4 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY 



1840 and several minute books of the Six Nations Council at Buffalo 

 Creek by the New England missionary Eev. 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 ethnogTaphic 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 



