Book Description

Excerpt from Ethnography and Philology of the Hidatsa Indians During the year 1854, while engaged in exploring the then almost unknown country along the Upper Missouri and its tributaries, the writer of this note commenced the work of collecting vocabularies of the languages and other ethnological data respecting the Indians of the Northwest. He continued this work at intervals during a period of about six years, and the materials thus accumulated were finally published in 1862 in the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society of Philadelphia, under the title of Contributions to the Ethnography and Philology of the Indian Tribes of the Missouri Valley. A brief sketch Of the Hidatsa Indians, and an incomplete vocabulary of their language, was included in that work. The author of the present volume, Dr. Washington Matthews, assist ant surgeon United States Army, Spent some years among these In dians while stationed at a military post in performance Of his Official da ties as a medical officer of the Army. During this period he paid great attention to the same subject, Observing the manners, customs, and other characteristics of these Indians, and making a close and careful study of their language. In this way were secured the materials upon which, elaborated with the utmost care and with conspicuous ability, the present important memoir is based. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.