Name/Title
Letter from Leo Frachtenberg to Harry GeorgeEntry/Object ID
Q1430.634.141BDescription
Letter from Leo Frachtenberg to Harry George noting he will help in securing Kusan baskets and discussing linguistics. Vol 1 P. 141B
Letterhead from the Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology, Wash. D. C.
Dear Mr. George:-
I am in receipt of your letter of July 5th and will gladly help you in securing some specimens of Kusan basketwork, if you insist upon obtaining same. Of course, this will take some time, as the Kusan Indians do not live in Siletz, and I will have no opportunity to go this summer to their present residence.
You have selected the best possible methods for your collection, namely, that based upon linguistic differentiations, It has taken us a very long time to conclude that the only way of classifying our American Indians was from a linguistic point of view correlating it, wherever possible, with the material culture. It may therefore interest you to know that at the present writing there are fifty-eight linguistic groups; the last one having been discovered by me in 1911. If you will look up in the Handbook of American Indians the names, Siuslaw and Lower Umpqua, you will find that these tribes have been supposed to belong to the Yakonan family. This supposition was wrong, as I have proven by my grammar of that language (still in print) that the two above mentioned tribes form a separate linguistic family which I call Siuslauan Group. If you wish, I may I may be able to secure for you dome specimen-work of that family.
Yours very truly,
(signature) Leo FrachtenbergSubject
Leo Frachtenberg
Smithsonian Institution
Bureau of American Ethnology
Washington, D.C.
Siletz, Oregon
Kusan
Baskets
Siuslaw
Lower Umpqua
Yakonan
SiuslauanSubject Person/Organization
Harry L. George Collection, Leo Joachim Frachtenberg
