In the 1906 Boas Anniversary Volume, Frederic Ward Putnam wrote, “When I was appointed Chief of the Department of Ethnology of the World’s Columbian Exposition, Dr. Boas . . . was appointed Chief Assistant of the Department. During that time of untold trials and difficulties in making the first scientific anthropological exhibit in this country, . . . to none did I owe so much as to Dr. Boas for the final success that attended our efforts.” Elsewhere Putnam described his experiences in Chicago as being squeezed dry like an orange and thrown away. “The Trustees and the head official of the Columbian Museum,” he asserted, had treated him with utter “ingratitude.” President of the World’s Columbian Exposition Harlow A. Higinbotham was “unsympathetic toward Putnam and his plans. . . . and even admitted to Putnam during one of their disputes that he never entered the Anthropological Building during the Exposition.” As Putnam’s assistant, Boas was on the receiving end of institutional “intrigues” and dismissive treatment by the same people who had so insulted Putnam. Putnam had hoped to become the director of the new Chicago museum that would grow out of the exhibits gathered for the world’s fair, just as Boas had hoped to become director of the anthropological department.1
The denouement of disappointments for Putnam and Boas played out against the phantasmagorical backdrop of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. Ultimately, their exhaustive and frantic work to fill the Anthropological Building with exhibits, and to transform the grounds outside the building into Mayan ruins and Northwest Coast living villages, yielded an important contribution to the development of anthropology as a science and to the creation of the core collection for a new museum. “The collections in the Anthropological Building,” Ralph Dexter comments, “became the nucleus for the departments of zoology and anthropology in the Field Columbian Museum organized immediately following the Fair.” The collections of Northwest Coast Indian cultures displayed in the exhibits and explained by the Kwakiutl Indians in their village settlement marked the World’s Columbian Exposition as “the single event” from which “all subsequent work” on the Northwest Coast would be measured.2
Putnam and Boas’s exhibits were not the only presentations of anthropology at the World’s Columbian Exposition. With multiple anthropology exhibits and little coordination between the organizers, the theme seemed to be “more is better.” Anthropology exhibits were included in state buildings—for instance, the living exhibit of the Penobscot Village sponsored by New York State, and Canada’s display, which included a representation of Cree Indians. Of the two major anthropology exhibits, Nancy Fagin writes, “One was the combined exhibit of the Smithsonian Institution, the Bureau of Ethnology, and the United States National Museum. The other was an exhibit by independent, newly formed Department of Ethnology. The two exhibits had only a superficial resemblance; they were conceived, organized, and developed along very different lines.” As the principal organizer of the U.S. government exhibit, Otis T. Mason from the United States National Museum (USNM) arranged the ethnological exhibits around John Wesley Powell’s linguistic map of North America. Mason had a 16 ft. x 12 ft. linguistic map mounted at the center of the exhibit and created separate alcoves with “typical inhabitants” of the areas represented. As Mason explained, “I have arranged the costumes and art productions of these families in separate alcoves, so that the student taking his position in one of them may have before his eye practical solution of some of the theoretical questions which have recently arisen concerning the connection between race and language and industries and philosophies.” With his extensive artistic training, William Henry Holmes of the Smithsonian Institution created the life-sized figures that were arranged in dioramas along the exhibit’s central aisle.3
The U.S. Government Anthropology Exhibit drew from “closed collections,” as well as from the collections of the Smithsonian, the Bureau of Ethnology, and the USNM. The challenge for those mounting the exhibit—Powell, Mason, Holmes, and others—was the time pressure of bringing together the artifacts for the exhibits from the copious collections in Washington DC. In contrast, Putnam and Boas were gathering the artifacts for their exhibit through “open appeals.” From the beginning of their preparations for the exposition, Putnam, Boas, and approximately one hundred assistants worked fervidly to bring together an extensive exhibit. At the same time, the whole organization of the exposition was wildly scrambling to construct “the White City” and to gather materials from around the world to fill the exhibit halls.4
Plans for the World’s Columbian Exposition had begun in 1889, at the time of the Exposition Universelle in Paris that commemorated the French Revolution. Curtis Hinsley notes that “the winter of 1889–90 saw a fierce competition arise among Chicago, New York, St. Louis, and Washington, DC for congressional approval to hold the Columbian Exposition.” Despite the prevailing East Coast view that Chicago would never be selected as the site for the World’s Fair, over two hundred Chicago businessmen successfully lobbied Congress. Money and organized power yielded positive results. The U.S. Congress in April 1890 selected Chicago. Intended as the celebration of the four hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the New World, the exposition opened in 1893, rather than in 1892, with the additional year for planning and construction.5
The organizers of the exposition desired to create “an American fair, the grandeur of which would prove that American culture was not only equal to, but had surpassed European culture.” To accomplish this, they planned to make everything bigger and better. If the Paris World’s Fair had 72 acres, Chicago’s would have 686 acres, or, as sometimes claimed, over 1,000 acres. If Paris’s fair was situated on a portion of the Seine, Chicago’s would be built on Lake Michigan and have canals, lagoons, and basins carved out of the swampy land. If Paris had Jules-Alexis Coutan’s fountain with the figure representing the City of Paris cutting through the waves, Chicago would have William MacMonnies’s fountain of Columbia, borne aloft on a throne in a ship of state paddled by allegorical figures representing “the arts, sciences and industries,” as the symbol of America. There was also to be more of everything. In “Electrifying Expositions: 1880–1939,” David Nye remarks, “Many visitors saw more artificial light in a single night there than they had previously seen in their entire lives. . . . Mobile jets of the outdoor electric fountains at either end of the Court of Honor shot water high into the air and wove complex patterns against the night sky. Spotlights underneath the fountains were fitted with colored filters, which permitted operators to create symphonies of color as they spewed forty-four thousand gallons of water a minute in kaleidoscopic variation.”6
These same planners of the fair allowed for the decorative backdrop of the Native populations. Indians in native dress paddled birch bark canoes in the lagoons, along with, as landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted wrote, “‘Malay proas, catamarans, Arab dhows, Chinese sanpans, Japanese pilot boats, Turkish caiques, Esquimaux kiacks, Alaskan war canoes, [and] the hooded boats of the Swiss lakes.’” Most displays of living people—classified as primitive, or savage—were relegated to the mile-long Midway Plaisance, where the people lived in villages and encampments, made crafts, cooked food, and danced and sang for the crowds.7 In “Rituals of Representation,” Burton Benedict notes, “At both the Chicago fair of 1893 and the St. Louis fair of 1904 ‘villages’ of living peoples were placed in the fairgrounds in what were supposed to be evolutionary sequences from the most ‘primitive’ . . . to the most ‘advanced,’ who approximated Euro-American physical type and culture.” Thus, the Bedouin Encampment was located at the end of the Midway Plaisance, opposite the Military Encampment; just up the Midway was the Dahomey Village, opposite the Captive Balloon. Then, in order as one moved up the Midway Plaisance toward the heart of the fair, among other displays of living peoples, were the following: Chinese Village, Indian Bazaar, Algerian and Tunisian Villages, Cairo Street, Persian Concession, Moorish Palace, German Village, Turkish Village, Javanese Settlement, South Sea Islanders, Samoan Islanders, Japanese Bazaar, and Irish Village. Right in the middle of the Midway’s panoply of excitement was Chicago’s answer to the emblematic Eiffel Tower of the Paris World’s Fair: “The Ferris Wheel was designed by G. W. G. Ferris. It was a vertical revolving wheel . . . capable of carrying at each revolution 2,160 passengers to a height of two hundred and fifty feet.”8
