Dinosaurs in the Attic (6 page)

When he first came to the Museum, Boas may have seen that there was a chance President Jesup would not support a kind of shotgun approach to collecting in the area Boas was studying, the Indians of the Northwest Coast. Jesup was a man who liked definite goals and tangible results. Therefore, Boas presented Jesup with a definite theory that required testing—that the Indians of North America had entered the New World from northeastern Siberia across the Bering Strait.

The origin of Native Americans was in fact one of the great unsettled questions in anthropology at that time. Some scientists identified them with one or another of the tribes of Asia or the South Pacific, while others insisted they were culturally—and perhaps racially—independent of the old World. Boas argued that the way to prove his theory was to send a major expedition to explore and study the cultures living along the entire North Pacific rim, from the Indians along the Northwest Coast of North America to the aborigines of eastern Siberia.

Jesup seized upon the problem with great interest. He was growing old (in 1895 he was already sixty-five), and he wanted a major scientific discovery to come out of his presidency. His shrewd financial management of the Museum had left it flush with funds, and whatever money the Museum didn't have for an expedition, Jesup would find within his own pockets. Boas would now be able to accomplish his secret agenda while at the same time pursuing this important anthropological question.

By 1897, Boas had organized the Jesup North Pacific Expedition. In the entire field of anthropology, nothing of comparable size or scope had ever been attempted before. Boas hired over a dozen anthropologists and assistants who fanned out among the tiny aboriginal cultures living along the circum-Pacific: the Ainu of northern Japan, the Tungus and Yakut of southern Siberia, the Yukaghir and Chukchee of northern Siberia and the Koryak of the eastern coast; the Asiatic and Alaskan Eskimo; and the Kwakiutl, Salish, Bella Coola, and Thompson Indians living along the Northwest Coast of Canada.

Boas directed the fieldwork in North America himself, reserving the Kwakiutl and Bella Coola Indians as his own. On earlier expeditions to the area, Boas had made the acquaintance of George Hunt, a part-Kwakiutl man living at Fort Rupert in British Columbia. Boas asked Hunt to join the expedition, and the two men worked together, collecting objects; transcribing myths, and gathering ethnographic material. Whenever Boas went into the field, Hunt accompanied him and acted as advance man, interpreter, and guide. When Boas was not in the field, George Hunt collected and transcribed myths, which he sent to Boas through the mail and for which he received payment of fifty cents per page. He was deeply knowledgeable about Kwakiutl customs and myths, and contributed valuable material for Boas' resulting analyses. Allen Wardwell, in his book
Objects of Bright Pride,
turned up an illuminating piece of correspondence between Boas and Hunt. Just before Boas left New York for British Columbia in 1897, he sent Hunt a letter, which read in part:

It occurred to me that in laying out our work, it would be a very good plan to have the Indians clearly understand what we are about. For this purpose, I enclose a letter which I have written to the Kwakiutl tribe.... I hope you will read this letter to them, translated, of course, into Indian, and in doing so, you better invite them to a feast, for which I will pay when I see you.

In the files of the Museum, Wardwell found part of the following letter, which Boas had enclosed in his letter to Hunt (the last pages of it are lost):

Friends, I am Mr. Boas who is speaking to you. I am he whom you called Heiltsaqoalis. It is two winters since I have been with you, but I have thought of you often. You were very kind to me when I was with you.... It is difficult for you to show the white men in Victoria that your feasts and potlatches are good, and I have tried to show them they are good.... I am trying to show them that your ways are not bad ways ... I am sorry to see how many of your children do not obey the old laws, how they walk the ways of the white man. The ways of the Indian were made differently from the ways of the white man at the beginning of the world, and it is good that we remember the old ways ... your young people do not know the history of your people . . . it is not good that these stories are forgotten. . . .

Boas was particularly anxious to preserve the myths of the Northwest Coast Indians. Most artifacts can survive the extinction of a culture; pots, house foundations, knives, stonework, and burials will last for thousands of years. But myths, Boas realized, are the most delicate artifact of a culture, and the first to disappear in the face of cultural change. Boas believed that myths were the key to understanding a culture. Like the majority of artifacts, myths reveal influences, contacts, and ideas from other cultures. They also reveal, Boas believed, the way a culture organizes and makes sense of a complex world. Myths integrate—in one structure—the many traits of a culture.

