Page:Journal of American Folklore vol. 12.djvu/478

 1 30 Journal of American Folk- Lore.

remains to this day," he has himself described. And from this sim- ple beginning — in reality a magnificent discovery — he " elaborated some seven or eight totally distinct methods of working flint-like substances with Stone Age apparatus," finding subsequently that " all save two of those processes were absolutely similar to processes now known to have been some time in vogue with one people or another of the ancient world." All this the intuitive anthropologist accomplished before science called him authoritatively to his life-task. In the spring of 1875 he entered as a student at Cornell University, but in the same year he was called to the Smithsonian Institution at Wash- ington, D. C, where he became assistant to Dr. Charles Rau in arranging the Indian collections of the U. S. National Museum, and preparing them for exhibition at the Centennial, in Philadelphia, the next year. At Philadelphia he acted as curator of the collection, and at the close of the Exposition was appointed curator of the Ethno- logical Department of the National Museum. During the summer of 1876 he began his investigation of the Pueblo Indians, which after- wards assumed such magnitude and thoroughness. Three years later he was with Major J. W. Powell's New Mexico expedition, which spent two months at Zuni, and, at his own request, was left there, where he remained until 1882. During his second year among the Zuni Indians, " he had so far made himself one of the tribe, and gained the esteem of the chiefs, that he was formally adopted and initiated into the sacred esoteric society, the ' Priesthood of the Bow.' " His zeal and what he went through for the sake of science, to the detriment of his health, may be judged from the popular account of his " Adventures," which he published shortly afterwards in the "Century." It was the boy Cushing over again with his delightful recklessness in the search after knowledge. But science reaped the benefit of his insight into the speech, habits, folk-lore, and religion of the Zufiis, a people as interesting to the student of man as any in the wide world. In 1882 he was with the six Zuni Indians who, under his auspices, travelled to the far East to take water from the " Ocean of Sunrise " (Atlantic) and religiously, as they had taken it up, carried it with them to their sacred house at Zuni, — one of the most remarkable pilgrimages on record. With two of these Indians, who did not return at once to their homes, he spent the summer in Washington, and from them obtained much material for his paper on " Zufii Fetiches." Back at Zuni by September of 1882, he remained there until ill health made his return to the East necessary in the spring of 1884. With him came three Zufiis, "to aid him in the preparation of a dictionary and grammar of their language and in translations of myth and beast stories, songs, and rituals." Two years later he organized, through the liberality of Mrs.

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