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"I'm Glad to Hear That You Liked M Y Little Article": Letters Exchanged

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"I'm glad to hear that you liked my little article": Letters Exchanged Between Frank T. Siebert and Fannie Hardy Eckstorm, 1938-1945 PAULEENA MACDOUGALL University of Maine Writing from his home at 127 Merbrook Lane, Merion Station, Pennsylvania, on 9 January 1938, Dr. Frank T. Siebert, Jr., penned the following: Dear Mrs. Eckstorm: Many thanks for your very nice letter. I am glad to hear that you liked my little article. I have several others, longer and of broader scope, in preparation, but they probably will not appear for some time to come. One of these is a volume of Penobscot linguistic texts, of which Dr. Speck and I are joint authors. The letter quoted above and others to follow offer a glimpse into the thoughts of two very different people who shared an interest in the Penobscot Indians: one, a woman of 73 years who had already published seven books and numerous articles at the time the two began correspond­ ing, the other a 26-year-old medical doctor. Siebert studied at Episcopal Academy, Haverford College, and received his M.D. at the University of Pennsylvania, where he made the acquaintance of anthropologist Frank Speck. The young doctor attended summer institutes in linguistics where he encountered Algonquianists such as Leonard Bloomfield, Edward Sapir and Mary Haas. His ability in the field of linguistics did not go unnoticed at the University of Pennsylvania, because Speck asked him to lecture in his anthropology class. Siebert visited the Penobscot Indian Reservation in 1932 for the first time and collected vocabulary and stories from Penobscot speakers thereafter on his summer vacations. The letter quoted above reflects his avid interest in Penobscot language, an interest he would pursue until his death in 1998. In 1937 he published his first article, "Mammoth or 'stiff-legged bear'", the "little paper" referred to in the letter. Apparently Eckstorm had read the paper and wrote favorably about it to Siebert, and he responded, thus beginning the correspondence that is the focus of this paper. The authority on Maine Indian language, customs and tribal relation­ ships, Fannie Hardy Eckstorm (1865-1946) corresponded with many 166 PAULEENA MACDOUGALL historians, anthropologists, natural historians and folklorists. In addition to 17 letters from Siebert, she also received 19 letters from Frank Gould- smith Speck (1881-1950) between 1935 and 1941. She was the woman everyone pointed to when questions about Maine's Native Americans arose. Born Fannie Pearson Hardy, she attended Smith College, from which she graduated in 1888, and then returned home to Brewer, Maine. She later married Jacob Eckstorm, a minister from Chicago who died six years into their marriage leaving her with two children. Her father, Manly Hardy, conducted a lively business from trading furs and selling moccasins to lumber interests. He had a Penobscot woman as a nurse when he was a child and befriended several hunters in the Penobscot tribe, and spoke Penobscot fluently. He frequently welcomed Penobscot people into his home, so it was natural that his daughter would become interested in collecting language and cultural materials. She also avidly collected folk­ songs and published several articles and two books on the topic. Her writings on the Indians of Maine began in 1919 when she wrote a chapter on the subject for Louis Hatch's Maine: a history. She continued publish­ ing, with numerous articles appearing in such periodicals as Appalachia, New England Quarterly, Historia, Atlantic Monthly, Sprague 's Journal of Maine History, and local publications and newspapers.1 Frank T. Siebert, Jr., continued a medical career, while at the same time pursuing his interests in Algonquian linguistics, ethnology, material culture, and collecting early Americana. He conducted fieldwork with the Penobscot and other Indian tribes, concurrently collecting an extensive library of rare titles in American history and Algonquian linguistics, and items of material culture. Much of his correspondence with Eckstorm concerns their mutual interests. I will discuss them in the following order: Penobscot texts and points of grammar, place names, material culture, and rare books. PENOBSCOT TEXTS AND POINTS OF GRAMMAR Siebert's mention of co-publishing Penobscot texts with Speck is intriguing. Since the letter postdates the publication of Speck's Penobscot texts in 1915, 1918, 1926 and 1935, and no other texts were published by Speck from the Penobscots, I contacted the librarian of the American Philosophical Society Library where Speck's papers are housed and asked For a detailed bibliography of Fannie Hardy Eckstorm, see Whitten 1976. "I'M GLAD TO HEAR THAT YOU LIKED MY LITTLE ARTICLE" 167 if any Siebert-Speck correspondence existed. I was surprised to find there was none. However, in a letter to Edward Sapir that predates the letter to Eckstorm by a year (25 May 1937), Siebert