Horatio Emmons Hale was born on May 3, 1817, in Newport, New Hampshire.

He was an American-Canadian ethnologist, philologist, and businessman. Entering Harvard College in 1833, Hale showed a striking ability for languages. In 1834, he published his remarkable first original work consisting of an Algonkin vocabulary, which he gathered from Indians camping on the college grounds. From 1838 to 1842, he worked with the U.S. Exploring Expedition under Capt. Charles Wilkes of U.S. Navy, visiting South America, Australasia, Polynesia, and North-western America. He received his M.A. degree from Harvard, then studied law, and was admitted to the Chicago bar in 1855. In 1856, after a marriage to a Canadian, he moved to Clinton, Ontario, and began to get involved in local real estate development and other business and educational endeavours. He devoted much attention to the development of the Ontario school system and was influential in introducing co-education of the sexes in high schools and colleges, in increasing the grants to these institutions, in establishing the normal school system, and in improving the methods of examination. He discovered two Indian manuscripts, dating between 1714 and 1735; the only known literary American Indian work extant. In 1883, he published “The Iroquois Book of Rites”, which included his translated and edited versions of these papers. Hale’s judicious introductions, careful translation, and editing add much to the value of the work. He was also the first to identify the Cherokee language as a member of the Iroquoian family of languages. In 1872, he was elected as a member of the American Philosophical Society. He reorganized the section of anthropology as an independent department of the American and also British Association for the Advancement of Science. Hale was an honorary fellow of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain.

In 1854, he married Margaret Pugh (1834–1900). He died on December 28, 1896, in Clinton, Ontario.