Despite his grasp of their importance, however, Boas found myth-gathering a tedious business. An entry in one of his journals attests: "I had a miserable day today. The natives held a big potlatch again. I was unable to get hold of anyone and had to snatch at whatever I could get. Late at night I did get something, [a tale] for which I have been searching—'The Birth of the Raven.'" He went on to complain about how much nonsense he was forced to listen to before getting one valuable myth.

The expeditions along the Northwest Coast yielded the largest and most important collection from that area in the world. Besides virtually the entire creation and myth cycle of the Kwakiutl and other Indians, Boas and Hunt brought back magical transformation masks, shamans' dance shirts, huge carved bowls and painted chests, shamans' rattles, exquisite carvings in bone, cedar, and slate, feast dishes, and giant totem poles (for which they paid one dollar per foot).

These items were saved just in time. By 1910 the Northwest Coast Indian culture had been suppressed and the potlatch (the periodic feasts where important chiefs would try to outdo each other in giving away their wealth) outlawed; the Indians had stopped creating their extraordinary art. What Boas feared most had come to pass.

EXPEDITIONS IN ASIA

Meanwhile, Boas had sent three men to conduct parallel work in Asia. The first two were Russian anthropologists, Waldemar Borgoras and Waldemar Jochelson, both of whom had been exiled to Siberia by the Czar for belonging to revolutionary societies. Once in Siberia, the two were more or less free to travel and research as they pleased, only mildly inconvenienced by the shadow of the Czar's secret police. The third man, Berthold Laufer, a German, was put in charge of research among the tribes living along the Amur River, which runs along the present-day border of China and the Soviet Union.

Laufer, Jochelson, and Borgoras hired their own assistants and traveled separately. At this time, Siberia was still one of the remotest regions on the earth, containing areas that were entirely unexplored. Many of the photographs taken by Jochelson, Borgoras, and Laufer show landscapes and peoples being seen for the first time by Western man.

The first to arrive in Russia, Laufer landed at Vladivostok in June 1898. From there he traveled by steamer to Sakhalin Island (a large, remote island in the Sea of Okhotsk, northwest of Japan), where he remained for the bitter Siberian winter studying the Gilyak, Tungus, and Ainu tribes. A letter he wrote to Boas on March 4, 1899, reveals a glimpse of the details of his fieldwork:

I did not succeed in obtaining any anthropometric measurements. The people were afraid they would die at once after submitting to this process. . . . I succeeded in measuring a single individual, a man of imposing stature. who, after the measurements had been taken, fell prostrate on the floor, the picture of despair, groaning, "Now I am going to die tomorrow!" . . .

I took phonographic records of songs, which created the greatest sensation among the Russians as well as among the natives. A young Gilyak woman who sang into the instrument said, "It took me so long to learn this song. and this thing has learned it at once, without making any mistakes. There is surely a man or a spirit in this box which imitates me!" and at the same time she was crying and laughing with excitement.

Jochelson arrived in Siberia a year later than Laufer, to research the tribes that made their home above the Arctic Circle. Both Jochelson and his wife, Dina Brodsky Jochelson, were imposing figures, well suited to the kind of expedition they undertook. They were intrepid explorers, hazarding everything to acquire new knowledge. In 1901, during their second year in Siberia, they attempted the almost unthinkable—a two-month trek across the breadth of Siberia, from Gizhiga Bay on the southern side to Nishe-Kolymsk on the northern side, near the East Siberian Sea. In order to take advantage of the shortest route to these remote tribes, they planned to take packhorses across the extremely remote Stanovoi Mountains, over unexplored territory to a small town on the Korkodon River. There they would build a raft and float north to the Arctic Ocean. In a letter to Boas, Jochelson wrote about the harrowing journey:

This journey was the most difficult one that it was ever my fortune to undertake. Bogs, mountain torrents, rocky passes and thick forests combined to hinder our progress.... A heavy rain which fell during the first few days of our journey soaked the loads of the pack-horses and caused the provisions to rot. Therefore we had to cut down on our rations from the very beginning. After crossing the passes of the Stanovoi Mountains, we reached the upper course of the Korkodon River. By this time our horses were exhausted, and it was necessary to take a long rest. Meanwhile the cold was increasing day by day, and haste was necessary if we were to reach the Verkhne-Kolymsk before the closing [freezing] of the river.

