LIIST OP CONTRIBDTOES. 7 



belligerent Modocs and to check any dangerous movements which they 

 might have undertaken against the settlers or the Indian Reservation. 

 Hill's father, Skaititko, or the "Left-Handed", was for some time a guide 

 to General Frdmont on one of his expeditions through Oregon, Nevada, 

 and California. 



Readers of Hill's texts will notice that his diction is very concise, preg- 

 nant and to the point, and so is the speech of these Indians generally. 

 But since that conversational language, or popular jargon, as we may not 

 improperly call it, moves along in contractions, elisions, metatheses and 

 ellipses, I have had to revise his texts many times with him and other Indians 

 before I could make them practically available. In the myths, Dave Hill 

 is not so pictorial and graphic as Minnie Froben, but in narrating his feats 

 of war he readily furnished all the points that could be expected. Con- 

 cerning the conjurers' practices and national beliefs, he was more communi- 

 cative than the majority of the Klamath Indians, whom superstitious awe 

 still deters from revealing all that the investigator desires to know. Hill's 

 list of topographic names is a very important addition to abonginal topog- 

 raphy, since he has added the correct etymology to the majority of these 

 local designations. 



3. Minnie Froben, born about 1860, the daughter of a pure-blood Kla- 

 math woman, who lives on the Williamson River, and of a (deceased) French 

 settler Froben or Frobine, was, at the time of my visit, the assistant of Mrs. 

 Nickerson, the matron of the boarding-school for native children at the 

 Agency. She and the subchief Hill were the most important contributors 

 to my mythic and other ethnologic anthology, and the pieces dictated by 

 her excel all the others in completeness and perspicuity. Moreover, I 

 obtained from her a multitude of popular songs, the names and uses of 

 esculent roots and plants, the Klamath degrees of relationship, a large num- 

 ber of words and sentences, a good deal of grammatic information, and 

 revised, with her assistance, the whole of the Modoc contributions, as well 

 as the majority of Klamath Lake texts. 



If any further books should be composed in or about the Klamath Lake 

 dialect, her assistance would perhaps be preferable to any other native help 

 to be found at present in the tribe; for during her stay with white people 



