56 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1948 
1840 and several minute books of the Six Nations Council at Buffalo 
Creek by the New England missionary Rev. Asher Wright; these have 
subsequently been acquired by the American Philosophical Society. 
Two grants were received for Iroquois research. Toward the col- 
lection of materials for a political history of the Iroquois the American 
Philosophical Society made a grant for travel, photoduplication, and 
secretarial assistance; and a similar grant was received from the Vik- 
ing Fund, Inc., for field work. 
Beginning in February, Dr. Fenton spent about 1 week of each 
month in travel to repositories of historical materials. He visited 
Salem and Boston to examine the Timothy Pickering papers, working 
in the Essex Institute and the Peabody Museum of Salem, and the 
Massachusetts Historical Society and the Houghton Library of 
Harvard in the Boston area. Frequent short trips were made to the 
library of the American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, to ex- 
amine parallel papers and to identify a Constitution of the Iroquois 
Confederacy by Seth Newhouse. In April Dr. Fenton went back to 
Hamilton College for further work on the Kirkland papers, and re- 
turning, he stopped at Vassar College library to arrange for copying 
the Jasper Parrish papers. Kirkland, Pickering, and Parrish were 
all concerned in negotiating treaties with the Six Nations after the 
Revolution, and their letters led to the immense collection of mementos 
relating to western New York which Henry O'Reilly of Rochester had 
collected in 15 large folio volumes for presentation to the New York 
Historical Society. By the end of June Dr. Fenton had completed 
a first examination of the O’Reilly papers and had arranged for micro- 
filming a substantial part of them. A policy of collecting as much as 
practicable on microfilm has cut down the cost of travel. 
Dr. Fenton completed a term as senior editor of the Journal of the 
Washington Academy of Sciences. In June he was appointed anthro- 
pologist member of the Language Panel of the United States National 
Commission for UNESCO. 
A second album of Iroquois records with program notes, edited by 
Dr. Fenton, entitled “Seneca Songs from Coldspring Longhouse,” 
was published by the Library of Congress. 
Dr. Philip Drucker, anthropologist, was detailed to the River Basin 
Surveys July 1 to October 1, 1947, for work in the Columbia Basin. 
He returned to Washington on October 1, and during the ensuing 
months he brought to completion an ethnographic monograph entitled 
“The Northern and Central Nootkan Tribes,” based on field investi- 
gations which he had made among the Nootkan-speaking Indians of 
Vancouver Island, British Columbia, some years before. This report 
describes in detail mode of life and customs of these Indians during 
the closing decades of the nineteenth century and is to be followed by 
a study tracing the cultural changes produced by European contacts 
