These new views produced conviction in enlightened minds, and, during the following session, in the winter of 1847, an appropriation was made, authorizing the Secretary of War to collect the statistics of all the tribes within the Union; together with materials to illustrate their history, condition, and prospects.

Mr.Schoolcraft was selected by the government to conduct the inquiry, in connection with the Indian Bureau.
And he immediately prepared and issued blank forms, calling on the officers of the department for the necessary statistical facts.

At the same time a comprehensive system of interrogatories was distributed, intended to bring out the true state and condition of the Indian tribes from gentlemen of experience, in all parts of the Union.
These interrogatories are founded on a series of some thirty years' personal observations on Indian society and manners, which were made while living in their midst on the frontiers, and on the data preserved in his well-filled portfolios and journals; and the comprehensive character of the queries, consequently, evince a complete mastery of his subject, such as no one could have been at all prepared to furnish, who had had less full and favorable advantages.

In these queries he views the Indian race, not only as tribes having every claim on our sympathy and humanity, but as one of the races of the human family, scattered by an inscrutable Providence, whose origin and destiny is one of the most interesting problems of American history, philosophy, and Christianity.
The first part of this work, in an elaborate quarto volume, was published in the autumn of 1850, with illustrations from the pencil of Capt.

Eastman, a gentleman of the army of the United States, and has been received by Congress and the diurnal and periodical press with decided approbation.