LETTER OF TRANSMITTAL. 



Smithsonian Institution, 



Bureau of Ethnology, 

 Washington, D. C, June 25, 1890. 



Sir: I have the honor to transmit to you my repoit upon the Klamath 

 Indians of Southwestern Oregon, the result of long and patient study. It 

 deals with their beliefs, legends, and traditions, their government and social 

 life, their racial and somatic peculiarities, and, more extensively, with their 

 language. To this the reader is introduced by numerous ethnographic 

 "Texts," suggested or dictated by the Indians themselves, and accompanied 

 by an interlinear translation and by "Notes," a method which I regard as 

 the most efficient means of becoming acquainted with any language. In 

 this report I have given prominence to the exposition of the language, 

 because I consider language to be the most important monument of the 

 American Indian. Archaeology and ethnography are more apt to acquaint 

 us with facts concerning the aborigines, but language, when properly inves- 

 tigated, gives us the ideas that were moving the Indian's mind, not only 

 recently but long before the historic period. 



Repeated and prolonged visits to the people of the northern as well as 

 of the southern chieftaincy have yielded sufficient material to enable me to 

 classify the language of both united tribes as belonging to a distinct family. 

 In their territorial seclusion from the nearer Indian tribes they show anthro- 

 pologic differences considerable enough to justify us in regarding them as 

 a separate nationality. 



There is probably no language spoken in North America possessed 

 of a nominal inflection more developed than the Klamath, although in 

 this particular, in the phonetic elements and in the syllabic reduplication 

 pervading all parts of speech, it shows many analogies with the Sahaptin 



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