1. See Huntly Dupre, Rafinesque in Lexington, 1819–1826 (Lexington, Ky.: Bur Press, 1945).

2. A short biography of Rafinesque is in the Dictionary of American Biography (1935), a better one in the Dictionary of Scientific Biography (1975), and the best in American National Biography (1999). An early Filson Club publication, R. E. Call's 1895 biography, though book-length, is little more than a retelling of Rafinesque's own autobiography. T. J. Fitzpatrick also paraphrased the autobiography in his 1911 bibliography, now more accessible in my own Fitzpatrick's Rafinesque: A Sketch of his Life with Bibliography (Weston, Mass.: M and S Press, 1982), where the bibliography is revised and enlarged but the biographical sketch left essentially untouched.

3. Gleanings from local archives and extant newspapers were collected and ably assembled by Carolyn S. Denton in Publication No. 11 (May 1992):15–24, of the Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation, under the title “George Shannon of the Lewis & Clark Expedition: His Kentucky Years.” She mentions the Rafinesque connection in a note.

4. See John C. Greene, American Science in the Age of Jefferson (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1984), esp. ch. 14, “The Sciences of Man: Comparative Linguistics and the Problem of Indian Origins.”

5. In his autobiography, A Life of Travels (Philadelphia, 1836), Rafinesque says (24), “I was told that I might be admitted as Botanist in the expedition which Lewis & Clark were then preparing.” A letter by Jefferson to Rafinesque (15 December 1804) often has been thought to refer to this hope, but it is actually in connection with the ill-fated trip by George Hunter and William Dunbar up the Red River in 1804. At any rate, Rafinesque never received Jefferson's letter because he had already left for Europe. The Jefferson letter was first printed by Edwin M. Betts in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 87 (May 1944): 369–370.

6. C. S. Rafinesque to George Ord; New York, 1 October 1817, Academy of natural Sciences of Philadelphia.

7. According to Raymond Darwin Burroughs, The Natural History of the Lewis and Clark Expedition (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1961). A more authoritative reference for currently recognized genera and species is James H. Honacki, et al., eds., Mammal Species of the World (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1982), compiled for the American Society of Mammalogists. Through a complicated series of revisions, Ord's generic name for the mountain goat was eventually replaced by Rafinesque's Oreamnos, which has current status according to

8. There is no biography of Clifford.

9. “To avoid quarrels and trouble, no Drunkards nor Lawyers shall be allowed to join the company,” though “pure wines, cider and beer” would be available and “every dispute … shall be settled by Arbitrators” according to a pamphlet Rafinesque published in 1837 titled Plan of the Philadelphia Land Company of Aurora.

10. Signed only with the initial “C.,” these were published during the course of eight months (September 1819–April 1820) under the running title “Indian Antiquities.” I have reprinted them, along with related papers and maps by Rafinesque, in John D. Clifford's Indian Antiquities (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2000).

11. Charles Wilkins Short to John Cleves Short; Hopkinsville, Ky., 11 December 1818, Library of Congress.

12. Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibnitz (1646–1716), mostly remembered today as a philosopher and mathematician, was a universal scholar who also had a profound impact on linguistic studies. To him is attributed the idea that “languages are the most ancient monuments of peoples before [the invention of] writing.” The books of this German-born author were available to Rafinesque in French. Although Rafinesque's mother was Saxon, German was one language he never learned well enough to use. He also dipped into the writings of Friedrich von Schlegel, seeking lists of Sanskrit words; had he been able to understand German he might have learned Schlegel's opinion that grammar, not vocabulary, is the key to language affinities. He probably was misled by another German scholar, Julius von Klaproth, whom he quoted with approval (in English) as having written that “languages are better guides than physical characters for researches on mankind, and roots more important than grammars” (C. S. Rafinesque, The American Nations [Philadelphia, 1836], 1:8–9).

13. C. S. Rafinesque, Genius and Spirit of the Hebrew Bible (Philadelphia: Eleutherium of Knowledge, 1838).

14. A letter prepared by Rafinesque was printed and sent out by the War Department's Office of Indian Affairs to 56 recipients, with 10 copies going to General William Clark alone, who was by that time (1825) superintendent of Indian affairs at St. Louis. The letter requested the collection of a vocabulary of 100 words from each of the languages addressed and gave a phonetic guide for their transcription. The Beinecke Library at Yale has one of the letters.

15. How Rafinesque obtained the Walam Olum has to be pieced together from enigmatic and ambiguous comments in the 1833 manuscript itself and a few paragraphs in his book The American Nations (1:122, 151). The story is so obscure that it gives credence to a recent argument that the whole thing is a hoax; see David M. Oestreicher, “Unraveling the Walam Olum,” Natural History 105 (October 1996): 14–21. The best access to this document is Walam Olum (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 1954), which reproduces Rafinesque's manuscript photographically and contains seven interpretive essays and an elaborate bibliography. The story itself has often been retold, and the pictographs and Lenape text reprinted with new attempts at translation. Most recently (1989) the text was translated into Dutch. Rafinesque published part of the Lenape text and his English translation of the whole of it (but not the pictographs) in The American Nations, 1:121–161.

16. Cited by Donald Jackson, ed., Letters of the Lewis and Clark Expedition with Related Documents, 1783–1854 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978), 2:644.

17. C. S. Rafinesque, “A Short Vocabulary of the Mandan or Wah-tah-neck Language,” American Antiquarian Society (1824): 133.

18. Rafinesque's anonymous essay (identified, according to the rules of the contest, by a code) was discovered by Joan Leopold, who is editor of a three-volume book about the significance of the Prix Volney. In volume 2, titled Early Nineteenth-Century Contributions to General and Amerindian Linguistics (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999), I have contributed a chapter on the essay, setting it in the context of Rafinesque's life and his other linguistic research. Rafinesque's manuscript (never published) is titled “Examen Analytique des Langues Linniques de l’Amerique Septentrionale, et surtout des Langues Ninniwak, Linap, Mohigan &c avec leurs Dialectes.”

19. By Dell H. Hymes, in his “Lexicostatistics and Glottochronology in the Nineteenth Century,” in Essays in the History of Linguistic Anthropology (Amsterdam: J. Benjamins, 1983), 59–113. Rafinesque first used his statistical formula in another unpublished prize essay, “Mémoires sur l’origine des nations nègres, ou introduction à l’histoire des nègres d’Asie, d’Afrique, Polynésie, Amérique & Europe,” of which a file copy exists at the American Philosophical Society. This 105-page essay, written in 1831 for the concours of the Société de Géographie of Paris, won for him the consolation prize of a gold medal.

20. In 1826 a better philologist than Rafinesque, Albert Gallatin (Jefferson's secretary of the treasury), tried to encourage the federal government to collect both vocabularies and grammatical analyses through its Indian agents. His effort met with less success than Rafinesque's had the previous year. Few Indian agents had the skills required; almost none had the interest.

21. William Clark wrote that “for want of an Interpreter thro’ which we could Speake” with the Nez Perce, it was necessary “to converse altogether by Signs” (Reuben Gold Thwaites, ed., Original Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, 1804–1806 [New York: Dodd, Mead, 1904–05], 3:85).

22. The best study so far of Rafinesque's linguistic work is a brief essay by the Ukrainian scholar Vilen V. Belyi, “Rafinesque's Linguistic Activity,” Anthropological Linguistics 39 (spring 1997): 60–73.