Early Anthropology on the Southwest-Great Basin Frontier: The 1883 Fieldwork of Herman Ten Kate‪.‬

In the United States the first courses in anthropology were taught at the University of Rochester (1879), the University at Lewisburg (now Bucknell University, 1882), and the University of Vermont (1885; Tooker 1990). Anthropologists and historians of science generally agree, however, that the history of anthropology did not begin with the formal recognition of the discipline in the academic curriculum (Hallowell 1965). Two previous stages of the development of the discipline in North America are usually distinguished: (a) the period of first exploration, trade, and missions, and (b) the period of surveys, early reservations, scientific expeditions, and research by nonspecialists. Tracing the history of anthropological research in the Great Basin, Don D. Fowler (1986) points out the ethnographic importance of the reports of eighteenth-century Spanish missionaries and early nineteenth-century fur traders. The road and railroad surveys since the 1850s and the federally sponsored geographical surveys of the 1870s produced the next important documentary accounts of tribal cultures. Reports of Indian agents contained additional data of ethnographic importance. John Wesley Powell was the first nonspecialist to conduct explicit ethnographic fieldwork in the Great Basin while heading the U.S. Geographical and Topographical Survey of the Colorado River of the West (1870-1873). While doing research on the Ghost Dance, James Mooney paid a short visit to Wovoka in 1892. In his review of the history of studies of the Southern Paiutes, Robert C. Euler (1966) presented a similar overview of a native group from the southwestern part of the Great Basin.