various mountain and river bands of Crows, the camp moved often to find grass for their large herd of horses. They hunted buffalo about once a week to provide meat for such a large group. Scott was fascinated by the great village and the life he observed there:
The camp had meat drying everywhere. Everybody was care-free and joyous in a way we do not comprehend in this civilized day. All the life of a nation was going on there before our eyes. Here the head chiefs were receiving ambassadors from another tribe. Following the sound of drums, one would come upon a great gathering for a war-dance, heralding an expedition to fight the Sioux. Or one came to a lodge where a medicine-man was doctoring a patient to the sound of a drum and rattle. Elsewhere a large crowd surrounded a game of ring and spear, on which members of the tribe were betting everything they owned: the loser lost without dispute or quiver of an eyelid. In another place a crowd was witnessing a horse race with twenty-five horses starting off at the first trial…. All day and far into the night there was something happening of intense interest to me.37
After the army, led by Nelson Miles, finally caught up with Chief Joseph and the exhausted bands of Nez Percé in the foothills of the Bears Paw mountains and fought them to defeat, Scott spent time in the Big Open country of Montana searching for Nez Percé who had escaped capture. From Fort Buford to Bismarck—225 miles along the Missouri River—Scott’s Troop I served as an escort for Chief Joseph and the Nez Percé prisoners who were being transported to the end of the railroad to be shipped to prison from Bismarck by rail. In spite of Miles’s promise to Chief Joseph that he and his people would spend the winter at the Tongue River Cantonment and then return to the Pacific Northwest in the spring, they were not allowed back to their homeland. Instead, they were forced to go to Fort Leavenworth. After a terrible winter at Fort Leavenworth, they were sent first to the Quapaw Reservation in Indian Territory (present-day northern Oklahoma), which they called “Eikish Pah” or hot place. Chief Joseph remained in exile until his death in 1904.38
From a Nez Percé called Tippit, Scott was able to learn some Chinook, an intertribal language used on the Columbia River and up the Pacific Coast. As they rode along the Musselshell River toward its confluence with the Missouri, where the Seventh Cavalry was camped, Scott induced Tippit to pose questions in Chinook followed by answers aimed at conveying their English translations.39 On the same trip, he spent time in the wagons with Sioux and Cheyenne scouts, working on improving both spoken and sign language. Another part of each day he spent in Chief Joseph’s wagon, along with a Nez Percé translator from Idaho named Arthur Chapman. During a stop at Fort Berthold, members of the Hidatsa, Mandan, and Gros Ventre tribes gathered in a large council to learn of the tribulations of Chief Joseph, who spoke in sign language to some fifteen hundred people representing eight different languages (Nez Percé, Cheyenne, Sioux, Crow, Mandan, Arikara, Gros Ventre of the Village, and English). Scott wrote that Chief Joseph was “completely understood by all that vast concourse.”40
A couple of months after returning to Fort Lincoln for the winter, Scott resumed his study of the sign language under the tutelage of White Bear and other members of the Cheyenne band captured by Miles the previous year, who had been brought as prisoners to spend the winter at the post. Scott visited the Cheyenne prisoners’ village regularly. There, in exchange for his language lessons, he subsidized White Bear with coffee, sugar, and other rations. During one visit to the Indian camp, White Bear told Scott that the group was planning to run away that night to go back to the buffalo country leaving all their lodges standing. He complained that the rations their families were issued for ten days were not sufficient to feed them even for three. Therefore, they had packed their belongings and were prepared to make a break. Not entirely believing what he was hearing, Scott moved as casually as he could among other lodges of the village and confirmed that, indeed, the Cheyennes had packed up their movable property and were preparing to leave. Scott quickly returned to the post and reported the plans for escape to his commanding officer. A squadron of cavalry were then dispatched to guard the camp and prevent them from leaving as planned. Scott received formal commendation for his discovery of the planned escape and for his “knowledge of the Indian’s character, his human nature, his method and thought of action, and of the Indian Sign Language.”41
Scott’s growing reputation as an interpreter and as a man who knew Indian character led to an assignment the following year as an interpreter for the army in its dealings with the Oglala chief Red Cloud, who had broken away without permission from his agency, taking the agency beef herd along with him. In reality, Scott’s assignment was to keep Red Cloud under observation and discover what had upset him and what his intentions were. Under these strained circumstances, Scott spent three days in Red Cloud’s lodge, essentially as a spy. Even though he was at best an imposed guest, Scott found Red Cloud to be “the picture of hospitality.” The two men passed the time conversing in sign language. Scott wrote about the incident in his memoirs: “Red Cloud was an excellent sign talker, but he made his gestures differently from any one I had ever seen before or since. While each was perfectly distinct, they were all made within the compass of a circle a foot in diameter, whereas they are usually made in the compass of a circle two and a half feet in diameter. We talked about everything under the sun, but he would not give me any clue to what made him so ill-humored, and to what was actuating his young men.”42 Scott learned much later that Red Cloud’s flight from the reservation had been triggered by the mobilization of army troops from Fort Laramie and several other points to rendezvous near Pine Ridge. Fearing that the troops were coming to arrest him, Red Cloud had fled with around five thousand of his community and they remained suspicious of and angry with the whites for the harassment and aggression they experienced.
In the parlance of modern anthropology, Scott gained his knowledge of Indian language and culture through participant-observation. He was not alone in valuing the kind of knowledge to be gained by such methods, nor in pursuing it, but the science of ethnology, as it was called at the time, was in its infancy. It was more concerned with the study of kinship and theorizing the stages of human progress, such as those on display at the Centennial Exposition, and not so developed as it would become with respect to what we now recognize as the ethnographic method. Yet Scott and a handful of other officers were practicing it in the context of the army’s work with Indians on the frontier.43
Scott’s ethnographic techniques were not limited to the study of sign language; he extended his close and critical observation to the landscape and culture of Native North America more generally. Observations and analysis of the behaviors of animals, including other humans, were part of the repertoire of the scout, providing valuable tactical knowledge of the surroundings in which the complex strategies of assessing, anticipating, and pursuing the enemy were carried out. By learning to recognize the differences in the grazing habits and differing behaviors among herd animals such as horses, cattle, and buffaloes, for example, Scott was able to gain clues about the proximity and actions of other groups of people associated with the animals, such as the Crows. Scott felt that the cultivation of such techniques of reading the landscape separated him from soldiers on the frontier who never learned to read such signs. “Many were first-rate garrison soldiers, who knew their drill, took good care of their men, and who never made a mistake in their muster-rolls,” he wrote. “But [they] were blind on the prairie.”44
Scott proceeded on the idea that every action had a motive that could be discerned. As a hunter he had long studied the laws governing the actions of various animals. Scott believed that all animals were governed by “laws of their nature that compel each kind to do the same thing under the same circumstances.” Some of these he prided himself on learning through his own observation, for example, those governing the behavior of rabbits and ducks. The laws governing the movement of black bears, mountain sheep, and black-tailed deer he learned from watching the movements of Crows, Caddos, Sioux, and Cheyenne while hunting. He also believed there was a motive for human actions, which could be discerned. Indians, however, according to Scott, could not themselves articulate the reasons they hunted these animals in certain ways. The only way of learning these secrets lay in Scott’s close observation and analysis. “They cannot give one their reasons for doing certain things,” he wrote. “The only means
