AMERICAN INDIAN EXHIBITS—EWERS 515 
no more precisely identified than were Varden’s. They comprised such 
items as a “Blanket made of feathers by the natives of California” and 
“Wooden masks carved by the natives of the north west coast of 
America.” 
Some other Indian specimens in the Smithsonian collections at that 
time had been collected by Army exploring expeditions in the trans- 
Mississippi west. The so-called “Indian Pillow, stuffed with Buffalo 
hair” was almost certainly a Blackfoot pad saddle obtained by Capt. 
Howard Stansbury on his overland explorations to the Great Salt 
Lake in 1851.? 
A second case contained a number of Indian artifacts as well as bats, 
minerals, woods, and other natural history specimens collected by 
Navy Lt. W. E. Herndon during his explorations of the Amazon River 
and its tributaries in 1851-52. A group of South American Indian 
specimens, including some weapons from the Indians of Tierra del 
Fuego collected by the Wilkes Expedition, shared a third case with 
weapons and other ethnological materials from southeast Asia. 
Although the guidebook introduced the ethnological collections as 
“one of the most extensive and curious in the world,” the American 
Indian portion of those collections was actually quite small. The 
tribal origins as well as the true functions of many of the specimens 
were unknown. As curiosities these objects comprised a limited sam- 
pling of handicrafts made and used by American Indians. 
ENLARGING THE COLLECTIONS 
Secretary Henry realized the inadequacy of the American Indian 
collections and took vigorous steps to add to their numbers both more 
and better-documented pieces. Through personal contacts he encour- 
aged men who resided in or near the Indian country or who planned 
to travel among the Indians to collect for the Smithsonian. One of 
those men was James Swan, secretary to the first congressional delegate 
from Washington Territory, who became a pioneer student of the 
Makah and Haida Indians and an industrious collector of northwest 
coast Indian materials. Another was young Robert Kennicott of 
Chicago, who explored the Canadian Northwest and enlisted the aid 
of Hudson’s Bay Co. traders in collecting both vocabularies and arti- 
facts among the then little-known northern Athapascan tribes. 
In 1863 Joseph Henry had printed /nstructions for Research rela- 
tive to the LH thnology and Philology of America (prepared by George 
Gibbs), earnestly soliciting the collaboration of “all officers of the 
United States government, and travellers, or residents who may have 
in their power to render any assistance.” These instructions, written 
for the Smithsonian by George Gibbs, an experienced field collector 
2This specimen is referred to as an “Indian Pillow’ in the old accession records. 