wrote: At present I have the following: 1) 17 Penobscot texts of my own, not ready for publication, 2) About 10 Penobscot texts of Prof. F. G. Speck (yet unpublished), which I am revising, and intend to edit with an added stem index. We hope this will be ready for publication by next winter. Siebert's use of the phrase "yet unpublished" suggests that ten unpublished Penobscot texts collected by Frank Speck are part of Siebert's collection, and have not yet been seen by the public.2 Siebert and Speck's plans to co-edit a body of texts left a scanty paper trail. Siebert had about 25 Penobscot texts that I and his other assistants typed and prepared for publication in the early 1980s. We hoped Siebert's texts would be published before his death, but I don't recall that he ever mentioned to me that any of them were collected by Speck — I was under the impression that they were all collected by Siebert. Siebert apparently spent much time on the project in those early years, because he mentioned the Penobscot texts again in his next letter to Eckstorm, dated 27 November 1939: If you don't mind, I am going to ask you a little favor. At present I am trying to prepare some Penobscot texts for publication, and I have run across some little dialectic variation that I would like to get an idea on as to its geographical distribution. I wish you would briefly send me the data you may have on the following from your Rasles, Nudenans, and what you have of Aubery. Rasles, Nudenans, and Aubery, are of course, references to manuscript dictionaries from Jesuit missions. Sebastian Rasles was a Jesuit priest who collected material on the Kennebec River; the manuscript is dated about 1723. Jean Baptiste Nudenans was an Abenaki man who lived at the mission at Pierreville, Quebec, and was educated by the Jesuits. He composed a dictionary in Abenaki and Latin dated 1760. Joseph Aubery was a Jesuit missionary at St. Francis who left a manuscript dictionary dated approximately 1709. Siebert eventually acquired copies of these dictionaries and used them extensively throughout his career to compare and elicit lexical items for his dictionary and in his studies of the Abenaki 21 learned from Connor Quinn at the 30th Algonquian Conference that Speck's texts were subsumed into Siebert's collection and will be published under Siebert s authorship (with considerable assistance from Richard Garrett and Martha Young - see Garrett 1998) by the American Philosophical Society. 168 PAULEENA MACDOUGALL dialects. He also used them to train his assistants during the Penobscot dictionary project. THE GENESIS OF SIEBERT'S PENOBSCOT DICTIONARY The Penobscot dictionary project grew out of the Maine Indian Land Claims suit settled in 1980. In the late 1970s, the tribe, together with their allies the Passamaquoddy, sought federal recognition. To receive such recognition, the tribe needed to prove that they were a distinct cultural entity. Upon the advice of their attorneys the tribe hired Siebert and established a humanities department. Siebert conducted historical research on treaties negotiated with the states of Massachusetts and Maine. Siebert's interest and knowledge of the Penobscot language prompted the tribal administration to apply for a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to create a dictionary of the Penobscot language from Siebert's field notes, with Siebert as principle investigator. The Endow­ ment awarded the grant, and the tribe hired several research assistants to help with the painstaking work of organizing Siebert's fieldwork notes into a lexical form. Two Penobscot assistants were hired, Mary Lolar Rhein and Paul Francis, Jr.; I was the third assistant. During the three-year grant period, Rhein and Francis pored through Siebert's fieldwork notebooks, converting verbs to the independent indicative and copying words onto index cards, filing them by root. Dependent nouns (all nouns requiring a pronominal prefix) were entered in first person singular, with gender recorded as animate or inanimate; non-dependent nouns were entered in the singular and plural; intransitive verbs were entered in the third person singular (since it does not require a pronominal prefix and thus begins with the root); and transitive verbs were listed under the root in alphabetical order. Homophonic roots created problems, but these were dealt with as individual cases. Each entry included examples of usage. Little refinement of the final draft has taken place since 1988; however, even with just three assistants an enormous amount of work did get done. In addition to filling out index cards with vocabulary from Siebert's field notes, Francis did considerable place-name research, compiling lists of place names from maps and other sources for the dictionary. In addition, every morning for several months Siebert lectured his assistants on the history of linguistic science, Eastern Abenaki dialectology and points of grammar, and recited long lists of vocabulary, particularly names of plants.
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