Lahcotah

The first edition of this dictionary of the Sioux language is a legendary rarity, and was printed in present-day Wyoming in 1866, in the middle of the series of conflicts known as the Sioux Wars.


William Starring and Joseph Hyer of the 36th Infantry completed this document of the Sioux tribe’s Lahcotah language during an immobilising winter of heavy snow in Smoky Hill River, Kansas from December 1865 to February 1866. 


The result is a vocabulary of some 1000 entries, ‘as complete as a perfect knowledge of the Lahcotah [Lakota] Language can make it’.  It was a crucial time for such a dictionary – the Sioux and Cheyenne were formidable opponents to the United States during this period, the Sioux Wars, and hostilities had been exchanged with some regularity since the mid 1850s. 


The dictionary was printed in Fort Laramie (what is now Wyoming) on a small mobile army press in a small number of copies, probably no more than 50. Only a dozen copies have survived, including three among the papers of Starring himself.