Biography and bibliography of Jesse Walter Fewkes

Bibliography compiled by Mrs. Frances S. Nichols
Jesse Walter Fewkes, Chief of the Bureau of American Ethnology, is the son of Jesse and Susan Emeline (Jewett) Fewkes. He was born in Newton, Mass., November 14, 1850. His father and mother were born in Ipswich, Mass. On his mother’s side his American ancestry goes back to the close of the seventeenth century. He fitted for college in 1871 and entered without conditions. He was graduated from Harvard with honor in Natural History in the class of 1875 and was elected in the society of Phi Beta Kappa. When a student in the Agassiz School, at Penikese Island, Buzzards Bay, in 1873, he came under the inspiring influence of the great naturalist, Louis Agassiz. After graduation he took a post-graduate course in Natural History, receiving the degrees of A. M. and Ph. D. in zoology in 1877. From 1878 to 1880 he studied zoology at Leipzig under Rudolph Leuckart, and spent several months in Naples, Italy, and Villa Franca, on the south coast of France, under the Harris Fellowship.
In 1880 he was appointed assistant in the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard, and for nine years was in charge of lower invertebrata, and from 1884 to 1887 was Assistant in Charge, every summer, of Mr. Alexander Agassiz’s Newport, R. I., marine laboratory. In 1881 he made a trip with Mr. Agassiz to study marine life at Key West and Dry Tortugas, and in 1883 visited the Bermuda Islands for a similar purpose.
In the spring of 1887, as a guest of Mr. Augustus Hemenway, of Boston, he pursued scientific studies at Santa Barbara, Santa Cruz, and Monterey, Calif., and in the summer of 1888 he studied in Paris and engaged in field work in marine zoology in Prof. Lacaze Duthier’s zoological station at Roscoff, Brittany.
The visit to California marked a turning point in his life, as through the influence of Mrs. Mary Hemenway, of Boston, he became profoundly interested, in ethnological problems, especially of the Pueblos. In the summer of 1889 and 1890 he visited Zuñi, New Mexico, and in the latter year employed the phonograph in recording primitive music, a method now universally adopted by ethnologists, and in 1891 used the same instrument in recording Hopi songs. The records collected on these trips were transcribed by Mr. B. I. Gilman under the titles “Zuñi Melodies” and “Hopi Songs” and published in the Journal of American Ethnology and Archæology, Vols. II and V, a scientific publication of which Dr. Fewkes was founder and editor.