JOURNAL 
OF THE 
WASHINGTON ACADEMY OF SCIENCES 
Vou. 13 Frsruary 4, 1923 No. 3 
ETHNOLOGY.—WNew light on the early history of the Siouan peoples. 
JoHN R. Swanton, Smithsonian Institution. 
Relationship between several of the languages of the western Siouan 
group was recognized by French missionaries about the beginning of 
the eighteenth century. In 1836 Gallatin brought most of the tribes 
of this division together under the name afterwards adopted by 
Powell in his well-known scientific classification.” 
In the year 1870 Dr. Horatio Hale had obtained from a few sur- 
viving members of the Tutelo tribe incorporated with the Iroquois 
a vocabulary demonstrating beyond question the Siouan connection 
of this former Virginian people, and the results of his work were 
published in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society for 
1883-4, pp. 1-47. Dr A. 8S. Gatschet of the Bureau of American 
Ethnology visited the Catawba tribe of South Carolina in 1881 and 
on the basis of a considerable body of linguistic material then collected 
suggested a Siouan relationship for them, a suggestion which subse- 
quent researches by Dr. J. O. Dorsey, the Siouan specialist of the 
Bureau, entirely confirmed.? With these two languages as a basis 
further investigations by the same students and by Mr. James Mooney 
resulted in the identification of a large eastern Siouan area in the 
piedmont region of Virginia and the Carolinas, including at the time 
of the English colonization about thirty distinct tribes. The results 
of this work were incorporated by Mr. Mooney into a bulletin en- 
titled ‘‘The Siouan Tribes of the East’? which remains a standard 
authority on the subject today. 
1 Received January 3, 1923. 
27th Ann. Rep. Bur. Amer. Ethnol., 111-112. 
3 Ibidem. 
4 Bur. Amer. Ethnol. Bull. 22. 
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