Plains Indian Studies - Smithsonian Institution Libraries

12 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY
a Student magazine of humor that was sometimes
in trouble with the college administration for
borderline jokes and drawings that would raise
few eyebrows or turn few heads today. Indeed,
much of the humor was quite funny. I do not
hold Jack responsible for all of it, but I must say
that his sense of humor has never left him.
We both went on to Yale to do anthropology
because of Clark Wissler. Wissler came up to New
Haven on Tuesdays and Thursdays to teach at
the Institute of Human Relations from his fulltime
post as chairman of anthropology at the
American Museum of Natural History, where
each of us had come to know him separately.
Wissler attracted an extraordinary number of
young students to careers in anthropology. He
afterward referred to them as his "boys." Each of
us had gone to him with some research interest
that perhaps started with a hobby; he always
found time for us and he was always encouraging.
Today I retain an image of this patient, generous,
and genial man turning from his desk to greet
me, and then returning to his writing without
ever having lost his stride. Small wonder that
some of us sought him out at Yale.
The Anthropology Department was in its birth
pangs when I arrived at New Haven in the fall of
1931. Wissler was already ensconced at the Institute;
Edward Sapir had just arrived from the
University of Chicago as Sterling Professor of
Anthropology and Linguistics in the graduate
school; George Peter Murdock, an Old Blue, was
assistant professor of sociology and heir to the
tradition of William Graham Sumner and Albert
"Buggs" Keller; and Cornelius Osgood, a fresh
Ph.D. from Chicago, was the new curator of
anthropology and prehistory at the Yale Peabody
Museum, George Grant MacCurdy having just
retired. This four-sided arrangement of anthropological
talent was soon to create some interesting
polarities, and some tensions for students, but
the distances kept us all in shape walking.
Jack arrived the second year, having spent the
year after graduation studying painting and
drawing at the Art Students' League in New York
City. This was excellent preparation for his later
work in material culture, muscology, and the
history of nineteenth-century painters of the
West. Many of these painters, from George Catlin
to Frederick Remington, were ethnologists more
or less. A number of them were also writers of
some note, and Jack is clearly in their intellectual
descent.
I recall that Wissler's seminar one year included
W.W. Hill, Willard Z. Park, David Mandelbaum,
David Rodnick, Froelich G. Rainey,
Jack, and me. Wissler had long since outgrown
the "age and area hypothesis," with which most
anthropologists would tag him today, and he was
into direct history and culture change. He was
also writing a landmark paper in the history of
anthropology, "The American Indian and the
American Philosophical Society" (1942), which
he shared with us. He assigned each of us a people
on or bordering the Northern Plains and suggested
that we read and master the historical and
ethnological literature on the group and be prepared
to trace their movements and major contacts
with other ethnic entities, including Whites.
Wissler assigned the Ottawa to me first and later
the Arikara, when it became apparent that he
was going to place me as a Laboratory of Anthropology
fellow with William Duncan Strong's field
party from the Smithsonian (that is how I met
Wedel). It was a similar assignment that led Jack
to the Blackfeet and their neighbors with whom
his name is now synonymous.
Either that year or the next, and certainly
under Wissler's influence and direction. Ewers
undertook for his master's degree thesis a study
of Plains Indian painting on skin robes, parfleches,
and tipis that resulted in his first book
(1939), which was selected as one of the fifty best
of the year by the American Institute of Graphic
Arts. This fate has befallen few doctoral dissertations
to my knowledge.
In those years, at least two other members of
the Yale Anthropology faculty were interested in
material culture and influenced students to undertake
research on related problems. Leslie Spier
came on as visiting professor in the autumn of
1932 to offer "Methods of Ethnography," with