The anthropology building was located in the far southeast corner of the fair. About the constant delays in the completion of the building, Boas wrote his parents, “‘The construction department always leaves us in the lurch.’” Originally planned to be part of the centrally located Manufacturer and Liberal Arts Building, anthropology was squeezed out when more space was needed to display national and international exhibits focusing on manufacturing and industry and, indeed, also when Putnam needed more space for the anthropological exhibits. In December 1892 the board of directors decided that a separate building, “unpretentious and devoid of all ornamentation,” would be constructed for anthropology. Putnam had early stated his vision for the architectural style of the anthropology building at the world’s fair. In an interview on May 31, 1890, with the Chicago Daily Tribune, Putnam had opined, “‘The building to contain such an exhibition should be . . . of a style of architecture corresponding in some degree to one of the types of great stone structures in Mexico, Central America, and Peru in pre-historic times, of which the ruins in several cases are fairly preserved.’” Putnam hoped that this would be a permanent building, to form the center of a “‘great ethnological museum.’” Putnam did not get this, however. Instead he got a big, plain box of a building, but it was solely devoted to anthropology. He wrote his daughter Alice about his challenges, “‘I am driven to death now with plans for interior of my building which is now called the Anthropological Building. It was first called Educational Building, and then Liberal Arts, but I have now got it officially named the Anthropological Building.’”9
Marginal in placement and set apart from the palatial and watery white city, the Anthropological Building was adjacent to the cab shops, near the greenhouse and the dairy barns, and just opposite the Forestry Building. A New York Times article, “Prof. Putnam’s Hard Luck, His Difficulties with the Anthropological Exhibit,” remarked on “one very important section of the World’s Fair, which because of its inaccessibility and distance from the main buildings, is likely to be overlooked by nine out of every ten visitors.” The author asserted that “the long and tedious tramp in sand ankle deep” was worth the effort. In this area—“what might be called the kitchen and the back yard of the exposition”—the anthropology building was set back, “the furthest in the rear, the most forlorn in its exterior and interior, and pre-eminently the one with the most promise of being a failure.” As if the marginal location were not insult enough, there was also the interminable “clacking of the elevated railway,” about which Putnam complained well in advance of the opening of the fair.10
If the Anthropological Building suffered by comparison to the elegance of the White City, so did Putnam suffer by comparison to the central planners of the World’s Columbian Exposition. The New York Times article described Putnam as a quaint academic, who had a deficiency of good sense. In particular, the article noted that Putnam seemed “to be a sufferer from that great drawback of scientific and professional persons—lack of practicability.” With a singular focus on “his ethnological research,” Putnam apparently had “none left for the everyday affairs of life which require policy and executive capacity.” The reporter continued, “Consequently he has got into snarls and imbroglios and has been buffeted about by more worldly and self-assertive chiefs of departments, who got things done while Mr. Putnam had to wait, and as a consequence his building at this date is unfinished, his ethnological exhibits, many of them, are between here and Patagonia, and the poor scientist has to carry a load of detraction, criticism, and denunciation.” The article concluded on a positive note: “One thing he still takes a special pride in, despite his troublesome critics, is physical anthropology.” While failing to note that Franz Boas was head of this department, the reporter continued, “The sciences of anthropometry, psychology, and neurology will here be practically illustrated, and the visitor may have his measurements taken and learn his place on the charts demonstrating the physical characteristics of man.”11
Putnam’s feelings must have been assuaged by knowing that he was supported in his home press. In September 1890 the Boston Herald had represented his work in glowing terms: “‘One of the most interesting features of the World’s Fair . . . at Chicago will probably be the American ethnographical exhibit under the direction of Prof. F. W. Putnam of Harvard. The general plan of the exhibit has been approved by the Fair commissioners at large and by the local board of directors and is now under the consideration of a special committee.’” A proud and accomplished academic, Putnam was curator of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, professor of American archaeology and ethnology at Harvard, and permanent secretary of the AAAS from 1873 to 1898. From his position at Harvard, Putnam was a leader in American archaeology and ethnology. However, Putnam was out of his element in Chicago, working neither in the museum nor the university, but rather in the setting of a world’s fair with “more worldly and self-assertive chiefs of departments, who got things done,” as the New York Times article represented it.12
Still, while not central in location, nor ornate of exterior, the Anthropological Building was spacious—255 x 415 feet, with floor space when the gallery was included of 158,234 square feet. In his 1893 article “Ethnology, Anthropology, Archaeology,” Putnam explained his plan “for a department which should illustrate early life in America from remote ages before historic times down to the period of Columbus.” Putnam continued, “The legend over the main entrance, ‘Anthropological Building, Man and his Works,’ is very comprehensive and indicates the scope of the department, which not only treats of the moral, mental and physical characteristics of man, but also shows the beginnings of his great achievements in art, in architecture and in manufactures.”13
The Department of Ethnology and Archaeology, designated as Department M, continued to expand. The area of physical anthropology was added, with “its subdivisions of psychology and neurology.” History, prehistory, and natural history—the latter because the organizers of that branch objected to the original intent, to include it with the Department of Livestock—were also added, as were “the sections of Sanitation and Hygiene and Charities and Corrections of the Liberal Arts Department.” Putnam distinguished between “departmental exhibits,” under the purview of the Department of Ethnology and Archaeology, and the “isolated and collective exhibits,” the latter of “which included the Midway Plaisance, the state buildings, the Viking ship, and the special concession exhibits, such as the Eskimo Village and the Cliff Dwellers.” Many anthropological concerns were only nominally under Putnam’s purview. As Gertrude Scott notes, Putnam, in all likelihood, “was not directly responsible for any Midway enterprise,” and thus he was probably not involved “with the village concessions.” J. W. Skiles and Co. of Spokane, Washington, owned the Eskimo Village concession and had sent “an expedition to Labrador to collect ethnological material and to bring a number of Eastern Eskimo” families, along with their dogs, to live “in twelve bark-covered huts very much as they live at home.”14
Boas was officially appointed as chief assistant in charge of physical anthropology on May 11, 1891. Putnam was enthusiastic about Boas’s suggestion for “‘a series of charts which would represent the bodily form of Indians.’” Boas worked with two populations: American Indians and American schoolchildren. During the summer fieldwork seasons of 1891–93, “over 70 volunteers, mostly students from universities, were sent out to measure native peoples of America.” By the time of the opening of the anthropological exhibits at the fair, 17,000 Indians and 90,000 school children had been measured. The display included the following: “Charts, diagrams, photographs, scientific instruments used in the work, and collections of skulls and skeletons of the native peoples.” Visitors to the exhibit on physical anthropology had the opportunity to have “specially trained assistants . . . take measurements and give tests of sight, perception, touch, etc.”15
