Scenes from the High Desert

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS

Contents

Preface...................................................ixIntroduction..............................................11. An Eastern Childhood...................................172. West to Deep Springs...................................353. University Years, East and West........................574. Berkeley and Beyond....................................755. From Far West to Midwest...............................1026. The Utah Years.........................................1237. Southwestern Sights....................................1518. Return to the High Desert..............................1759. Washington Ways and Means..............................20610. East of Everything....................................23511. At Home on the Prairie................................26312. Notes from the Ninetieth Meridian.....................286Conclusion................................................313Notes.....................................................329References Cited..........................................385Index.....................................................407

Chapter One

In 1902, the year of Julian Steward's birth in Washington, D.C., one of that city's most famous residents, John Wesley Powell, died. Powell had set out from his home on the Illinois prairie in the late 1860s to explore the Rocky Mountains. Departing from Wyoming Territory in 1869, he and a small band of men made one of that century's most celebrated journeys of exploration. After launching their wooden boats into the swift current of the Green River, they were soon swallowed up by the wilderness and within weeks were reported lost. But Powell and his companions survived their long journey, which took them through the fierce rapids and white water of the Green and Colorado Rivers and into the heart of uncharted territory. The journey ended when the men emerged from the Grand Canyon; they were the first explorers to reach it by water.

Powell had spent his life up to then living in the East and Midwest, regions that showed a certain uniformity over large areas. By contrast, he saw a striking degree of variety in the West, in altitude, terrain, climate, and soil. As a native of the well-watered lands to the east, the aridity of the American West impressed him deeply as well. These themes, of variety and aridity, ran through his Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States, submitted to the government in 1878. The renowned explorer was not only a geologist and a founder and director of the U.S. Geological Survey but also a self-taught anthropologist. In his early western journeys he encountered Shoshone, Ute, and Paiute Indians and began studying their languages and cultures. Eventually he founded the Smithsonian Institution's Bureau of Ethnology, later called the Bureau of American Ethnology. Powell remained director of the bureau until the time of his death. Three decades later, Steward would join the bureau as a research ethnologist, specializing in a portion of the vast area that Powell called the Arid Region.

Alfred Kroeber, who would become Steward's teacher and a dominant figure in American anthropology, offered his first course, on North American ethnology, in 1902. (He had a new position as instructor at the University of California in Berkeley, where he taught for nearly forty-five years.) In the same year, the American Anthropological Association was established, with Kroeber and Powell among its founding members. Many of the members of this new scientific society specialized in North American ethnology and archaeology, and, in common with Kroeber and Powell, had worked in the American West. Very few members had graduate training in anthropology, which was still a fledgling academic discipline. In 1902 Kroeber was one of only nine men who had earned a Ph.D. in anthropology from an American university. Like Powell, many of the founding members were not academics, and their interest in North American Indians and anthropology grew out of a background in the sciences, especially natural history, which encompassed botany, zoology, and geology, as well as ethnology and archaeology by some definitions.

Steward's own path into the field, which began with a boyhood interest in natural history, followed an early and authentically American tradition in anthropology. It was a native American tradition in a double sense, one dating back at least to Thomas Jefferson's excavations of an Indian site in Virginia, not far from his home at Monticello. Powell, still widely remembered as an explorer/ scientist during Steward's childhood years, belonged to the same tradition. Steward's graduate training would introduce him to a European-influenced anthropology, as taught by Franz Boas. Boas had emigrated to the United States from Germany in the 1880s, later joining the faculty of Columbia University, where he offered graduate training in anthropology; Kroeber was his first student at Columbia to earn a Ph.D.

In 1902 anthropology was thus the preserve of a select number of men and a very few women, the most eminent of whom was Alice Fletcher. The only woman invited to the founding meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Fletcher was a contemporary of Powell's and had worked for many years with Omaha Indians and the Nez Percé. Later she lived in Washington, D.C., not far from a neighborhood where Steward's parents happened to reside for a year or two before his birth. Fletcher was drawn to the city because of her work in anthropology. Washington, along with Cambridge, Massachusetts, was one of two organizational centers for anthropology in nineteenth-century America. At the turn of the century, the federal capital retained its place as a center of the new field.

Anthropology would remain practically unknown to the general public until decades later. The first generation of university-trained anthropologists, nearly all of them men and easterners, went west to study what they believed were the dying cultures of American Indians, and they published their research in monographs and journals that few people other than scholars read. In 1902 the West that captured the popular imagination was the one Owen Wister portrayed in his newly published and best-selling novel, The Virginian, as a land of cowboys without Indians. The many popular writers who soon followed Wister, adopting the genre of the western novel, wrote about a cowboy way of life that had nearly vanished by the early 1900s.

Remnants of these earlier Wests remained, however, in the high desert of eastern California, a place where cowboys and Indians still lived. Most of the cowboys, in fact, were Indians, as Julian Steward would discover when he arrived there at age sixteen.

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Julian Haynes Steward was the second child of Thomas and Grace Steward. At the time of his birth, on January 31, 1902, his parents had been married for six years. The marriage later ended in divorce. The years preceding the divorce were marked by Thomas Steward's gradual withdrawal from family life and at least one lengthy separation. Steward later wrote simply, "my father and I were not close." Behind those few words, however, lay a complex family history that presented Steward with opportunities as well as difficulties. Notably, his family background prepared him for professional success by...