A Packrat’s Path to Indian Past

Few understood the true significance of John Peabody Harrington’s work when he died at age 77. For some 50 years, the linguist and anthropologist had crisscrossed California and the West, cheating the grave by finding the last speakers of ancient Native American tongues and writing down their words and customs.

Secretive and paranoid, Harrington was a packrat who stuffed much of his work into boxes, crates and steamer trunks. After his death in 1961, the papers turned up in warehouses, attics, basements, even chicken coops throughout the West and eventually made their way to his former employer, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

“Six tons of material -- much of it worthless,” recalled Catherine A. Callaghan, now 72, a linguist who sorted through the Harrington papers when they arrived at the Smithsonian.

“There was blank paper, dirty old shirts, half-eaten sandwiches. The low point came when I found a box of birds stored for 30 years without the benefit of taxidermy .... But mixed in with all of that were these treasures.”

Forty-three years later, Harrington’s massive legacy is regarded as a Rosetta stone that unlocks dozens of all-but-forgotten California Indian languages. But the work of deciphering it is far from over.

Researchers at UC Davis, backed by a National Science Foundation grant, are transcribing Harrington’s notes -- a million pages of scribbled writing, much of it in code, Spanish or phonetic script -- into electronic documents that can be searched word by word. The job is expected to take 20 years.

“I very much doubt I will see the end of it,” said project co-director Victor Golla, a 65-year-old professor of linguistics at Humboldt State. “Like Harrington’s original project, you do this for the future benefit of other people.”

Harrington’s work has been used by California’s Indians trying to establish federal tribal recognition, settle territorial claims and protect sacred sites from development.

It has also played a crucial role in reviving languages. The Muwekma Ohlone tribe in the Bay Area, for instance, is using a dictionary compiled from Harrington’s research to teach its members the Chochenyo language, which had been dead for more than 60 years.

“They’ve gone from knowing nothing to being able to carry on a short conversation, sing songs and play games. Now they’re starting to do some creative writing,” said UC Berkeley linguistics professor Juliette Blevins, who works with the tribe. “We are reconstructing a whole language using his material.”

Scholars of Indian anthropology are drawn to Harrington’s archive as the definitive work of its kind. There’s only one problem: His handwritten notes are as comprehensible as Aramaic.

“It’s impenetrable,” said Martha Macri, director of the UC Davis Native American Language Center and co-director of the effort to computerize Harrington’s papers. “It’s too hard to read his handwriting. Few people can tolerate looking at it for long periods of time.”

The significance of Harrington’s work lies not in individual great discoveries, but in the preservation of millions of words and customs. His archive is a detailed inventory of the everyday.

He pumped his subjects -- often the last speakers of their languages -- for everything they knew on topics ranging from astronomy to zoology. His papers describe centuries-old ceremonies. Medicinal cures. Songs, dances and games. Family histories. Even gossip.

“You’ve got a RICH lot of information there. Just record them all DRY.... Get all that each one knows,” Harrington wrote to one of the many assistants he hired, often with his own money, to record Indian elders. “Get all the old people, get ones I never heard of and all who are about to die.”

Consider the thousands of pages Harrington devoted to the Luiseno Indians of Southern California. Some of the material, gathered in the 1930s, is straightforward. “Hu-ka-pish,” reads one entry, “a pipe ... made of clay, and has no stem, it is necessary for a person to lie on his back to smoke it.”

More typical are the rambling, hard-to-read descriptions of games, stories and sacred rites. One of Harrington’s “informants,” Maria Omish, told him about two smallpox epidemics that ravaged the tribe.

“When the smallpox came 1st time,” Harrington wrote, “the Inds. were having a big fiesta at Sjc. [San Juan Capistrano], and a man came who had smallpox, & the people were talking of making him go away, but he threw a cloth that had small pox matter on it into the fire, & then all of them got it, pretty near all of them died.”

There’s the description of a religious ceremony involving two men who slowly dance while quickly playing flutes made from the shin bones of a deer. The legend of a dying man who asks not to be buried and who returns to life as an elk. The behavior of a particular black beetle that crawls away quickly when placed in the hand of a generous man -- and plays dead in the hand of one who is stingy.