Boas wrote of his work at the World’s Columbian Exposition, “‘It was my general plan to illustrate the culture of the tribes of Fort Rupert most fully, because they have exerted an influence over all the tribes on the North Pacific coast.’” This was demonstrated, Boas maintained, by the fact that the names for the ceremonies all derived from the Kwakiutl language. In “Northwest Coast Indian Culture and the World’s Columbian Exposition,” Ira Jacknis notes that Boas was incorrect on this point, that, rather, the “terms and the ceremonial complex” had spread from the northern Kwakiutl Haisla-speakers and had been adopted by the Kwakiutl of Fort Rupert and other coastal peoples. Nonetheless, based on his premise developed during his fieldwork in the Northwest Coast, Boas desired to have a large, thorough display of Kwakiutl lifeways from Fort Rupert.16
As Jacknis recounts, Boas commissioned Hunt in August 1891 “to ‘obtain a large house and the model of a whole village, buy canoes and a complete outfit to show the daily life of the Indians, and everything that is necessary to the performance of their religious ceremonies.’” With the consent of officials at the Canadian Indian Affairs and under the escort of James Deans, George Hunt served “as manager and interpreter” and had brought “nine men, five women, and two children (a 5-year old girl and an 18-month-old boy)” from Fort Rupert to Chicago. Arriving on April 12, 1893—two weeks before the World’s Columbian Exposition officially opened and three months before the Anthropological Building would be ready—the Indians from Vancouver Island “were all housed temporarily in three small rooms in the stock pavilion . . . until they moved into the traditional beam and plank houses on the ethnological grounds.” Unfortunately, storms in Fort Rupert and Alert Bay had delayed the shipment of their house and the 365 ethnographic items that focused mainly on the winter ceremonials. Hunt had assembled an expansive Northwest Coast collection: “Hamatsa, Grizzly Bear, Nutlamatla—virtually every Kwakiutl (and some Bella Coola) secret society—were represented.”17
When the shipment arrived in May, the Kwakiutl erected the forty-five-square-foot, cedar-plank dwelling on the shore of South Pond. They leveled the beach in order to launch their canoes. In his report, Johnson quoted Boas’s description of the dwelling:
The front of the house was painted. Over the door was the thunderbird, and on each side the moon, both crests of the owner. The posts were carved. The house that was represented at the Exposition belongs to the clan Ne-ens-sha of the Nakanigyilisala tribe, and represents the houses of their mythical ancestor, Kanigyilak, the creator of the salmon, the great transformer, who transformed the semi-human animals of his time into men and animals. He was conceived by a woman who was exposed to the rays of the sun. He built the house for himself and his brother Nomokwis, and his descendants have built the same kind of house ever since.
The smaller, approximately twenty-nine-square-foot Haida house that Deans had shipped from Skidegate was erected right next to the Kwakiutl cedar-plank dwelling. Boas had commissioned James Deans, the Scotsman—sometimes Hudson Bay Company employee, farmer, and coal worker—to make a collection of Haida material culture, which he did with gusto. He brought three boxcars of items, including an entire Haida house with long cedar beams and carved columns and a forty-two-foot pole. As Deans reflected, it was “‘a rather poor specimen of a Haida house but then, as so few of the old houses were left . . . I could do no better.’” Jacknis describes the setting: “In addition to a 40-foot totem pole outside the Haida house, the Northwest Coast village included a Tsimshian heraldic column, Bella Coola memorial columns, Salish house posts, and two Tlingit poles . . . . To complete the scene, several canoes were drawn up on the pond’s edge.” With the elevated train tracks, the Leather and Shoe Trades Building, and Lake Michigan as backdrops, the Northwest Coast settlement was tucked between the Dairy Building and the Indian School, the latter an exhibit by the U.S. government intended to illustrate the modern education of the Indians.18
Before entering what would be their homes for the duration of the fair, the Kwakiutl performed “‘the first of a series of ceremonials.’” On the day prior to the opening of the fair, “a requisition went in . . . for 39 yards of blue and scarlet flannel, 232-dozen pearl buttons, and other material needed at once to complete the outfit of the Fort Rupert Indians.” One week later the blue and scarlet flannel had been crafted into ceremonial garb bedecked with pearl buttons for the Kwakiutl. As Jacknis recounts, “On the afternoon of May 6 . . . the Kwakiutl marched in procession from their temporary quarters to their plank house, where they dedicated the house and totem poles with dancing.” One of the women, of noble lineage, “sponsored a formal feast, complete with orators for the host and guests.” While living in this village on the fairgrounds, the Kwakiutl provided demonstrations of their lifeways to visitors, “‘whatever is asked of them in relation to their customs and mode of life, particularly the ceremonies connected with their secret religious societies.’”19
Both Putnam and Boas were swamped with crushing, overwhelming work. Throughout his career, Putnam added responsibilities without ever giving anything up. As Dexter notes, in the early days of the World’s Columbian Exposition “Putnam kept on with his work at the Peabody Museum in Cambridge and fulfilled his duties as permanent secretary of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Even though he was given a leave of absence from the [Peabody] Museum in 1892, he maintained close touch with matters at home; and his work arranging the meetings and editing the proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science continued unabated throughout the Fair period.” While in the thick of organizing the exhibition, Putnam wrote to beg forgiveness from Alice Fletcher, who was serving as the assistant for the Indians of the Western United States for the Department of Archaeology and Ethnology, for the five unanswered letters. There were, Putnam confessed, five hundred unanswered letters on his desk: “‘Well, I am simply overworked and driven to death. This World’s Fair business has become a perfect mountain. I am directing parties all over North, South, and Central America and as I have to keep all in funds and report to Chicago monthly and ask for money all the time that doesn’t come as fast as it ought to—it is no small job.’” With equal candor, though two years following Putnam’s expression of fatigue, Boas wrote his parents, “‘I do not have very good remembrances of 1893. A rushing rat-race, great uneasiness, and unsatisfactory work have been its watchwords.’”20
While Boas judged his work to be “unsatisfactory,” amid the fair’s frantic activity he accomplished tasks that had lasting impact. On top of unrelenting responsibilities, Boas taught George Hunt to write texts phonetically in the Kwakiutl language. The foundation for the Boas-Hunt collaboration in collecting and transcribing texts, which lasted from 1893 until Hunt died in 1933, was put in place at the World’s Columbian Exposition when Boas sat with Hunt in the Kwakiutl settlement teaching his orthography for the Kwak’wala language. In “The Kwakiutl of Vancouver Island,” Boas referred briefly to this time at the World’s Columbian Exposition: “We had a number of Kwakiutl there, in charge of my former interpreter, George Hunt; but, being overburdened with administrative duties, the summer passed without any possibility of an adequate exploitation of the rare opportunity except in so far as I succeeded in finding time to interest Mr. Hunt in methods of recording and collecting, which have yielded valuable results in later years.” In her assessment of George Hunt’s contributions to Kwakiutl ethnography, Berman remarks on the “large, documented museum collections” he had made for Boas over the years, and his work as “a linguistic consultant and researcher.” Berman writes, “What he will perhaps be best remembered for, however, are the tens of thousands of pages he composed in the Kwak’wala language on ethnographic and folkloric subjects. These materials make up all but a small portion of the eleven volumes of Kwak’wala text and translation published by Boas.”21
