A party in charge of Mr. Victor Mindeleff left Washington on August 5 to survey the ruined pueblos of the Chaco, in New Mexico. Five of the ruins were accurately measured and platted to scale, and a full series of sketches, plans, and photographs was secured. Mr. Mindeleff returned from the field on the 1st of October. He then made a trip to the great Etowah mound, near Cartersville, Ga., under the direction of Prof. Cyrus Thomas, in order to secure an accurate survey and scale drawing, as a basis for the construction of a model.
At the close of this work Mr. Mindeleff returned to Washington, on October 7, and was engaged in office work until the middle of the following June, when he took the field in advance of his party for further studies among the ruins and pueblos of the Cibola and Tusayan groups. He was also instructed to secure similar material at other available points for comparison.
LINGUISTIC FIELD WORK.
WORK OF MRS. ERMINNIE A. SMITH.
From the 1st of July to the 15th of August, 1884, Mrs. Smith, assisted by Mr. J. N. B. Hewitt, of Tuscarora descent, was engaged among the Onondaga living near Syracuse, N. Y., in translating and annotating two Onondaga manuscripts; afterward, until the latter part of October, with the same assistance, she was at work on the Grand River reservation in Canada, where she filled out the vocabulary in the Introduction to the Study of Indian Languages from the dialect of the Cayuga. She also obtained from the Mohawk a translation, with annotations, of a manuscript in their dialect.
The three manuscripts mentioned are now in the possession of the Bureau of Ethnology. Their origin and history are not distinctly known, as they are all probably copies of originals which seem to have been lost or destroyed. It was intended in these manuscripts to reproduce, by the alphabet and the script used by English writers, the sound of the dialects employed.
These records have their chief interest in the preservation of many archaic words, or those of ceremony, law, and custom, which in these dialects, as is the general rule, remain unchanged, although the colloquial language may be modified. The subject matter of all these records is genuinely and exclusively Iroquoian.
The Mohawk manuscript was copied about the year 1830 by Chief John "Smoke" Johnson from an earlier original or perhaps copy. The orthography of this copy is quite regular and is that of the early English missionaries, being similar in many respects to the well known Pickering alphabet.
One of the Onondaga manuscripts was found in the possession of Mr. Daniel La Fort and the other in that of Mrs. John A. Jones, both of the Onondaga reserve, New York. These two copies differ from each other in orthography and substance, the Jones manuscript being probably a full detail of a part of the other.
The orthography of the La Fort manuscript is very irregular and difficult to read, but that of the Jones manuscript is regular and legible. The Mohawk manuscript contains a detailed account of the rites and ceremonies, speeches and songs, of the condoling and inducting council of the Iroquoian League in the form in which that council was conducted by the elder brothers or members of the Onondaga, Mohawk, and Seneca divisions, which have been generally called tribes, but are more correctly confederacies, their villages being the tribal unit. The La Fort Onondaga manuscript comprises a similar ritual of the same council as carried out by the younger brothers, viz., the Cayuga, Oneida, and Tuscarora members or confederacies of the league. The Jones Onondaga manuscript is the charge of the principal shaman to the newly elected or inducted chief or chiefs.