It took us one day to build a strong raft, and then we began our descent of the river, made dangerous by numerous rapids and short bends, by the rocky banks and by jams of driftwood. Our guides had intimated that we could make the descent in two days, but instead we spent nine days on the raft.

Jochelson did a great deal of research and collecting with the Koryak, a group of small tribes living along the shores of the Sea of Okhotsk. While among the Maritime Koryak, Jochelson and his wife lived most of the time in the tribe's underground dwellings, which could be entered only through a tree-trunk ladder descending through the smokehole. He complained to Boas:

It is almost impossible to describe the squalor of these dwellings. The smoke, which fills the hut, makes the eyes smart ... walls, ladder, and household utensils are covered with a greasy soot, so that contact with them leaves shining black spots on hands and clothing. The dim light which falls through the smoke-hole is hardly sufficient for writing and reading. The odor of blubber and of refuse is almost intolerable; and the inmates, intoxicated with fly agaric, add to the discomfort of the situation. The natives are infested with lice. As long as we remained in these dwellings we could not escape these insects, which we dreaded more than any of the privations of our journey.

The pair continued their trek first to the Arctic coast and then inland again. By 1902 they had crossed the Lena River and reached the town of Yakutsk. During much of this journey, Jochelson was shadowed by secret police, on the orders of the Russian Interior Ministry, who did everything they could to hinder and thwart the success of the expedition, without much success.

Jochelson made extremely rare and valuable collections among the Yukaghir, the Tungus, and the Yakut tribes of eastern Siberia. The material Jochelson gathered remains today one of the most thorough and important collections of Siberian ethnography in the world.

Borgoras was the most daring of the three explorers, traversing areas of Siberia unknown even to the Russians. He left Vladivostok in the early summer of 1900, bound for the remote tribes of the Pacific. He landed at the mouth of the Anadyr River in late July of 1900, at Mariinsky Post, at that time the most remote Russian settlement in eastern Asia—nothing more than a detachment of cossacks, living in barracks next to a native village. He studied and made collections with the Reindeer Chukchee and the Ai'wan tribe, the Asiatic branch of the Alaskan Eskimo. Borgoras then made a large loop, lasting a year, following the Siberian coastline north to Indian Point, one of the extreme eastern points of Asia, then cutting inland, following the Anadyr River south and exploring the northern part of the Kamchatka Peninsula. His extensive collections were hauled by dog sled to Mariinsky Post, loaded on a steamer to Vladivostok, and finally sent to New York via the Suez Canal.

The explorations of eastern Siberia were completed in 1902, and Borgoras and Jochelson traveled to the Museum in New York to edit and publish their results. Boas kept Laufer in Asia, directing him to make collections in China. Jochclson stayed at the Museum until 1908, returning to Russia once to lead another expedition. He then remained in New York until his death in 1937. Borgoras stayed in Russia and was imprisoned after the 1905 Revolution. Eventually he became a leading Soviet citizen, and lived a peaceful life until his death in 1936.

The collections and ethnographic notes brought back by the Asian leg of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition are a priceless record of the fragile tribes of the area. Boas made it clear that he wanted the explorers to collect everything they could lay their hands on. A letter from Borgoras listing the various results of one expedition gives a clue to the sheer scale of the work. Borgoras shipped back to New York volumes of ethnographic notes; 5,000 objects; 33 plaster casts of faces; 75 skulls; 300 myths, tales, and legends; 150 texts transcribed in the Chukchee, Koryak, Kamchadel, and Asiatic Eskimo languages; 95 wax-cylinder phonographic records; anthropometric measurements of 860 individuals; and hundreds of photographs.

Since Boas hoped to show a physical affinity between the American Indians and the north Asiatic peoples, physical anthropology—especially the study of racial features and types—was an important part of the expeditions. The anthropometric measurements referred to above (such measurements as the distance between the eyes, the shape of the skull, and arm lengths and leg lengths combined in various ratios) were a way of quantifying similarities and differences in appearance to determine how two groups might be related. Measured individuals were usually photographed from the front, side, and back (remember Albert S. Bickmore), resulting in a series of photographs that looked like mug shots.