Author: William Healey Dall

Publisher:

Published: 2015-07-21

Total Pages: 400

ISBN-13: 9781331928232

Excerpt from Tribes of the Extreme Northwest, And, Tribes of Western Washington and Northwestern Oregon During the past ten years much of my time has been spent among the Indians of the Rocky Mountain region. In the earlier years I collected many short vocabularies of the various tribes with whom I met. From time to time, as opportunity afforded, many of these vocabularies were enlarged. I soon learned to enlist Indians in my party, and to seize every opportunity of conversing with them in their own language, in order that I might acquire as much knowledge of their tongues as possible. A large number of vocabularies were collected, some embracing but a few hundred words, others two or three thousand each. These Indians, among whom I traveled, belonged chiefly to one great family - the Numas, a stock embracing many languages, and several of the languages having more than one dialect. I also made notes on the grammatic characteristics of these languages to the extent of my opportunity. In the mean time some of my assistants collected vocabularies furnishing important additional material. Much of this related to families other than the one in which I was making especial studies. In such a hasty review of the general literature of this subject as I was able to make, my attention was attracted to some interesting publications in the Overland Monthly, from the pen of Mr. Stephen Powers, and soon a correspondence was begun, which finally resulted in my receiving from that gentleman a large amount of linguistic and other ethnographic material, the results of his labors for many years among the Indians of California. From time to time other vocabularies were sent me from various persons throughout the Rocky Mountain region. 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.