6. George Shannon and C. S. Rafinesque
Charles Boewe
In the 1820s, when George Shannon was a resident there, Lexington, Kentucky had a population of a little over 5,000.[1] For its size and its geographic location, Lexington was remarkably cosmopolitan, with more than a dozen French names listed in its directory, one of which was that of C. S. Rafinesque.[2] Most of these people knew one another, so it is not remarkable that Rafinesque and Shannon were acquainted—Rafinesque, a professor at Transylvania, the only university west of the Alleghenies, and Shannon, a successful lawyer and a member of the state's General Assembly from 1820 to 1823. In addition to his teaching duties, Rafinesque gave occasional public lectures on various topics; and Shannon, to further his political career, gave speeches before the Lexington Tammany Society. Both were public figures in a small town.
Despite all the attention given in recent years to the lives of members of the Lewis and Clark expedition, the aperçu we have on Shannon through Rafinesque's writings has been overlooked.[3] Rafinesque himself had several reasons to be interested in the expedition and its discoveries. As a naturalist typical of his time, he considered the study of mankind within his purview, especially those little-known Native Americans the Corps of Discovery encountered; and an accomplished linguist himself, he collected vocabularies as avidly as he collected natural history specimens.[4] He was the kind of polymath who appreciated Thomas Jefferson's scientific goals for the expedition. George Shannon, of course, was the expedition's youngest member and helped Nicholas Biddle prepare the first published edition of the expedition journals. By reviewing—and in some cases, retrieving from obscurity—some of the scientific writings of Rafinesque, we find that Shannon's knowledge of Indian languages, acquired during his service in the Corps of Discovery, was considerable. His contributions to Rafinesque's
It was only reasonable that Rafinesque should seek the acquaintance of Shannon, four years his junior, for he himself had hoped to participate in the expedition sent out in 1804 by his friend Thomas Jefferson.[5] Rafinesque had come to the United States as a young man aged nineteen, but he returned to Europe at the end of 1804, just as the Corps of Discovery was settling into winter quarters in the Dakotas. He stayed in Sicily for a decade, publishing there his first books in natural history, the field for which he is best known, and returned to America in 1815, when naturalists—especially in Philadelphia—were trying to sort out the scientific accomplishments of the expedition.
Though unable to join the Corps of Discovery, Rafinesque was immediately interested in the expedition's scientific findings and written report. At the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, of which he was a member, Rafinesque tried to convince George Ord, a distinguished zoologist, that the expedition's Ovis montana, as Ord had named a mammal on the basis of its skin and one horn, actually was a goat, not a sheep.[6] Rafinesque's opinion was correct, but such is the confusion between mountain sheep and mountain goats in the Biddle edition of the Journals (1814) that Ord stuck to his own belief in the face of the contradictory evidence of the specimen before him.
Rafinesque, too, had ransacked the Biddle edition. Despite its lack of the crucial scientific portion of the journals, Rafinesque got enough information from Biddle to give scientific Latin names to a number of animals he himself had never seen. He gave their specific names, which continue to be used, to the Oregon bobcat, the mountain beaver, the mule deer, and the prairie rattler.[7] The living prairie dog that the expedition had shipped to Peale's Museum in Philadelphia died long before Rafinesque returned from Europe, but he named that animal too, from the description he found in Biddle. So had George Ord, and in this case Rafinesque's generic name, Cynomys, has been retained for the prairie dog in preference to Ord's, though Ord gets credit for the specific name, ludoviciana.
As a pioneer naturalist, Rafinesque longed all his life to explore the trans-Mississippi West. Unable to obtain either public or private patronage, he never got farther west than Shawneetown, Illinois, the terminal point of his self-financed trip down the Ohio River. Returning overland to Philadelphia in 1818 from this trip, he passed through Lexington, where John D.