Boas facilitated the research of two other scholars in the village settlements: he encouraged Harlan Smith to work with the Eskimo from Labrador, and J. Comfort Fillmore to record Kwakiutl ceremonial music for the winter dances. Smith, assistant to the Department of Archaeology and Ethnology for Ohio and Michigan Archaeology, sent Boas a manuscript of the “Eskimo Stories . . . I collected, under your direction, at the Eskimo Village of the W[orld’s] C[olumbian] Exposition, together with some further remarks and comments derived both from observations there and subsequent reading.” He explained his approach and asked for Boas’s guidance: “I have given an account, it seems to me, of about all I learned of the Eskimo and so perhaps have given too much detail & too popular for a scientific publication.” He requested that Boas “cut out such unimportant parts or you may indicate them & suggest any changes which you think best & return ms. to me to change.” He added, “I fear many things were misunderstood by me and were it not that you were to inspect it before publication I would not dare to send it to an editor.”22
While there is no copy of Smith’s original manuscript, likely Boas changed very little, since the points in Smith’s letter appeared in print just as he listed them. The value and charm of the article is in the detail of the account and in the personal reflections on the performance of the narratives, precisely the points about which Smith was concerned. Boas’s retention of the “detail & . . . popular” showed that he valued these aspects of Smith’s work. In the first narrative, “Olŭngwa,” Smith referenced both Boas’s The Central Eskimo, which Boas had let him borrow, and Rink’s Tales and Traditions of the Eskimo. “This story seemed to be made up of several short parts, some of which are apparently incomplete and show but little relation to each other.” Smith continued, “Collected October 2, 1893. Olŭngwa . . . was a medicine woman, perhaps an angakok, or possibly a pivdlerortok, ‘a mad or delirious person,’ able to fore-tell events, unfold the thoughts of others, and ‘even gifted with a faculty of walking upon the water, besides the highest perfection in divining, but was at the same time greatly feared.’” Smith had substituted the name “Sedna,” following Boas’s discussion of the sea goddess by that name in The Central Eskimo, for “‘the woman whose fingers had been cut off,’” as she was continually referenced by the narrator and his wife. Smith continued with a description of the performance that revealed the meaning of the designation for this character: “When telling of Sedna, Conieossuck and his wife would clutch the top of the table, from the side, then letting go the right hand would draw it edgewise over the fingers of the left: or she would hold both hands while he struck them with the edge of his: thus representing the cutting off of Sedna’s fingers.”23
Boas sent Smith’s manuscript to Newell for publication in the Journal of American Folklore and then sent his own contribution with the following explanation: “I happened to fall in with a party of Eskimos here a few days ago, and obtained some information from them which fitted in nicely with the paper I sent you a few days ago.” In “Notes on the Eskimo of Port Clarence, Alaska,” Boas explained that a “party of Eskimo from Port Clarence . . . stopped in Chicago on their way to Washington.” He was able to ascertain whether “certain traditions, which are of great importance in the mythology of the eastern Eskimo, are found also in Alaska, and if the peculiar secret language of the Angakut is known to tribes of the extreme West.”24
Boas also encouraged musicologist John Comfort Fillmore “to study a large number of Kwakiutl and other songs of the northwest” from Indians at the World’s Columbian Exposition. As Fillmore wrote, “I also recorded songs of the Navaho, besides making some valuable collections on the Midway Plaisance.” Using a gramophone, Fillmore collected “more than a hundred” Kwakiutl songs. Before he used this new form of technology, Fillmore had expressed a preference for transcribing music without the use of a phonograph. Recounting his “own methods” for recording Indian music, Fillmore wrote, “First, to listen to the singer attentively without trying to note down what he sings. This gives me a good general idea of the song. The next step is to note down the song phrase by phrase. Then I sing with him, and afterwards by myself, asking him to correct any errors in my version, of course noting down carefully all variations.” After having recorded the Kwakiutl music, however, Fillmore wrote Boas about the challenges of puzzling out the stick-beats: “The one advantage of the cylinders, as to the rhythm, has been that, by reducing the speed very low, I could count the beats, which I found impossible when I heard the songs at Chicago.”25
In “A Woman’s Song of the Kwakiutl Indians,” Fillmore recounted, “A little before noon on the 3rd of September of . . . 1893, I sat in the lodge of the Kwakiutl Indians, from Vancouver Island, on the Columbian Fair Grounds, Chicago.” Fillmore continued, “Close at my right knee sat Duquayis, chieftainess of the tribe, a bright-looking, cheerful responsive young woman of about twenty-two years of age. She was nursing her baby, a strong healthy-looking child. On the other side of me sat another young woman, whom she had called to sing with her a woman’s song of the tribe, for my especial benefit.” Fillmore related that Duquayis had not believed “any white man could sing the songs of the tribe correctly; but after I had taken her and her husband, with the interpreter, to a room in Music Hall where there was a piano, and had played and sung with the Indians for an hour some half dozen or more of the songs I had been collecting,” she apparently acknowledged that “the white man could master the Indian songs.” With Boas observing, Fillmore recorded the songs “as fast as I could; but, as they sang faster than I could write, I soon had to ask them to repeat a portion of it.” With good-natured self-effacement Fillmore recalled, “Then I sang it with them, which seemed to afford them a good deal of amusement, whether because of the phenomenally unpleasant quality of my voice, or because of my peculiar pronunciation of the words, I could not determine. However, I was determined to get the song, so I did not mind their fun, or, rather, I smiled and laughed good-naturedly with them and sang away.” The two women became “extremely interested in what we were doing and eagerly corrected all my errors of pronunciation, clapping their hands and laughing gleefully when I had done it to their satisfaction.” James Deans, who was serving as interpreter, told Fillmore, “‘You must know, sir, that Duquayis has just done you the greatest honor in her power. She has not only given you a woman’s song; she has given you her own particular song . . . which she alone sings at the potlatch.’”26
Fillmore returned to Milwaukee, where he was director of his own music school, to work on the transcription of the Kwakiutl music and to puzzle over “the relation of those stick-beats to the song [which] . . . still baffles me.” Fillmore concluded that this was “the really serious problem in this Kwakiutl music.” He wrote Boas, “I understood you to say that these cylinders belong to the Exposition Association. Will that corporation pay me anything for all this hard work?” While interested in the project, Fillmore admitted that he didn’t want to carry the whole load himself without recompense: “I am at recent indebted to Mr. Goodwin’s generosity for the use of a phonograph and a battery. I cannot afford either to buy or to rent one.” He held out hope that “the Exposition Association” would enable him “to buy such an outfit.” Boas wrote Fillmore that Professor Putnam would pay him fifty dollars, and an additional fifty dollars “on receipt of your report on primitive music at the World’s Fair.” He concluded, “This was the best I was able to get for you.” Fillmore replied, “Of course, $100 is no pay for the work I put on these cylinders; but I should do it anyhow, aus Liebe zur Sache [from love of it], & I am glad to get anything.” Boas planned a trip to Milwaukee to work with Fillmore on adding “the words to the tunes.” He hoped that Fillmore would be able to transcribe “as many songs as possible by that time so that I may finish the text of all of them.” Boas added, “You know most of the songs belonging to the winter dance ceremonial and I wish to place them in their proper places in the description of the ceremonial.”27
