At San Diego and San Luis Rey he obtained vocabularies representing four dialects of the Yuman family.
WORK OF MR. A. S. GATSCHET.
In August, 1884, Mr. Gatschet proceeded to visit the Tonkawē and Lipan tribes in Texas.
He reached Fort Griffin on the 29th of August. The Tonkawē tribe was encamped about a mile and a half south of Fort Griffin, Shackleford county, and consisted of 78 individuals, while the Lipan camp, one mile north-northwest, consisted of 19 persons only. All these Indians were on the point of removing to the Oakland reserve, Indian Territory.
The Tonkawē constitute an aggregate of several tribal remnants formerly living independently of one another in southern Texas and on the Rio Grande. Mr. Gatschet devoted five weeks to the study of their language and one week to that of the Lipan, which is a dialect of Apache (Athapascan). The Tonkawē is a sonorous and energetic form of speech. The radix of many of the adjectives becomes reduplicated to form a kind of plural, and the same thing is observed in some of the verbs, where iteration or frequency has to be indicated. Case suffixes are observed in the substantive, which can easily be traced to postpositions as their original forms. Very few of the natives were sufficiently conversant with English or Spanish to serve as interpreters, so that it was difficult to secure trustworthy results. A white man who had lived over six years among them was of material help, and several mythologic and other texts were obtained with tolerable correctness through his aid.
On October 9 Mr. Gatschet left Fort Griffin and reached Fort Sill, in the Indian Territory, on the 15th. Many Kaiowē and Comanche Indians encamped during the warmer months of the year around this fort, which is situated at the southeast base of the Wichita mountains. He engaged the best help he could find for studying the Kaiowē language, for which there is no Government interpreter. The Comanche is the predominating language on the whole Kaiowē, Comanche, and Apache reservation, although the Comanche exceed the Kaiowē but little in number. The Comanche is more easily acquired, at least to the extent required in conversation, and all the traders and shopkeepers on the reservation have a smattering of it.
Better interpreters for Kaiowē were obtained at Anadarko, the seat of the agency, where Mr. Gatschet remained from October 31 to December 12. A few Kaiowē were found who had passed some months or years among Americans or at the Indian schools at Carlisle, Chilocco, and elsewhere, and could express themselves intelligibly in English. A few white Mexicans were found among the Comanche, who were captured by them in infancy, acquired the Comanche language, and have ever since lived among these Indians. Of the Kaiowē, Mr. Gatschet acquired over two thousand terms, phrases, and sentences, several historic texts of value, and of the Comanche, eight hundred or a thousand words. The circumstances necessitated careful and numerous revisions of everything obtained, by which much of the time was absorbed.
The Na-ishi Apache, about four hundred in number and formerly roaming with the Kaiowē, furnished also a large amount of terms, exceeding fifteen hundred.
There are a few verbal similarities between the Kaiowē and the Shoshoni languages, but apparently not enough to indicate anything more than long association of these peoples. The Kaiowē has a dual in the intransitive verb and in some nouns. There are more than a dozen different modes of forming the plural of nouns. The subject pronoun is incorporated with the verb as a prefix, and every tense has a different subject pronoun, as in Otomi and other languages of southern Mexico.
Vocabularies were also obtained of Delaware, Ottawa, Yuchi, Caddo, Wichita, and of the hitherto unstudied Caddo dialects of Anadarko and Yatassi.