In company with Clifford, Rafinesque came upon a new interest in Lexington that led to his brief involvement with the expedition veteran Shannon. It is doubtful that he and Shannon should be called friends, for Shannon's name is not even mentioned in Rafinesque's autobiography. And in the sketch of a utopian society that Rafinesque drew up late in life, he specifically ruled that lawyers would be banned—probably because during a lifetime of many litigious conflicts, most of which he lost, he had had his fill of lawyers.[9]
Clifford, who died in 1820 at age fortyone, had long been interested in geology and paleontology, even though the study of organic fossils had not yet received that name. Before his death Clifford also took up the investigation of prehistoric Indian remains, publishing in Lexington's Western Review magazine eight long letters on “Indian Antiquities.”[10] All of these were interests shared by Rafinesque, though the last is little known because his biographers have concentrated on Rafinesque's botanical and zoological researches.
In the vicinity of Lexington are a number of prehistoric sites, called, then as now, Indian forts. Whatever their occasional idiosyncrasies in other respects, Clifford and Rafinesque clearly saw that most of these prehistoric sites had nothing to do with fortification. As the few Shawnee Indians remaining in Kentucky had no idea what purpose the earthworks were intended to serve, Rafinesque and Clifford took up the task of trying to understand and explain them. Rafinesque, a cultural nationalist in his adopted land, called these earthworks the “Monuments of America,” comparable in a modest way to the monuments of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, and believed they were the civil and ecclesiastical ruins of a pacific race of people who had been vanquished by the more warlike ancestors of contemporary Indians. Clifford's conclusion, based on the configuration of the earthworks as well as certain conch shells and ceramic artifacts found in their vicinity, carried the thesis a step further. For him, the earthworks were the ruins of the civilization of an accomplished ancient people who were either identical with or closely related to the ancient Hindus of India. In
Out of loyalty to Clifford, Rafinesque never wholly dismissed the Hindu thesis, but he had limited enthusiasm for it. Whoever their builders were, earthen mounds and fragments of pottery found near them could tell us little about their long-dead makers. Rather, Rafinesque decided, probably after reading Leibniz in the well-stocked Transylvania library,[12] that the best way to recover something of the unwritten chronicle of the ancient Americans was through a comprehensive study of the history of indigenous languages.
Rafinesque knew that there were similarities among the hundreds of contemporary Indian languages, which he believed he could trace back to about twenty-five ancient “mother languages,” and through these could then trace migrations of peoples and lines of linguistic descent back to the dawn of time. Perhaps it is not surprising that Rafinesque theorized as he did about the ethnological value of language, because it was a position many linguists, amateur and scholarly, endorsed at the turn of the century. Thomas Jefferson had suggested in Notes on the State of Virginia, for instance, that the noble origins of American Indians would eventually be documented by extended philological analysis. Because Indians left no literary traces, their history would be redeemed, according to Jefferson, by the study of their languages.
