A thorough analysis of Julian Steward's life and work and the history of the discipline of anthropology during his lifetime.

Scenes from the High Desert

JULIAN STEWARD'S LIFE AND THEORYBy VIRGINIA KERNS

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS

Copyright © 2003 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-02790-1

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

An Eastern Childhood

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.

* * *

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 providing important social connections and by fostering ambition and a strong work ethic.

At the time of his marriage in 1895, Thomas Steward was thirty-seven years old and an examiner in the U.S. Patent Office. Grace Garriott was twenty-six when they married and, unusual for the times, also was a federal employee, having worked for nearly six years as a "lady clerk" in the Pension Office. Both the Pension and Patent Offices were then part of the Department of the Interior and were located only a few blocks from each other on F Street. How the couple met is unknown, but perhaps her brother, Edward Garriott, introduced them. Like Thomas Steward, Edward Garriott was rising rapidly through the ranks of the civil service in the 1890s.

Grace Garriott's employment ended when she married. She gave birth to their first child, a daughter named Marion, in December 1896. When Julian, their second and last child, was born five years later, Thomas Steward, then in his midforties, had already been promoted to examiner-in-chief at the Patent Office. He remained there until he left the civil service in 1917, at the age of sixty, to practice as a patent attorney.

Julian Steward usually denied that his family background had influenced his career as an anthropologist. "My forebears," he wrote, "had little direct influence upon my scientific career." He did concede that his father "obviously had considerable aptitude in science," since "without a college education and through his own studies, he became Chief of the Board of Examiners of the United States Patent Office." It is a curious statement, and one that he evidently made to colleagues as well. The archaeologist Gordon Willey remembered that Steward, in speaking of his father sometime during the 1940s, "referred to him as a man of considerable intellectual potential who, had he been given the advantages of a university education, would have gone much farther."

Although Thomas Steward did not have a college education in the sense of training in the liberal arts, he had earned an engineering degree and two law degrees from reputable universities. Highly educated for someone of his generation, he also achieved great success in his work, rising to a senior, secure position in the federal government. Indeed, he reached the top of his chosen profession and could have advanced further only by being appointed commissioner of patents. In keeping with his professional stature, Thomas Steward counted many distinguished scientists among his acquaintances and close associates. His name appeared with theirs, and with others prominent in the professions and business, in an early volume of Who's Who in America. Julian Steward did occasionally allude to his father's accomplishments—he wrote, for example, "His achievements, I suppose, made me implicitly assume that I, too, would pursue some profession"—but he still denied any influence. Perhaps he tended to diminish his father's professional success and influence because he saw him refracted through the lens of unhappy childhood memories.

* * *

Thomas Gifford Steward, born in 1857 in New York State, came from a family line of New Englanders, Baptist ministers, and abolitionists. In 1876, two years after graduating from high school, he moved to Plano, Illinois, a small town thirty-five miles southwest of Chicago, where his father established a church. The Stewards had relatives in Plano, including a cousin who was a business associate of William Deering, of the Deering Harvesting Machine Company. That company later merged with four other harvesting machine companies, forming the industrial giant, the International Harvester Company, in 1902.

Thomas Steward began to work as a machinist at the age of nineteen. He found employment in Plano soon after he arrived, very likely with the Deering Harvesting Machine Company. During the late 1870s, a time of economic depression, skilled workers at harvesting machine companies saw their wages fall at a rate that exceeded cost-of-living declines. This, along with periodic layoffs, may explain why Thomas Steward looked elsewhere for employment. After three years as a machinist, he moved to Washington, D.C., having been appointed from Illinois to the federal service. Family connections and political affiliations probably played a role in his appointment, as they so often did in that era before the introduction of competitive examinations for civil service positions. At twenty-two he began his long career with the government, initially as a clerk in the General Land Office of the Department of the Interior.

At twenty-four, he earned a degree in civil engineering and entered the Patent Office, where he worked for six years as an assistant examiner. During that time he earned both a bachelor's degree and a master's degree in law. No doubt like many ambitious young men in the capital, Thomas Steward saw that he could combine well-paid employment in the civil service with the opportunity for higher education and professional training. A law degree offered the prospects of professional mobility, higher social status, and financial security. During that era, young men who worked as clerks in government offices by day often attended university classes at night, and local universities assisted them by scheduling all classes after 4 p.m., when government offices closed for the day. Thomas Steward conformed to the profile for law students in Washington, D.C., in the 1880s: male, Anglo-Saxon, and a federal employee.

