AMERICAN INDIAN EXHIBITS—EWERS 517 
one of Nez Percé artifacts collected by Indian Agent John B. Monteith 
more than a year before Chief Joseph’s masterful retreat made the 
name and the courage of that tribe known throughout the civilized 
world. 
Some of the most popular exhibits at the Centennial Exposition 
were the tall Haida totem poles, collected by James Swan, and a 
buffalo hide tipi, the home of an Arapaho Indian family, obtained in 
the field by Vincent Colyer, talented artist and secretary of the Board 
of Indian Commissioners. (PI. 2, fig. 2.) 
By the time the exhibit materials from the Philadelphia exposition 
reached Washington the Smithsonian certainly did possess one of 
the most extensive North American Indian collections in the world. 
Its Northwest coast and Plains Indian materials were outstanding, 
although some of the tribes of those regions still were very poorly 
represented. The collections were weak in artifacts from the historic 
tribes east of the Mississippi, from the Indians of the Southwest, from 
the Eskimos and the majority of the Canadian Indian tribes, and 
from the very great majority of the Indian tribes living south of the 
United States. 
TECHNOLOGICAL EXHIBITS IN THE ARTS AND INDUSTRIES BUILDING 
By 1877 the very wealth of potential exhibit materials possessed 
by the Smithsonian Institution had become a handicap to effective 
exhibition. Collections in the natural sciences, in archeology, and 
in the ethnology of Old World peoples had also grown rapidly. It 
was impossible to interpret these subjects in addition to history and 
art within the limited confines of the Smithsonian Building. A new 
and larger museum was needed, and until that structure (the Arts and 
Industries Building, which stands east of the Smithsonian Building) 
was available, little improvement of exhibits was possible. 
Meanwhile, the Smithsonian appointed its first specialists in an- 
thropology to supervise the work of accessioning and cataloging the 
large and growing collections and to begin the systematic classification 
of the materials on hand. In 1876 Dr. Charles Rau, of New York, 
was appointed to classify and arrange the anthropological collections 
in the museum, and Frank H. Cushing became his assistant in 
ethnology. 
In 1879 the Bureau of (American) Ethnology was established and 
its vigorous head, Maj. John Wesley Powell, declared its mission “to 
organize anthropologic research in America.” He inaugurated an ex- 
tensive program of fieldwork in the Southwest which led to the en- 
richment of the museum’s previously limited Pueblo Indian collec- 
tions. Cushing and Col. James Stevenson assumed very active roles 
in this Southwestern research. Meanwhile, Powell and his staff were 
engaged in a series of classic projects which did not involve the study 