In 1896 Boas published “Songs of the Kwakiutl Indians.” In it he noted that he and Fillmore had recorded the music separately for these eleven songs: “Mr. Fillmore’s records were obtained from phonographic cylinders while mine were written down from the singing of the Indians themselves.” He continued, “On the whole our renderings of the music agree closely.” In “The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians,” Boas remarked on this “series of phonographic records of songs belonging to ceremonials” that he and Fillmore had transcribed. He noted that he had been able “to verify many of the phonographic records by letting the Indians repeat the songs two years after the records had been taken.” While in his publications Boas had remarked on the congruence between Fillmore’s transcription of songs and his own, he was more candid in his letter to Marie from Fort Rupert in 1894: “Today I corrected a few of the songs Fillmore wrote down in Chicago. Either the Indians sang very differently into the phonograph, or he could not hear them well. I am positive that I have written them down correctly now, and the difference between my rendering and his is immense.” He added, “I have now had enough practice to write it easily.” Thomas Ross Miller writes about the disposition of these recordings, “There are even restrictions imposed after the fact on the songs Boas and Fillmore recorded for demonstration purposes in 1893 at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. These wax cylinders of Kwakiutl songs were willingly made by the singers. Some of them were composed, apparently on the spot, by Boas’ lifelong partner George Hunt, yet the songs remain individually inherited property.” Miller concludes, “Several were ‘returned’ to their owners by artist Bill Holm in the early 1960s. Even if they were made by singers expressly for reproduction and transcription, songs remain the hereditary property of individuals.”28
With the explosion of energy invested in the development of the World’s Columbian Exposition, the evanescent dream city came to a sudden end on October 30, 1893. In “Memory and the White City,” Neil Harris writes, “And then, not unexpectedly but abruptly nonetheless, the fair was over. Not only did it end, but fires, vandalism, and systematic disassembly quickly dismantled almost every physical vestige of its existence.” The power and personality struggles that had marked the planning of the fair continued through to its closing. The Chicago Evening Post had remarked on this conflict more than two years before the fair opened: “‘Fighting the fair seems to be a favorite diversion. The pathway of the Columbian exposition is strewn with mementos of conflict.’” As it turned out, Putnam and Boas figured as “‘mementos of conflict.’”29
The “split authority structure” of the World’s Columbian Exposition obfuscated the person who was really in power. Director-General George R. Davis represented the national organizational structure; president of the Chicago Exposition Company Harlow Niles Higinbotham oversaw the local organizational structure. Higinbotham held the purse strings. Prominent and wealthy Chicago businessmen had formed a corporation, the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1889, and had “raised more than $5,000,000 by subscription.” As the financial challenges mounted for both the fair and the country, these same businessmen found more resources, often by reaching into their own pockets. Money is power, and thus originated the overarching sway of Higinbotham as president of the World’s Columbian Exposition, Inc. As a partner in Marshall Field & Co. of Chicago, Higinbotham was in business with Marshall Field, the man who was to give the seed gift of one million dollars to insure the success of what would become the Field Museum of Natural History. Davis was a senior colonel in the Illinois National Guard and Republican Representative to the U.S. Congress. He struggled in his capacity as director-general of the World Columbian’s Exposition to hold his own against the well-heeled businessmen of the World’s Columbian Exposition, but his tenacity usually turned to frustration. As Dexter notes, “Putnam became an innocent victim of the animosity between Higinbotham and Davis. Putnam remained loyal to Davis and avoided as much as possible any contact with Higinbotham.”30
Putnam never quite realized that H. A. Higinbotham, as president of the World’s Columbian Exposition, Inc., held ultimate power, and not Director-General Davis, who had hired Putnam and who was charged with planning and producing the fair. Nor did Putnam realize that he was sandwiched between these two opposing foes. Higinbotham clearly understood the source of the conflict with Putnam: “‘The whole trouble seems to have arisen from the fact that Prof. Putnam understood instructions from the Director-General of the World’s Columbian Commission as binding on the World’s Columbian Exposition. The dual organizations of the World’s Columbian Exposition and the World’s Columbian Commission somewhat complicated the business of the position which he occupied as Chief of the Department of Ethnology, and I can readily understand how he understood that the Director-General had a right and also power to issue instructions.’” While Higinbotham explained the confusion in the “dual organizations” in a dispassionate manner, he was known to treat Putnam with callous disregard. In one instance Higinbotham ordered workmen to create a larger office for himself. Without consulting Putnam, the workers removed the partitions to Putnam’s temporary office on a Sunday when no one was around. Dexter quotes Putnam in a letter to Davis:
Upon arriving at my office this morning, I found it in a state of confusion and nastiness that is disgraceful to all who had anything to do with it—without my knowledge or notice from anyone, a force of workmen was put into my office during my absence since Saturday; and partitions have been torn down and plastering removed without any care being taken of all the records and valuable property belonging to my department of the exposition. This office was given to me for my use until another could be provided for me and to be treated in this disgraceful and arbitrary manner is a deep insult to me personally as well as to the position which I hold in the Exposition.
Higinbotham had claimed the working space right out from under Putnam and had in one disruptive move insulted both Putnam and Davis. As Hinsley notes, within eight months “Putnam was forced to move his office nine times.”31
The Chicago business magnates were playing a high-stakes game, and they did not view Putnam or Boas as part of their team. At the close of the fair, Putnam returned home and left Boas in charge of overseeing the monumental task, which lasted for nine months, of returning the items on loan, or cataloging and transferring them to the Columbian Museum. Back in Cambridge, Putnam responded to a letter from Samuel A. Crawford, assistant secretary to the board of directors of the World’s Columbian Exposition, who had asked Putnam to urge the Columbian Museum to purchase the Gunning collection of idols and the library that went with it. Putnam replied, “I am sorry to say that I feel that suggestions of mine are no longer desired by the Trustees and the head official of the Columbian Museum.” With uncharacteristic animus Putnam continued, “Since I left Chicago it has been clearly indicated to me, . . . that my advice is no longer desired.”32
The tidal wave of exhaustion and disappointment engulfed both Putnam and Boas at the end of the World’s Columbian Exposition. Each handled it in his own distinctive way: Putnam with patrician grace, Boas with pugnacious missives. Putnam had hoped to be appointed to the position of director of the Columbian Museum of Chicago. He was passed over for Frederick J. V. Skiff, who had worked directly under President Higinbotham as deputy director-general of the World’s Columbian Exposition. From his office at the Peabody Museum, Putnam wrote, “I am now getting settled in my old routine in Cambridge, and after the wear and tear of the Exposition I can assure you that the quiet and comfort of my office is a blessing which I fully appreciate.” Putnam didn’t remain long in the “quiet and comfort of his office.” As an “institutional entrepreneur,” he seized the next opportunity to shape anthropology in a museum setting. In 1894 he “took charge of the Department of Anthropology of the American Museum of Natural History” on a part-time basis. Putnam wrote Boas, “The Trustees of the American Museum have placed the Anthropological Department of the Museum under my charge, and for the present I am to go there one week in four.” Putnam was offered “the position of Curator of the department of Anthropology . . . at the rate of $3,500 per annum.”33
