ANTHROPOLOGICAL STUDIES IN OKLAHOMA, 

 IOWA, AND MONTANA 



By TRUMAN MICHELSON 

 Ethnologist , Bureau of American Ethnology 



Leaving Washington at the close of May for the season's field-work, 

 I first visited Oklahoma, where my attention was confined exclusively 

 to the Southern Cheyenne. The prime object was to restore phoneti- 

 cally some 700 Cheyenne words and stems (extracted previously 

 from Fetter's dictionary) which can be rigorously shown to be Algon- 

 quian in origin. With correct restoration it is possible to enunciate 

 the phonetic shifts transforming normal Algonquian into aberrant 

 Cheyenne with greater precision than previously. Incidentally much 

 new ethnological information was obtained — a great deal in an auto- 

 biography of a Cheyenne woman. 



T also measured some 23 Cheyennes, among them 11 full-blood 

 adult males. Combining this with the series reported last year it is 

 very clear that the range of absolute measurements is great. For 

 example, the minimum and maximum for head-length is 180 and 210 

 mm. respectively for adult male Southern Cheyennes. It is my belief 

 that students of human paleontology are likely to ignore the great 

 variations in living man and so are too prone to making a new species 

 or genus of a skull that varies slightly from the usual run (e. g., Sinan- 

 thropus 1). In this connection I may add that in my collections I 

 find the head-length of a white adult male American, of English and 

 Scotch descent, though American on both sides for at least four 

 generations, to be 212 mm. No doubt had this been found in the 

 ground it would have been heralded as a new species. 



Near the middle of July I left for Tama, Iowa, to obtain additional 

 material on Fox ceremonials, in which I was very successful. While 

 at Tama I learned of the alleged discovery of human remains in gravel 

 pits near Stratford, Iowa, and in company with Doctor Thone of 

 Science Service I visited the site. The first man interviewed did not 

 make it clear that two such pits were involved, so I personally ex- 

 amined only the gravel pit north of Stratford. Fortunately Doctor 

 Thone subsequently learned from the mayor of the town of the second 

 gravel pit southwest of the town and inspected it ; there he obtained 

 some additional information which is embodied in this report. The 



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