His legal training, as well as his previous experience as a machinist, surely helped him rise through the ranks of examiners at the Patent Office. In 1887, at the age of thirty, he was appointed principal examiner; ten years later, on the recommendation of the commissioner of patents, President William McKinley appointed him examiner-in-chief. As examiner-in-chief, he ascertained whether claimed inventions met the three tests of patentability still used today: novelty, utility, and invention.

Thomas Steward held a position in the Patent Office from 1881 until 1917, years of dramatic technological change in which many significant inventions were patented in the United States. Shortly before he began to work as an examiner, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone (in 1876) and Thomas Edison invented the incandescent lamp (in 1879). During his tenure in the Patent Office, many new technologies that transformed twentieth-century life received patents: automobiles, aircraft, radio, motion pictures, and the phonograph, to name only a few. Thomas Steward's career roughly coincided with a growth in American technology following electrification; the new technologies virtually created a second industrial revolution by fostering new industries and changing production processes in old industries.

Ten years after Thomas Steward joined the Patent Office, it celebrated its hundredth anniversary. Held in Washington, D.C., in April 1891, the centennial commemorated both the founding of the Patent Office and a century of significant technological innovation. Employees of the Patent Office, including Thomas Steward, and many luminaries attended the centennial and heard one of the speakers, a senator, declare that seven American inventions surpassed the pyramids of Egypt as wonders of the world: "'The cotton-gin; the adaptation of steam to methods of transportation; the application of electricity in business pursuits; the harvester; the modern printing press; the ocean cable [transatlantic telegraph], and the sewing machine.'" Whatever their merits as judged against the pyramids, these new technologies did transform the American economy and social life.

Visitors to the Patent Office building could see display models of many significant American inventions. In addition, in the mid-nineteenth century the Patent Office also carried out scientific research and, for many years, was responsible for some functions later assumed by the Department of Agriculture, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Weather Bureau. Because it sponsored scientific expeditions, the Patent Office accumulated a large collection of specimens and artifacts, much of which related to North American natural history and native peoples. A patent commissioner in the 1850s considered the collection too significant to keep in storage, and he convinced Congress to appropriate money to display the collection. A trip to the Patent Office soon became requisite for visitors to the city. William Henry Holmes, who later became a prominent anthropologist, visited the museum around 1871, when he saw effigies of two Indian "chiefs" in traditional dress, an arresting sight that he later called his "'first lesson in ethnology.'"

If the young Julian Steward ever saw this collection, it may have provided his own first lesson about scientific expeditions, and not only about ethnology. A career as an explorer/scientist appealed to him even before he chose anthropology as his profession. In childhood and adolescence, he knew of government scientists who had taken part in expeditions to the remote reaches of the American West. The museum at the Patent Office exhibited the type of material that Steward would later collect in that very region.

Perhaps his father, whose office was in the same building, took him to see the museum or, more likely, his mother did. She had an enduring attraction to the American West, and although this centered on landscape, she did appreciate the Indian arts. Those interests might have drawn her to the museum as early as the 1880s, when she worked at the nearby Pension Office.

* * *

Grace Garriott was born near St. Louis, Missouri, in 1869, a few months before Powell and his men set off on their river journey to the Grand Canyon. In that same year, the transcontinental railroad was completed, opening up the West to a flood of settlers from the East and Midwest. Her father, P. Addison Garriott, a Virginian, claimed French Huguenot and English ancestry. As a child, her mother, Maria Bennett Garriott, emigrated with her family from England. Maria and her husband were living near Cincinnati when their son, Edward Bennett Garriott, was born in 1853. Four of their children reached adulthood: Edward, the eldest, and three daughters, of whom Grace was the youngest.

Grace's family had wandered slowly westward in the years before her birth in the wake of the advancing frontier. Moving westward across Indiana, the family settled briefly in southern Illinois. They reached the Mississippi River in the 1860s, coming to rest in the small town of Kirkwood, Missouri, where Grace was born.

(Continues...)

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