“For Harrington, it was all about getting the information down on paper, and he lived in fear that he couldn’t get it done in his lifetime,” Macri said. “He wasn’t heavy on analysis. His gift was to record what he heard.”

When Gloria Morgan, a member of the Tejon tribe in Kern County, read that UC Davis was seeking Native Americans to help computerize Harrington’s work, she jumped at the chance. Morgan discovered that Harrington had recorded her great-great-grandmother Angelita singing songs in the Kitanemuk language, of which there are no fluent speakers today.

“I didn’t grow up exposed to my own culture, so this is such a huge thing,” said Morgan, 30, a 911 dispatcher. “I had never even heard of Harrington before this.”

Typing Harrington’s notes into a spreadsheet is tedious work. But with each page, Morgan has learned something. A description of a death ceremony. How paint was made using deer marrow. That her ancestors had words for 40 different native grasses but didn’t know what a shark was.

“A hundred little things that wouldn’t mean anything to anyone,” Morgan said. “Except if you’re a Tejon.”

Harrington, born in 1884 and raised in Santa Barbara, studied classical languages and anthropology at Stanford University and graduated at the top of his class in three years. He turned down a Rhodes scholarship and studied anthropology and linguistics at universities in Europe. Professors marveled at his flawless ear. He also had the ability to write down every word said to him.

“He was able to take phonetic dictation at conversation speed, like a court reporter,” Golla said.

He returned to California to teach languages at Santa Ana High School. But Harrington had a wanderlust. He wanted to follow the ethos of anthropologist Franz Boas, who promoted the then-radical idea that “primitive” societies were as complex as those in Europe. As modernity overtook the West, advocates of Boas saw the preservation of Indian cultures as nothing short of a rescue mission.

In 1915, Harrington landed a job as a field linguist for the Smithsonian’s Bureau of American Ethnology. Over the next 40 years his travels took him from California and the Southwest to Canada and Alaska as he immersed himself in a world that was evaporating before his eyes.

“I thought he was a little nuts at times. But I never met anybody who was so devoted to his work,” said Jack Marr, an 83-year-old retired Fullerton engineer who worked for Harrington as an assistant, beginning as a teenager. “He’d travel into a remote area by bus and get off and walk miles by himself to a trading post and ask, ‘Where can I find the Indians?’ ”

Harrington was a recluse who didn’t care about money, dressed in tattered clothing and slept on the dirt floors of his interview subjects’ homes. He rented Marr’s grandmother’s home in Santa Ana and used it as a base for several decades, turning it into a warren of papers and boxes that left little room to walk. He had no phone and would routinely not answer the door.

While in the field, Harrington routed letters to his bosses in Washington, D.C., through Marr’s mother, so they would bear a Santa Ana postmark and would not reveal where he was. Marr was instructed never to tell anyone where he or Harrington were going or what they were doing.

In contrast to others in his field, Harrington was not the least bit eager to publicize his discoveries. Quite the opposite. Marr said Harrington once told him of a tribe in the Sierra that had discovered the skeleton of a Spanish conquistador in full armor in a cave. Fearful that the find would attract reporters and other anthropologists, Harrington told Marr he had the Indians bury the body and swore them to secrecy.

Harrington’s life was full of contradictions. He was sensitive to the nuances of native cultures but revealed himself in his private letters as a fervent anti-Semite. He was a workaholic who never quite finished a project. A social misfit who had no close friends but could charm suspicious strangers into divulging their most profound secrets.

“He preached it to me over and over: If we didn’t do this, nobody else will, and these languages will be lost forever,” said Marr, who hauled a 35-pound recording machine powered by a car battery around the West during the late 1930s and early 1940s, sometimes through mountains on horseback. “We’d be gone for a month or two at a time, living off cases of dried beef and chili and crackers.... It was quite an adventure for a 17-year-old guy.”

