Indians were not always able to recognize the motives for their own actions, but he believed that he could ascertain them by posing questions and by observing and analyzing their behavior.45 An example of this method at work is in Scott’s account of how he went about finding out what made a good buffalo-hunting horse in the Crows’ estimation. Scott’s inquiry into this topic, which was of existential importance to people who depended on the buffalo, began by close observation of the methods of hunting. Scott also asked questions, and in at least one case, provoked discussion among his informants so that he could learn from their exchange of ideas. In 1877, while traveling with the Crows, he instigated a debate among the chiefs in council as to who had the best buffalo horse. “After a week it was determined that Iron Bull Chief of the Montana Crows had him, and on the next run I borrowed him to find out what a really fine buffalo horse was like,” Scott wrote. After riding the best buffalo horse, Scott went on to borrow the second best and so on “until I had ridden twenty-five out of the cream of over 12,000 head—the great majority of which were pack horses and mares and colts.” From this experience, Scott noted some significant points about what made a good buffalo horse: “He did not have to be fought with like our [cavalry] horses. All he needed was to be pointed at the animal selected; then he would take one so close that one could put his hand on the buffalo’s back if one wished.”46 In his memoirs, Scott reflected wryly that he must have been a “sore trial” to the native informants whom he badgered over the years, “boring away at a subject they were unable to elucidate” until he had found the motive, which Scott thought they were often unable to formulate themselves.47
In the beginning, Scott’s interest in ethnographic knowledge was instrumentalist. In particular, he applied himself to acquiring a mastery of sign language and other languages as a means of furthering his career in the army and securing more satisfying work for himself as well as winning respect and stature. However, Scott quickly became interested in learning all that he could about Indians. What began as a strategy to achieve advancement and autonomy developed into a profound lifelong interest in indigenous languages and customs.
Figure 3. Hunting party on the Washita River in the Kiowa-Comanche-Apache Reservation. The group includes Hugh Lenox Scott (standing, third from left), Mary Scott (seated in front of him), Lieutenant Oscar Charles (seated on the ground next to Mary). Also pictured are General Nelson Miles and Frank Baldwin, who was then the Indian agent at Anadarko. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.
In 1889 Scott was assigned to Troop M of the Seventh Cavalry at Fort Sill in what was then Indian Territory. Scott’s tenure at Fort Sill coincided with a transformation of the role of Indians in the army. Although still referred to as scouts, after 1891 Native men were enlisted directly in the army. In each of the twenty-six regiments of Infantry and Cavalry serving west of the Mississippi except for the black units, one company or troop was reorganized as an all-Indian unit. Thus, Troop L of the Seventh Cavalry, a unit ironically wiped out at the Battle of Little Big Horn, was reconstituted at Fort Sill in 1891 as an Indian Scout troop. Initially, all officers were white, although later Indians served as noncommissioned officers. From June 1891 to May 1897, Troop L was composed of a majority of Kiowas, Comanches, and Apaches. After 1894, some of the Apache prisoners who had been resettled from Florida and Alabama to Fort Sill also served in Troop L under Scott’s command.48
By the time he made the move to Oklahoma, Scott was widely recognized as an expert on sign language both within and outside the army. Scott was one of a number of frontier officers who kept up a correspondence with the Bureau of Ethnology after its founding in 1879 under the direction of John Wesley Powell. He also wrote to missionaries and corresponded with foreign experts on sign language, such as Ernest Thompson Seton, the British artist and author who founded the Woodland Indians to promote woodcraft and scouting among white boys. When Seton wrote his book Sign Language for Scouting, he sent a copy to Scott for his comments. “I hope you will scribble as freely as you feel disposed on the [manuscript],” Seton wrote to him. “Of course you know I attach the greatest importance to everything you say about sign language. You are admitted to be the greatest living authority on the sign language of the Indians.”49 Perhaps the Englishman was engaging in some strategic flattery, but in fact, there were few nonnative signers who shared Scott’s interest, experience, and facility with the language. In addition to Scott’s study of vocabulary, he also wrote thoughtfully on the structure of the sign language and analyzed how its properties were analogous to those of spoken language. He recognized sign language as a living, evolving language, with its own rules and grammar, although he persisted in fitting it into a hierarchy of languages in which some (like the sign language) were primitive and some were more advanced. Scott’s thinking about the evolution of increasingly complex language was consistent with prevailing racial ideas, such as those informing the exhibitions at the Centennial Exposition.50
Soon after arriving at Fort Sill, Scott was detailed by the post commander to study the religious movement known as the Ghost Dance among the Indians of western Indian Country. In December 1890 the War Department commissioned him to investigate the meaning and causes of the movement and assess whether it constituted a danger to white settlers, who had become alarmed by the rumors of possible uprisings linked to the new craze. From 1890 through February 1891, Scott visited camps in the vicinity of Fort Sill, observed dances, and interviewed practitioners about the meaning and power of the religion and its rituals.51
To carry out these inquiries among eight tribes in the western part of Indian Territory, Scott recruited several Indian soldiers from Troop L, including Sergeant Iseeo, who became one of Scott’s closest associates and collaborators in his ethnographic work. In addition to Iseeo, the investigating party included several enlisted Indian soldiers who served as orderly, scout, cook, and driver. So as not to alarm the Ghost Dancers they visited, the group traveled under the guise of being a hunting party, obscuring the true interests of their expedition.52 Of course, at the same time Scott was leading his ethnographic fact-finding tour through Oklahoma, preoccupation with the Ghost Dance was reaching a crisis point among whites on and near the Sioux Reservation to the north. In fact, as Scott’s undercover ethnographers gathered information and formed an impression of the movement on the southern plains, the largest army assembled since the Civil War was converging on the Sioux agencies from around the country. By the end of December, overreaction to the religious movement had led to the tragic killing of more than 250 Lakota as well as a number of soldiers of the Seventh Cavalry when they attempted to disarm Big Foot’s Minnecounjous on Wounded Knee Creek.
In contrast to the semi-hysterical view of some in the civil Indian service and many anxious settlers around the reservations, who worried that the vision of a world in which whites had been replaced by resurgent buffalo would be sought through violence against them, Scott’s conclusion was that the dance was purely religious and posed no threat. “These songs and the dance itself are of a purely religious character,” he wrote. “Being a prayer to and worship of the same Jesus the white man worships and who has come down in the North.” As far as threatening violence to whites in order to bring about the prophecy of a restoration of buffalo and the return of dead relatives, Scott wrote: “The doctrine of the separation of races, the red man from the white called for no action on the part of the former, it was to be accomplished by supernatural means alone Jesus was to do it all that the red man had to do was to push this dance and stand by see it done and reap the benefits.”53 Scott counseled that the dance be allowed to run its course without interference, “that the whole structure would fall from nonfulfilment of the prophesies.”54
Scott wrote up the findings of his ethnographic hunting trip in a paper for the Fort Sill Lyceum the following winter. Several things emerge from this report. One is Scott’s wry and ironic sense of humor. Commenting on the wide appeal of the Ghost Dance prophecy of the resurrection of dead relatives and their return to earth, Scott noted an exception to the general happiness at the prospect of being reunited with lost dear ones. “These tidings brought great joy to all who heard them,” he wrote.