Boas and Putnam had both anticipated that Boas would be appointed director of the Anthropological Department of the Columbian Museum in Chicago. However, since Putnam’s critics saw Boas as Putnam’s man, he was tarred with the same brush. Just as Putnam had been accused of being a poor administrator, so was Boas. He wrote Putnam, “The delays in the completion of the Anthropological building were used to best advantage against you and your administrative ability was assailed in every way. . . . I have learned that . . . I was charged with lack of administrative ability again on account of the delay in getting the Anthropological Building into shape.” Boas reflected on Putnam’s early efforts to introduce the idea of a Columbian Museum, and how Putnam had run headlong into the objections of the President William Rainey Harper, “as he wanted the Museum for the University of Chicago.” A keen administrator who was aware of the potential for conflicts of interest, Rainey “viewed the new Field Museum as a potential rival that might ‘affect us very severely’ unless aligned with the university.” Thus, in this “political tangle between the museum, university, and government science,” the forces of Chicago businessmen elided with the academic power structure of the University of Chicago, the latter financed by the Rockefeller fortune, and linking right back to business.34
While Harper was involved in shaping decisions with respect to the museum, as Boas said, “he left the management of the campaign for the University in the hands of Prof. Chamberlin who has proved to be a most shrewd politician.” The University of Chicago Professor of Geology Thomas C. Chamberlin had in his previous position as president of the University of Wisconsin worked with the U.S. Geological Survey in 1881, and he had been affiliated with Powell, Holmes, and Walcott. Chamberlin saw an opportunity to build a scientific center at the University of Chicago, to be directed by “his former colleagues in the Survey, Charles D. Walcott in geology and Holmes in anthropology.” In Chamberlin’s own words, they would make a “‘glorious team’ to lead Chicago science to ‘the highest and best things.’” Boas conveyed to Putnam that “Chamberlin has two ends in view, one to make the Museum subservient to the University, the second to strengthen the Geological Survey.” After securing the support of the trustees, Chamberlin, in Boas’s words, sought out the “man whom he could influence the most,” for the position of the director of anthropological exhibits, and this was Holmes.35
With outrage, Boas conveyed to Putnam Chamberlin’s plan to create a position for Walcott and to entice him away from the U.S. Geological Survey. “In order to further his plans regarding Walcott,” Boas wrote, “he is trying to divide the Department of Paleontology which is now in charge of Baur and to make invertebrate Paleontology while vertebrate Zoology is to be part of Zoology.” He concluded, “The division . . . is made only to make room for Walcott at the University.” Certainly, Chamberlin did not want Boas, for, as Boas had written his parents in February 1894, “‘I am a thorn in Chamberlin’s eye because he regards me as one of Putnam’s men.’” Boas summarized in the opening to his four-page letter of February 18, 1894, “Mr. Holmes has been practically appointed director of the anthropological Department and the Museum authorities are willing to let me step down and [let me] take the ethnology under him which he does not want.” He added, “This information comes from Harper.” Boas did not garner this directly from a conversation with President Harper, but, rather, “indirectly and from certain remarks which have been made in my presence in the Museum.”36
Boas fought with a war of words. He told Putnam of his plan to write Director Skiff to ask if anyone “besides myself is being or has been considered for the position of Director of the Anthropological Department, since I have been in charge of the Department.” If Skiff equivocated or answered in the affirmative, Boas wrote, “I shall discontinue my present relation with the Museum at once. You will see that I shall have to go now [in February] or in May. These people simply want to take advantage of my knowledge of the collections and break off after I have made the installation.” Recognizing the precariousness of his situation, Boas acknowledged that “I may be willing to make a new bargain with them to finish the installation for a decent pay and this I should do only because I must try to make money.” Boas had been working exhaustively and unceasingly to transfer the collections of the World’s Columbian Exposition to the new Columbian Museum to be housed in the Palace of Fine Arts, one of two buildings to remain as the fair’s legacy to the city. As he noted, “Unfortunately the greater part of the work has been accomplished already; else I should stand a much better fighting chance.” Once more facing uncertain employment, Boas ended his letter to Putnam, “You spoke several times of recommending to President Elliott to appoint me at Harvard University. I beg to ask you now most urgently to use your influence in that direction.”37
Boas and Skiff exchanged numerous curt and acrimonious missives during the winter and spring of 1894. They were able to reach an agreement by mid-February. Skiff proposed that Boas stay “until the period of installation is over, providing you are paid a greater salary than you are at present receiving.” Boas had responded, “I am ready to continue in charge of the Anthropological Department of the Columbian Museum until the first of May 1894, provided I am paid the sum of eleven hundred dollars for my services during that period.” In an effort to ferret out the details of the offer made to Holmes, Boas also exchanged letters with Holmes and W J McGee at the BAE. Holmes tried to shut down Boas’s questions by responding that the communications had been confidential. McGee wrote that Holmes was not “a party to any arrangements prejudicial to you.” McGee also attempted to calm Boas and to support his colleague at the BAE: “There was undoubtedly, a small group of men, including Prof. Chamberlin, . . . who desired to have Prof. Holmes go to Chicago.” McGee posited, “This desire doubtless grew out of appreciation of Prof. Holmes’ experience and ability in museum work, an experience and ability which in my judgment place him in the front rank of museum men in this country, and indeed in the world; and the technical skill and knowledge are combined with genius in original research.” Assuring Boas that Holmes had initially “hesitated” because he was troubled by “the confidential nature” of the offer, McGee stressed that Holmes was much concerned “as to how you would be affected should he accept.” McGee assured Boas that Holmes did not “accept until he had made the provisional condition that you should, if you desired, be retained in the museum in an important capacity.” McGee wrote that he was providing Boas with extensive details in order to show how far Holmes was “from engaging in any arrangement which might be deemed injurious to you.”38
Holmes wrote Skiff about his concerns: “‘Boas’s antagonistic position with respect to my coming has given me a good deal of discomfort.’” At the same time, he thought that “Boas’s departure would be a calamity.” Holmes suggested that Boas be put “in charge of physical anthropology and made ‘agent of the Museum for all the great northern regions of the globe,’” with his time divided equally between the field and the museum. In the end, Holmes’s effort to create a position came to naught. While Boas was willing to accept “a curatorship of overseas anthropology,” he wanted this to be at an equal salary to other curators. When Holmes arrived in Chicago on May 7, Skiff took him uptown to a meeting of the executive committee of the trustees of the museum. Boas, it appeared, had overplayed his hand. The trustees were not willing to encumber an additional eight thousand dollars to hire him, an amount that would have made Boas’s salary equivalent to Holmes’s. On this point of equity Boas was most adamant. Boas was put out of his office, or, as he wrote his parents, “‘I was chucked out.’”39