When Marr took trips on his own, Harrington wrote long, rambling letters exhorting him not to come back empty-handed. When one of his aged subjects took ill, Harrington exhibited sheer panic.

“Tell him we’ll give him five dollars an hour, it’ll pay all his doctor bills and his funeral and will leave his widow with a handsome jackpot,” he wrote Marr regarding a sickly Chinook Indian elder in Washington state. “DON’T TAKE NO. Hound the life out of him, go back again and again and again.”

When another subject, a Chinook man nearly 100 years old, suffered a stroke, Harrington was heartbroken -- for himself.

“Have just gotten over crying ... this is the worst thing that ever happened to me,” he wrote Marr. A few sentences later, though, Harrington encouraged him to remain optimistic.

“You know, a paralysed person often GETS OVER the first stroke, it is the third stroke that carries them off. And between strokes they get well and sit up and talk.”

Harrington was married once, to a linguistics student. He immediately turned Carobeth Tucker into an assistant, dragging her from one dusty outpost to another, even late in pregnancy and with their newborn daughter in tow, she recalled in a 1975 memoir. She divorced him after seven years and went on to become an accomplished linguist and ethnographer.

Harrington’s bosses at the Smithsonian accommodated his eccentricities because of the quality of the reports he sent back.

It was only after his death that the extent of his material became known.

It took the better part of the 1960s to bring most of the stuff together. Managers of storage units shipped boxes of notes to the Smithsonian seeking unpaid rent. Forgotten stockpiles turned up in post offices that were about to be razed.

The material eventually filled two warehouses. In the mid-1970s, Gerald R. Ford was president when work began to transfer the written collection to 500 reels of microfilm. When the job was completed, Ronald Reagan was leaving office.

The size of the archive makes a mockery of time. Spend a month plowing through what took a lifetime to compile, and you haven’t even scratched the surface.

A Smithsonian editor who worked for years to commit the archive to microfilm wrote, in a 10-volume overview of the collection: “One can easily fall prey to the ‘Harrington Curse’: obsession.”

After six months of separating Harrington’s papers from his dirty laundry, Catherine Callaghan had an epiphany.

“I could see myself becoming more and more like Harrington. I had wanted to devote my life to pure research as he did,” she said. “But I realized I could not survive as a human being that way.”

For a man who worked so desperately to save something, Harrington gave surprisingly little thought to how his stuff would be used -- or whether it would, in its vastness, simply be admired.

“He thought these languages were dying off so rapidly that he could not afford to take the time to publish any of his findings,” said Macri of UC Davis. “I don’t think he envisioned [his archive] being used by Indian people. I don’t think he thought Indian people would be as resilient as they’ve been.”

Joyce Stanfield Perry, a Juaneno tribal leader in Orange County, discovered the depth of Harrington’s legacy in 1994 as she and others searched the Smithsonian for documentation to support federal recognition for their tribe.

On a dusty shelf, they found a box of recordings one of Harrington’s assistants made in the 1930s. On them was the voice of Anastacia de Majel, a tribal elder then in her 70s and one of the last speakers of the Juaneno language.

Her words were preserved as if in amber.

“We wept,” Perry said. “It truly was like our ancestors were talking directly to us.”

Perry, who also runs a nonprofit Indian education and cultural foundation, estimates that 10,000 pages of Harrington’s notes refer to her tribe. As they are entered into the database, a dictionary of her native language is emerging. So far, it contains 1,200 words.

Through Harrington, Perry has made discoveries about her ancestors’ way of life that have affected her profoundly.

“I didn’t know that animals would talk to my ancestors and that my ancestors understood them. I didn’t know that the stars communicated with my ancestors or that when a crow flies overhead that I’m supposed to say certain words to them,” Perry said.

“It was humbling to acknowledge how much our ancestors knew.”

Perry’s backyard garden is full of rocks that represent people in her life, a tradition she learned from Harrington’s archive. Every room in her house has something in it that her ancestors told Harrington it was important to have -- sacred items that Perry won’t reveal to outsiders.

“Harrington is our hero,” she said. “There’s something magical about his work.... It changed how I pray and how I see the world.”