furnishing all his departed relatives with horses from his large herd.”55
Scott’s report is also notable for the level of detail and nuanced and contextualized ethnographic description it provides. Take, for example, his description of the ritual at the center of the controversy over the movement, the dance itself. First, he provided a precise description, revealing both attentive observation and his ability to convey the details of unfamiliar practice in understandable terms.
Our first view of the dance was at a small Kiowa Camp in the northern foot hills of the Wichita Mountains; there nicely sheltered from the cold winds from the north in a timbered bend of Sulphur Creek was found the village, the lodges arranged in the shape of a horse_shoe. When we arrived there were gathered together in a ring in the open space in the centre of the horse_shoe about fifty people having hold of each others hands the fingers interlocked dancing with a peculiar side step. the mechanism of which seems to be : first the weight of the body being on the right leg the right knee is bent lowering the body slightly then a short step is made to the left with the left foot, the weight is then transferred to the left leg which is immediately straightened, the right foot brought to the side of the left and the weight again placed upon the right leg, this is repeated continuously all keeping time to the singing.56
To this he added his own analysis and commentary on the dance.
The music of these songs is unique and distinctive; none of us had ever heard anything precisely like it. The Messiah songs could be distinguished at once from the war songs or those used at the “wokowie” feasts or sun dances by the character of the music even if the words and air were unknown. There was a great variety to the songs, some owing to the minor key in which they were sung were very weird some were low rich and beautiful but all had a certain monotony owing to the fact that each line was repeated and the song itself sung over and over again in making each round of the circle: yet all were pleasing one especially delighting us, it gave all the impressions of a noble chant and when sung by a large concourse of people in the moonlight with the wild surroundings the peculiar accompaniment of the crying and the solemn dance, its effect was most striking and will never be forgotten by those who heard it.57
Scott made sense of the landscape and the work before him by recourse to another nineteenth-century heuristic for knowing and classifying the natural world: collecting. The nineteenth century gave rise to all kinds of colonial collecting. From geology to folklore, amateurs with natural curiosity and a scientific bent searched places both familiar and remote for everything from fossils to birds’ nests.
As would be the case later in the Philippines and Cuba, Scott’s early attempts to know his surroundings and to make sense of them relied heavily on classifying and articulating the similarities and differences among classes of things, creating a typology and then elaborating and refining it. Thus, an early letter home to his mother from Fort Lincoln bragged that in his first year in the Northwest he had seen “nearly all” the Indians with whom the army had dealings. He proceeded to provide a typology for his mother, clearly informed by his own cultural categories and values and also attuned—one suspects—to his knowledge of his mother’s prejudices. “The Cheyennes are the Indians I like. The braves—cleaner and more manly in every way than any I’ve seen in the Northwest and I’ve seen nearly all of them—the Nez Perces are too much like the Crows and of all horrible cowardly wretches the Crows are the worst—the Nez Perces are not cowardly, but in stature, appearance dress hair & filth they are very much alike—the Yanktonais Siouxs don’t pan out well or the Assiniboines or the Rees Mandans or Gros Ventres—the Cheyennes beat them all.”58 Confident of his young man’s ability to judge types of men, although he had as yet little knowledge of them, his early assessments reflected most of all the prejudices of the East and of the civilization from which Scott came. To a great extent, Scott’s close and interested association with Native peoples over the next two decades of service in Indian Country led him to move away from such crude typologies. With more experience with Indian scouts and more time spent actively seeking ethnographic knowledge for strategic military purposes in Indian villages, Scott’s knowledge progressed increasingly beyond such superficial and impressionistic typologies. What started out as little more than a cataloging of tribes in a way that reinscribed the stereotypes and prejudices available to him through the dominant Indian-hating culture, developed over time into a more finely tuned ethnographic sensibility. Interestingly, he later wrote not just with sensitivity but with admiration of the village life of the Crows in particular, the group that seems to have provoked the disdainful assessment he expressed in his letter to his mother during his first winter in Indian Country.
Scott’s penchant for classifying and collecting, on the other hand, increased over time. Like many soldiers, Scott had a taste for exotic memorabilia and trophies collected in the field. He collected artifacts for their intrinsic curiosity value as well as with awareness of their more practical exchange value in his own society. Half a century after the event, he ruefully recounted the loss of six fine Crow buffalo robes lost in the course of trading duties with another officer during the Nez Percé campaign.59 The most significant collecting Scott did was carried out during the nine years he spent at Fort Sill in Oklahoma (1889–97). His home at Fort Sill became a veritable museum of artifacts of all kinds, from feather work to pottery to hides and weapons.
Several years after Scott’s return from Oklahoma to the East, a collection of 124 artifacts he had collected during his time in the Southwest was acquired by Phoebe Hearst (mother of William Randolph Hearst) and became the foundation for the collection of the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. The objects sold to Mrs. Hearst were all things he had collected from the Kiowa and Apaches, including clothing, cooking and household objects, ceremonial calendars, and baskets, as well as shields, clubs, bows, and arrows.60
Scott carried his enthusiasm for collecting to Cuba and the Philippines. Like other soldiers abroad, he collected and sent home trophies. In a nod to his guru Parkman, he described some medals and military decorations he sent his wife from Cuba as “spoil of the Spaniard” (and cautioned her not to wear them anywhere she was likely to encounter any Europeans). In addition to a set of Cuban stocks he sent to Woodrow Wilson at Princeton, he also collected weapons in the Philippines.
Figure 4. Artifacts on display in Scott’s Fort Sill home. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.
Without question, the most significant collecting Scott did was his work to record legends, history, and linguistic information from the people of the southern plains during his nine years at Fort Sill, detailing several of the scouts in his troop to travel to villages in a large region around the fort tracking down words, signs, and stories. The ledgers he compiled at Fort Sill have survived as a unique source of ethnographic information collected through the medium of sign language about the life and history of the Kiowa, Comanche, and other peoples interviewed in the vicinity of the Fort.61 He also used the tours of inspection of Indian reservations on which the Board of Indian Commissioners sent him to continue his studies of culture and language in the 1920s.
In the research he began at the Bureau of Ethnology after leaving Fort Sill in 1897, Scott tracked down a few scanty observations on sign language in the records of European explorers dating back to the expeditions of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and Francisco Vásquez de Coronado in the mid-sixteenth century. He also studied the journals of the Lewis and Clark expedition looking for evidence of the Corps of Discovery’s awareness of the use of this lingua franca among many of the Native nations they encountered on their trek up the Missouri. Scott was struck by how little notice earlier colonizers had taken of sign language. In an early draft for the book he never completed, he wrote: “I have always been amazed at the little attention the Singlangue has received in the past especially soldiers and explorers—for it is certainly a wonderful language and most useful to the above classes—for 200 years—but instead of
