an interesting life and wrote some interesting books, but that there’s a lot of personality there, maybe too much, that she’s too sentimental, and so it is easy to turn her into a caricature of an eccentric Victorian lady and move on. 

But if you look carefully you see that these assessments of Jameson are highly gendered and that, more interestingly, she had to play into certain gender conventions to find her audience, to make a living. She had to play to these conventions because she was a woman, because of her class, because she needed to provide for her family. Yet she was able to accomplish so much within a rather rigid Victorian culture, and fight against it in her own way, in her later social writings, and in her complex magnum opus on sacred art. Many of her contemporaries and acolytes saw and understood this, and she was highly regarded by the time she worked herself to death in 1860.

The problem was that after she died Jameson’s legacy was hollowed out, sold for scrap, maligned by influential figures like John Ruskin, so that only the caricature remained. Fortunately Alison Stone, Kimberly VanEsveld Adams, Judith Johnston, Clara Thomas and other writers have done the invaluable work of reconstituting Jameson’s legacy—almost sixty years of effort on the part of a few dedicated scholars. But she remains criminally obscure, so if my book does nothing other than initiate a few more souls into the cult of Anna Jameson I’d be fine with that.  

Jane Schoolcraft is now gaining well deserved recognition, but more people should read her, and much more could be written about her. There’s a purity and authenticity about her that is so refreshing. Yet in her letters you also see her clap back at her husband’s bloviating and neglect, and in her poems you see a critique—sometimes subtle, sometimes not—of the government’s treatment of the Ojibwe people. We let her have the last word.

The other thing readers might take away from this is a recognition of how dynamic this interval of history was. Maybe you know a bit about Andrew Jackson and the Antebellum South, or Regency and early Victorian England, or how dubious treaties forced the Ojibwe off of their land, but to see these elements collide through the interaction of these figures really brought the 1830s to life for me in a way I would have never imagined, and I hope a few readers can walk away with that too.