John Wesley Powell papers

The material in this collection has been organized and cataloged in various ways by the Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE) and National Anthropological Archives (NAA) since the 1870s. There is little remaining evidence of Powell's own organizational scheme. James Constantine Pilling, BAE Chief Clerk, was first custodian of the manuscripts collection. Pilling compiled the first catalog of BAE manuscripts in 1881 as "Catalog of Linguistic Manuscripts in the Library of the Bureau of Ethnology" in the First Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. The Pilling catalog organizes the manuscripts alphabetically by collector and includes twenty-six (26) of Powell's manuscripts, as well as other material then in the BAE manuscript collection. In 1893, BAE linguist James Owen Dorsey, with the help of J.N.B. Hewitt, began to compile an in-house catalog of BAE manuscripts. This system involved organizing the manuscripts onto shelves by language group, and involved separating vocabularies from related items, such as letters, related notes, and other vocabularies. Some of the manuscripts are marked with shelf numbers from this system (e.g., Sh-57, Sh-67, etc.) This work was interrupted by Dorsey's death in 1895 and never completed. The incomplete Dorsey-Hewitt catalog in now in MS 1524. In 1896, an inventory was conducted on the manuscript collection. An inventory list has not been preserved, but many of the manuscripts have been marked "'96" in ink indicating that they were accounted for in this inventory. In 1926, Hewitt, with the assistance of typist Mae Tucker, began to assign Manuscript Numbers to BAE collections. The numbers loosely corresponded to language families, but this may have been a result of the numbers being assigned to the manuscripts in the order in which they were already arranged on the shelves. The manuscripts were stamped with a BAE stamp including the month and year they were cataloged and the catalog number was stamped or written on the documents. In some cases, manuscripts numbers were reassigned, resulting in several different numbers appearing on the documents. In 2025, Powell's manuscripts were reprocessed and incorporated into a single collection now known as the John Wesley Powell papers (MS 798). The Archivist assembled Powell's ethnographic and linguistic manuscripts, writings, and personal papers. Manuscripts relating to Powell's work as director of the BAE were not included. Due to the numerous cataloging and arrangement schemes imposed on the materials and a lack of documentation, the Archivist was unable to determine an original order of the collection. The Archivist organized the collection into four (4) series. The Archivist referred to: Powell, John Wesley, and Smithsonian Institution. Anthropology of the Numa: John Wesley Powell's Manuscripts on the Numic Peoples of Western North America, 1868-1880. Edited by Don D. Fowler and Catherine S. Fowler. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1971. to identify and arrange the research material in Series 1. Old BAE/NAA manuscript numbers have been recorded as "Local Numbers" for each file. In some cases, more than one BAE/NAA manuscript has been incorporated into a single file. In other cases, BAE/NAA manuscripts have been divided among several new files. Original titles and wording on the documents were used when possible, even when they included outdated or offensive terminology. Supplied titles, including modern terminology, are in square brackets [].