Neither Putnam nor Boas ever stood a “fighting chance” for what they hoped to realize in Chicago—Putnam as head of the Columbian Museum and Boas as director of the Anthropological Department of the Columbian Museum. The monumental work that both had invested in the fair and the confusion over its organizational structure overlay the ground rock of the World’s Columbian Exposition: the city of Chicago. From the battle in 1890 over choosing the site of the world’s fair to the challenge in financing it, as well as to the selection of those in charge of the exposition, this was enduringly about Chicago and the future of the city. The struggle along “‘the pathway of the Columbian exposition’” was fundamentally a struggle between Chicago and the East Coast. In 1890, when Chicago was selected as the site for the Columbian World’s Exposition, the city was widely known for its stockyards and for the 1871 fire that had entirely consumed it. Chicago was dismissed by those on the East Coast as a place to slaughter livestock and to make money. Following his appointment to chief of the Department of Ethnology and Archaeology, Putnam had warned Davis about the views of “‘the eastern people.’” Davis typified this disparagement by Easterners as an attempt to “‘roast’” Chicago. Those in charge of the exposition wanted to forge a new image of their city, one of creative achievement and of expansive wealth.40
The powerful forces in control of the exposition were guided by an implicit agenda, that all things from the Columbian World’s Exposition should benefit Chicago and those based in Chicago or allied to it. The selection of Skiff as director of the Columbian Museum and the passing over of Putnam fit snugly with this agenda: Skiff was an ally and crony of Higinbotham and the other leaders of the World’s Columbian Exposition, Inc. The appointment of the director of the anthropological exhibits at the Columbian Museum was carried out with subterfuge. As Douglas Cole notes, “Holmes appointment was intended to be secret—secret, Boas thought, only from him.” Boas was kept dangling and working. While he clearly suspected that he was not going to be appointed to the position he so desired, and that he felt was his, he could not find the definitive answer to his question: Who was going to be the new director of the anthropological exhibits? All the while that Boas was writing letter after letter to Skiff, confidential negotiations were underway to recruit William Henry Holmes to the position.41
From the start, Holmes did not really want the position, and he certainly had no desire to move to Chicago. He was born, as he liked to reflect, in 1846, the same year that the Smithsonian Institution was founded. He had established himself in Washington as “the leader of ‘Washington anthropology.’” Nonetheless, he allowed himself to be recruited to the position in Chicago, where he was in charge of the exhibit that had been assembled by Putnam and Boas. Never acclimating to his new position or to Chicago, Holmes disliked the administrative work at the Columbian Museum. Further, he “found when he got to Chicago that his appointment was considered tentative, and he was kept ‘on the ragged edge of uncertainty.’” In three years Holmes had left his position in Chicago to return to Washington DC, where he headed “the Department of Anthropology in the reorganized National Museum.”42
Aggrieved at the way he was treated, Putnam wrote Boas from Cambridge that he was “very much disgusted” with matters at the Columbian Museum. He continued, “I feel that I have been very shabbily treated by Mr. Skiff and the Trustees, after . . . all the work I did for the Museum, the conception of which was mine and would never have been accomplished had I not worked for it as I did.” Putnam concluded with indignation, “Such ingratitude I have never heard of before and I am very much disappointed.” The following week Putnam sent Boas a check to cover the expenses for the loan of exhibits from Europe and referenced “the Columbian Museum and your position.” Putnam referred to the “humbuggery” of it all:
I have wiped my hands of the whole Columbian Museum business, which has been a dirty piece of work on the part of many, and I am glad that I got out of it before Chamberlin began his intriguing and Skiff began playing his double game. We know that such things cannot succeed in the end, but unfortunately science must suffer in the meantime. I did hope that the Columbian Museum would start on a good honorable scientific basis, but I suppose that was too much to expect. I am very sorry for the Museum that it has lost your services.
Skiff didn’t want anyone at the museum, Putnam insisted, who was associated with him. Additionally, both Putnam and Boas were too bruised and insulted to recognize one salient point: W. H. Holmes was a distinguished and recognized anthropologist. As Cole notes, his “stature could justly rank second to none.” Being considered also for a position at the AMNH, Holmes had been characterized as “‘at the head of his profession.’” Thus, while Boas and Putnam declared Boas the best suited for the job, others recognized the achievements of a quiet scholar of erudition whose career had been so entwined with the Smithsonian and Washington as to render him ultimately inextricable. He stayed in Chicago only three years before moving back to Washington.43
Putnam wrote Boas, “I have told all hands that I have come in contact with that you are the best man for the place, and should have been retained.” Indeed, the word did spread about Skiff’s treatment of Boas. Just one week following Boas being “chucked out” of his office, Newell wrote him after having spoken with Putnam that he could not fully “express my disgust at your own personal news.” The following week Daniel Brinton wrote Boas, “The action of the Managers of the Col. Mus. was most shabby. I cannot believe that Mr. Holmes was a party to it.” In June Georg Baur remarked, “I just learned from Donaldson about the dirty trick the Museum people played on you, and am again furious.” He asked, “What can be behind it,” and then, with an indirect reference to Chamberlin, “Is our common friend still intriguing?” Baur concluded, “It again shows the absolute ignorance of the administration.” Hale also wrote Boas in June that “the actions of the authorities in charge of the Columbian Museum was most disgraceful.” He continued, “It will, I believe, prove in the end more injurious to them than to yourself.” He hoped that the “results should be to place you ultimately in a much better position than you would have held with them.” Hale ended, “Your proper place is a professorship in a first-class University.”44
During this time of uncertainty in Chicago, Boas never relented in pursuing other venues for permanent employment. He wrote McGee at the BAE about the possibilities for his doing anthropometric work: “Perhaps you can make an arrangement so that I devote a few months to the organization of that work taking it up in Indian schools.” Boas reminded him that, with some fieldwork, he could “complete the work on the Chinookan language, part of which is now being prepared for the printer in your office.” There was a brief glimmer of hope that the University of Pennsylvania would create a position for Boas through joint funding with the Wistar Institute of Anatomy and Biology. This prospect fizzled because the deed of trust for the Wistar Institute forbade joint appointments. Harrison Allen, anatomist and physician at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote Boas, “I need hardly tell you of my profound disappointment that our efforts to secure you for our University have failed. We did everything in our power, but the Fates appeared to be against us.”45
Boas’s friend and colleague Henry Donaldson tried repeatedly to sound out President Harper about the possibility of employing Boas. On August 18, 1894, Donaldson wrote Boas that he had met with the president, who “is a very much exhausted man, and by reason of that fact does not take a very cheerful view of life.” Undoubtedly, after the tumult over the appointment of Holmes as Director of Anthropological Exhibits, Harper was not inclined to entertain the thought of employing Boas at the University of Chicago. Harper opined after Boas’s time at the World’s Columbian Exposition that “Boas did not ‘take direction’ well.”46
