The Universe: 1879-1949

The Americans

Among those in favor of the USGS were Othniel C. Marsh, the famous Yale paleontologist, and King himself, who was named first director of the USGS. Of the reformers, however, the most notable was Powell. His political contributions made the Survey's survival possible.

As important as the creation of the USGS, at least for the Smithsonian, was the addition, instigated by Powell and included in the same legislative bill, of a little-noticed item. "For completing and preparing for publication the contributions to North American ethnology," it read, "under the Smithsonian Institution, twenty thousand dollars: Provided, that all of the archives, records and material relating to the Indians of North America, collected by the geographical and geological survey of the Rocky Mountains, shall be turned over to the Institution, that the work may be completed and prepared for publication under its direction....'

This was the seed of the Bureau of Ethnology- later renamed the Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE)- and a personal triumph for Powell. As its director, he launched himself on a second career. And by making the bureau an adjunct of the Smithsonian, rather than of the Department of the Interior, he had it removed from national politics.

Two years later, in 1881, Powell succeeded King as director of the USGS. He then combined the administrative offices of the survey with those of the BAE, hired new people, and set about mapping the entire United States while initiating broad-ranging research in archaeology, ethnology, linguistics, and physical anthropology.

The BAE was the first government agency formed solely for the study of humans. Intended as a permanent anthropological survey, it had grown out of Powell's experiences in the field. He had become convinced that American Indians were faced with eradication through unplanned development of the West and attempts to "civilize" them, and he wanted to record all aspects of their cultures.

Intellectuals of the period sought unity in chaos, a rational explanation of the cosmos and of humanity's place in it. Anthropology was already a serious endeavor at the Smithsonian, considered an admixture of science and religion. Joseph Henry's main anthropological interest had been origins. He pushed for classification of human habitation of the North American continent, and earlier had turned the head of Powell from geology to anthropology. The first Secretary had always stressed the value of research.

The current Secretary, Spencer Baird, was also committed to anthropology and other natural sciences, but as a Baconian he believed that truth would emerge from the diligent study of many specimens. This brought him and Powell into philosophical conflict, and pushed the Smithsonian toward intellectual frontiers it would ultimately reach after the real Western frontier had been declared closed.

A year before the completion of the new National Museum in 1881, the Smithsonian's enduring, punctilious chief clerk, William J. Rhees, produced a second guide to the Institution that attempted to classify objects roughly according to geography and Indian tribe. It revealed-again-the exponential growth and dismaying diversity of collections that still contained such oddities as a "tomahawk presented to Davy Crockett by the young men of Philadelphia" and fragments of an iron bolt "to which Columbus was chained in Santa Domingo."

The character of the collections was matched at times by the Institution's anthropologists, a diverse lot. Some were quite eccentric, and some would clash with Powell. Among them was Charles Rau, a German, who had corresponded with Henry in search of a job and finally had been hired by Baird to help with the Centennial's ethnological exhibit.

Baird made Rau curator of the museum's Department of Antiquities, a fitting appointment since Rau was no field collector but a thoroughgoing museum man who believed that Paleolithic hunters had crossed from Siberia on the Bering land bridge to America. This theory brought him into conflict with Powell, who thought humans had not dwelled on the continent before Neolithic times.

More versatile than Rau was Otis T. Mason, who had taught anthropology and other subjects at Colombian Academy in Washington. In 1869, then a devoted scholar of Eastern Mediterranean cultures, Mason had been called to the Smithsonian to explain some Semitic inscriptions to Henry and Baird. Afterward, Baird suggested that Mason give up Near Eastern studies for those of the Americas, where opportunities for firsthand, significant research abounded. Baird's arguments were compelling, and Mason, in his own words, was "born again that day."

Mason believed that invention was the basis of human culture, that a person was an "artificializing" animal, and that therefore the key to human identity lay in what was concocted. Invention was construed as any action directed toward some new objective, including societal ones. But things were most important to him, as they were to Baird, who considered Mason the Smithsonian's resident anthropological expert.

Like Rau, Mason was a museum man rather than a field worker. He started the list of Indian tribes that provided the seed for Powell's "synonymy," a card catalog of tribal names that would grow into the Bureau of Ethnology's Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico. Like Powell, Mason believed in the thesis of Lewis Henry Morgan that all humankind progressed through three successive stages from savagery to barbarism to civilization.

Both men tended to shoehorn findings into these categories, to which Powell added a final stage of "enlightenment"-meaning rational, scientific society. But Powell believed that language, religion, and folklore, not collections, were the primary objectives of the committed anthropologist.

Powell's reigning inner circle at the BAE included four men. One, James Stevenson, formerly with the USGS, was chosen to lead the BAE's first expedition to the Southwest in 1879, the year the bureau was formed. This was to prevent the ransacking of ethnological sites there, as well as to study pueblo cultures and collect objects.

Another member of the inner circle and also a friend, James Pilling accompanied Powell on field trips, compiled notes, and assisted with the synonymy. Making up in diligence what he lacked in imagination, he assembled a valuable set of bibliographies of publications dealing with Indian languages, the focus of so much BAE activity.

Colonel Garrick Mallery, a retired Army officer, contributed a study of Indian pictographs and sign language. He worked mostly in Washington, conducting his research through correspondence, a method of which Joseph Henry would have approved. It was Mallery who skewered the popular notion that Indians believed in a "Great Spirit"-a notion that appealed to Victorians because it suggested that the Indians were prime candidates for conversion to Christianity. Mallery pointed out that Indians tended to give answers they thought would please their white interlocutors, and that, in fact, many Indians didn't even understand the concept of a single divinity.

The sickly Henry Henshaw became Powell's linguistic coordinator. Formerly a member of the Wheeler survey, Henshaw was a naturalist and an ornithologist. He believed, as Powell did, that "biologic training was a prerequisite to a successful career in anthropology." To Henshaw fell the task of devising a sound scientific nomenclature for anthropology, a task to which he was singularly devoted.

Others, though not intimates of Powell, depended heavily on him for work in the field. The Reverend James Dorsey, an Episcopal minister and missionary whose linguistic talents led him to become an authority on the languages of the Omaha, Ponca, Kansas, and Quapaw tribes, did not believe,