LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS. 5 



and locutions, repeated from generation to generation, are not always under- 

 stood at the present day by the young people, who most attentively listen to 

 the aged rhapsodists, when they expound these miraculous stories in the lurid 

 glare of the nocturnal campfire. Nothing in them indicates a migration of 

 these upland tribes from any part of the country into their present homes, 

 and hence the Maklaks must have had undisturbed possession of the head- 

 waters of Klamath River for some centuries prior to the advent of the 

 white population. 



The various texts obtained clearly exhibit the character of the lan- 

 guage actually spoken and the diffei'ence existing between the two dia- 

 lects, but they do not all possess the same linguistic value. The texts of 

 Dave Hill and others are worded in the conversational language of the 

 tribe, which in many particulars differs from the more elaborate and cir- 

 cumstantial mode of speech which appears in the mythic tales given by 

 Minnie Froben. The "Modoc War" and some of the shorter pieces could be 

 obtained only by putting down the English first and then getting sentence 

 for sentence in the dialect, whereas the best worded stories and specimens 

 were written in continuous dictation. All texts obtained were carefully 

 revised first with the informants, then with other natives, and all the neces- 

 saiy explanations added at the time. 



From a purely linguistic view the popular songs or song-lines are the 

 most valuable contributions. The melodies of some of their number deserve 

 to be called pretty, according to our musical taste. To the natives all of 

 them appear harmonious; but when the Western Indian calls some melody 

 "pretty," guided by his musical principles, he very frequently does so in 

 opposition to what our ear tells us to call by this predicate. 



The Klamath Lake dialect was spoken by the majority of the con- 

 tributors to my linguistic anthology. I obtained these specimens, with the 

 exclusion of the Modoc texts, in the autumn of 1877, at the Klamath 

 Reservation, Lake County, Oregon. Though many of these natives speak 

 the Chinook jargon more fluently than English, I never availed myself, for 

 obtaining any information whatever, of that imperfect and hybrid medium, 

 through which the Indians of the Northwest carry on so much of their 

 intercourse. 