Boas was poised on the knife’s edge, not knowing where he would find employment, not knowing how he would be able to support his family. The only certainty for him was uncertainty, in his awareness that he was totally dependent on the decisions of others. In May 1894 Boas had written his parents, “‘All our Chicago ships have gone aground.’” Chicago had been for Boas and Marie a time of despair and grievous loss. He and Marie had rented an apartment on Stewart Avenue, approximately three miles from the World’s Columbian Exposition. With only two positive points in its favor—it was located across the street from Marie’s sister, Alice, and it was affordable—the flat was small and hard to heat. Under pressure of work, Boas left early in the morning and rarely returned home in time to be with his children. On March 24, 1893, Marie had given birth to their third child, Hedwig. The nurse did not come and Marie’s mother, who was to arrive five days later, had been delayed due to a broken wrist. Boas assisted the doctor in the home delivery. When she did arrive, Marie’s mother and her sister Alice helped enormously with caring for Marie, the new baby, two-year-old Ernst, and three-and-a-half-year-old Helene. By April Helene came down with the measles and passed them on to Ernst. By May baby Hedwig, affectionately called “Hete,” was so ill that she was unable to keep food down, and by July she was still underweight by about three pounds. As Cole recounts, “In August all three children had fevers; in December it was flu, followed by whooping cough.” Alternating nights, Boas and Marie sat up with the children. The baby’s cough worsened, her fever rose, and she developed bronchitis. On January 11, 1894, as Boas cradled ten-month-old Hete in his arms, she struggled for breath and then died. Later, when Boas was in the Northwest Coast, he wrote Marie, “I think again so much of our poor little child. I don’t know why. I saw before my eyes . . . how she hit around with her little hands, and how I held her in my arms—the poor, poor little thing.”47
Boas and Marie’s dear friends, who had moved from Clark University to Chicago, stood by them in their time of tragedy. Georg Baur made arrangements for the burial. A tiny coffin was delivered to the family’s apartment and baby Hedwig was laid inside. The next day, Franz, holding the coffin in his lap, and Marie rode together in a wagon to Oakwood Cemetery. Baur, Donaldson, and Bolza met them there. In freezing weather, they gathered around the small and barren plot to lay the baby to rest. Cole recounts, “The cemetery was detestable—a barren, treeless field bordered by swamps and manure fields. The grave site was too small for plantings, so they bought a new, family-size grave and themselves moved the baby to it on Saturday.” Sunk in unrelenting sadness over the loss of his baby Hedwig, Boas was also inundated with the medical bills that had been accumulating with each childhood illness in the fall and then were compounded by the two doctors who attended Hedwig in her last week of life. Both Putnam and his father had lent him money. On the heels of this family tragedy and economic hardship, Boas saw his job hopes evaporate.48
The lease for the Stewart Avenue apartment ended in April. Marie left with Helene and Ernst to stay with her mother in New York, and Boas accepted Donaldson’s invitation to stay with him. When Boas left toward the end of May, Donaldson wrote him that “the house seems quite lonely again now that you have departed.” While Dawson had asked Boas to return to the Northwest Coast to conduct additional fieldwork for the BAAS, Marie queried, “‘How much richer does it make us?’” She reasoned that he would just have another report to write, which would interfere with any job that might come his way: “‘Don’t go west. I can’t let you go.’” Boas listened to Marie and returned to New York.49
Joan Mark identifies the three major centers for anthropology in the nineteenth century, all on the East Coast: Harvard was first, Washington second, and Philadelphia third. Initially the two centers of Harvard and Washington “were nearly equal in resources and prestige.” Mark continues, “They were competitive, but generally in a friendly way, and individuals moved back and forth between them.” From these East Coast institutions, Mark recounts, “Putnam, Fletcher, Cushing, and Holmes all knew one another, and they knew John Wesley Powell and Franz Boas. Together they made up a complex and interlocking scientific community. They worked with an eye on one another.” There was, however, a new force at play, with the emergence of the power brokers in Chicago. The scientists at the World’s Columbian Exposition, at the Columbian Museum, and at the University of Chicago were not so genial and polite to others. They were playing for keeps. There was in this battle between the East Coast and the Midwest the genesis of grit that emerged most clearly in the treatment of Putnam at the Chicago World’s Fair. The Columbian Exposition coincided with, and likely provided impetus to, the founding of the University of Chicago, which was emerging rapidly as a new center of power and influence.50
While Putnam and Boas left Chicago with battered egos and deflated spirits, their combined work yielded lasting results that lay much farther out on the horizon than they could see. Ironically, Putnam’s success at the Chicago World’s Fair also made him vulnerable to the expansive criticism to which he had been subjected. He became so conspicuous to Higinbotham and others of the World’s Columbian Exposition, Inc., and to members of the press precisely because of his grand vision for the anthropology exhibit. As Dexter notes, “For two years he planned the greatest exhibit of its kind ever assembled and sent out field workers all over the New World to collect specimens and data for the grand exhibition.” When Putnam’s collections outgrew the space allotted to him in the Manufacturers and Liberal Arts Building, he needed a separate building. The delay in its construction was laid at Putnam’s feet. In a sense, he was blamed for his vision and his success. Putnam’s massive collections formed the core of the departments of zoology and anthropology in the Field Columbian Museum. Putnam’s and Boas’s work lived on, long after the Anthropological Building and the other buildings of the Columbian World’s Fair lay smoldering in ruins.51
As the World’s Columbian Exposition prepared to close its doors, the same press that had pilloried Putnam now praised him. On October 8, 1893, the Chicago Sunday Herald, as quoted in Dexter, called Putnam’s anthropological exhibits “‘one of the marvels of the Fair’”:
To collect this has been the work of three active years by Prof. Putnam and his corps of assistants. Nearly every quarter of the globe was explored in search of material to illustrate the development of mankind. Nearly every museum in the country has also contributed its share, to say nothing of the exhibits sent by archaeologists in foreign countries. From ancient Greece to modern Mexico the world has been ransacked. From the very hour of his appointment as department chief he set about the difficult problem. He started expeditions to Peru, Chile, Bolivia, to North Greenland, and Labrador, to the British Northwest Territory, and to nearly every country of Europe in search of material for his great work.
The praise was too late to give balm to Putnam’s wounded spirit.52
Boas’s lasting contributions to the World’s Columbian Exposition remain in iconic representation in the Kwakiutl hamatsa. Jacknis writes, “Franz Boas first witnessed the return of the Kwakiutl hamatsa (or cannibal dancer) initiate in a dramatized version at the fair.” He used this as an inspiration for his work for the U.S. National Museum, when he constructed the life figure groups. Additionally, the Smithsonian modeled their creation of the cedar-plank screen after the one created at Chicago’s fair. Jacknis continues, “Boas’s display, in turn, was copied by George Dorsey and Charles Newcombe at the Field Columbian Museum in 1901 . . . [that] remains on view to this day. Thus, a performance at Chicago in the summer of 1893 has continued to serve as a key image of Kwakiutl culture.” George Hunt and the other Kwakiutl from Fort Rupert constructed a village on the shores of Lake Michigan, which would live on in Boas’s, Smith’s, and Fillmore’s recordings of songs, and in Boas’s and Hunt’s collections of linguistic texts. For Boas, the work with the Kwakiutl in Chicago would reverberate for years in his Northwest Coast fieldwork.53
Boas’s accomplishments elicited boundless pride within the family circle. Sophie Boas wrote her son, “According to a recent letter from Jacobi you are known in the U. S. A. as ‘erster Anthropologe’ [the first anthropologist] and you need not fear that your work at the Fair was in vain.” Sophie continued, quoting Jacobi, “‘The work he did in Chicago was prodigious and has received recognition. Even his old tormentor President Hall at Clark University calls him the most prominent American anthropologist. He is a fine fellow and already very famous.’” She advised, “So my dear boy, keep up your courage and do not allow yourself to be depressed. Everything must turn out well in the end.” Knowing clearly her son’s reaction to adversity, she reflected, “Of course you are right, dear Franz, to try everything to assert yourself. If you would only not allow yourself to become so angry and upset. You use up your strength too soon and will be old too early in life.” She concluded, “I love you dearly the way you are but for your own good I wish you were different.”54