﻿SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 78 



trip was in many respects a noteworthy one and rich in resuhs, which, 

 if followed up, promise to lead to valuable additions to our knowledge 

 regarding the American aborigines. 



Since American anthropologists started to study native man, there 

 has always been in the background of the work the question of the 

 origin and antiquity of the American Indian and Eskimo. There 

 were always the questions : Who are they ? ; What are their true affilia- 

 tions? ; Where did they come from? ; and When did they come to the 

 New World? One man after another under the Smithsonian Institu- 

 tion, and more especially under the Bureau of American Ethnology, 

 besides those elsewhere, has given his life to the study of these prob- 

 lems, and research was and still is carried on in all parts of the 

 continent on these basic questions, without the final answers having 

 as yet been reached. 



Throughout this work there has always been felt a need of more 

 definite knowledge of those parts of America and Asia that come 

 closest together. In the studies on the origin of the American aborig- 

 ines in particular, indications invariably point to the furthermost 

 American northwest and thence to the Asiatic continent. Time and 

 again, even to the present day, ideas or opinions have been advanced 

 that the American man, or at least some of the American aborigines, 

 may have reached this continent from other parts of the world— from 

 Europe, Polynesia, Melanesia, Central or Southern Asia, and even 

 Australia. The men who are advancing these ideas generally forget 

 that when we are dealing with the peopling of America we are not 

 dealing with the people of the continent within anything like historic 

 times, Init thousands of years back when man was by no means as 

 civilized or apt in any part of the world as he later became, and when 

 he did not control as yet sufficient means of navigation or, especially, 

 of provisioning for any extended journey such as could have brought 

 him into this continent. The best students of the question agree that 

 man, up to relatively late times, could only have come into America 

 over small stretches of ocean ; and so everything points in the one 

 direction of Alaska, and beyond to the Asiatic continent. And here 

 many people have assumed that there must have been up to recent 



Pt. Hope ; to the American teachers at Wales, Shismareff, Kot^ebue, Pt. Hope 

 and elsewhere ; to Tom Berryman, Jim Allen and Mr. Chas. Brower, traders 

 respectively at Kotzebue, Wainwright, and Barrow; to Mr. Sylvester Chance, 

 Superintendent of Education, Kotzebue, Alaska; to the U. S. Marshals, Deputy 

 Marslials and Postmasters along the route ; and to the numerous traders, 

 miners, settlers and others who were helpful with specimens, advice, guidance, 

 and in other matters. 