Rafinesque's contribution to this school of thought was enhanced by the fact that he was personally well equipped for comparative linguistics; he wrote in English, French, Italian, Latin, claimed a reading knowledge of Spanish and Portuguese, and had a smattering of such exotic languages as Arabic. Later in life he published a book interpreting, to his own satisfaction, the root meanings of words in the Hebrew Scriptures.[13] From travel books in the university and town libraries, he collected vocabularies of languages ranging from Kurdish to Hottentot. He persuaded the federal government to instruct all its Indian agents to collect vocabularies from the oldest people in their charge (a venture that was not very successful), and he personally collected vocabularies from Indians known to him.[14] There was, of course, a fatal flaw in his research program: his concentration on vocabulary alone. Even though there is still some disagreement among linguistic anthropologists over the relative significance of lexicon and grammar, most would concede that indifference to the morphology of languages makes it difficult if not impossible to discover relationships among them. Yet, at the time, few people interested in comparative language study were aware they were taking an inept tack, for Rafinesque was not alone in collecting
Through the course of his life, just as he collected plants for his herbarium, Rafinesque collected thousands of pages of vocabularies, most of which were probably carted off to the Philadelphia dump after his death. One document that remained and gives him what little distinction he has among historians is the Walam Olum, a long narrative poem in pictographs with a Delaware text that purports—according to some people, including Rafinesque—to describe a prehistoric migration across the Bering Strait. Known today from two bound notebooks (dated 1833) in Rafinesque's hand that are among the treasures of the University of Pennsylvania library, the Walam Olum came to Rafinesque in two parts. According to his account, the pictographs alone were given to a “Dr. Ward” by the Indians in 1820 in gratitude for medical treatment; then in 1822 “were obtained from another individual the songs annexed thereto in the original language.” He does not further identify Dr. Ward or the other individual, nor does he tell how the two documents reached him. This poem does not, however, account for the so-called Indian mounds near Lexington and elsewhere in the Ohio Valley; they were built by an earlier people only hinted at in the Walam Olum. Rafinesque says that he obtained this document while living in Lexington, remarks that only after deep study was he able to read it by 1833; and he did not publish it until 1836, when he was back in Philadelphia.[15]
Partly because of his need to translate and interpret the Walam Olum text, Rafinesque was greatly interested in the Delaware-related languages of the West. That surely is the main reason he sought out and interviewed George Shannon, hoping Shannon could recall words from the languages of the various tribes he had visited.
The only reference to this interview in Rafinesque's vast number of publications occurs on two and a half pages of the Atlantic Journal, a magazine he published (1832–33) after returning to Philadelphia, and for which he wrote most of the text. The first article, titled “American Languages: Wahtani or Mandan” (132–133), gives words for the cardinal numerals 1 to 10 and lists twenty-three Mandan equivalents for such cardinal nouns as father, mother, man, woman, and so on. There Rafinesque says: “I met in Lexington, Ky. Mr. George Shannon, who was one of the companions of Lewis … and who furnished me with some words of the Mandans.” But it is not clear how many or which, for Rafinesque notes further that he has also “added a few scattered in Lewis’ Travels.” Hence, it is obvious that, exacting scholar as he was, he was trying to wring all possible evidence for this particular issue from the Lewis and Clark expedition, both from the imperfect Biddle edition of the report and from the only living member available to
It happens that there are, in addition, two extant unpublished manuscripts where Shannon's testimony also appears. The first of these is a fourpage essay Rafinesque sent to the American Antiquarian Society in 1824, while he was still in Lexington and probably shortly after his interrogation of Shannon. It is titled “A Short Vocabulary of the Mandan or Wah-tah-neck Language,” and it contains twenty-five words that Rafinesque said Judge Shannon “remembered well.” This list enables us to see that Shannon contributed all the ten numerals in the Atlantic Journal essay as well as twelve other words. It also has three words Rafinesque chose not to include in the Atlantic Journal list (equivalents for Indian, Missouri, and Whiskey), probably because he did not consider these Mandan words indigenous to that language.
Troubled by the variant forms of Indian words when recorded through the filters of English, French, Spanish, and even Swedish used by the Caucasians who had reported them, Rafinesque devised his own phonetic alphabet to render pronunciation more accurately. Essentially, it gave vowels the sounds they have in French and dispensed with silent consonants. Using this “Universal Orthography,” as he called it, he recorded the Mandan words recalled by Shannon as follows, pointing out that this language had
never been recorded before by philologists:
| Man | Nusuakeh | Cold | Shinihush |
| Woman | Mikeh | Missouri or Water-white | Mini-shoti |
| Indian | Huatanih | Whiskey or Water of God | Mini-hupanish |
| Father | Papah | One | Mahanah |
| Mother | Nayeh | Two | Nupa |
| God | Hupanish | Three | Namani |
| Water | Mini | Four | Topa |
| Corn | Cohanteh | Five | Kehun |
| White | Shoti | Six | Kima |
| Knife | Maheh | Seven | Kupa |
| No | Nicosh | Eight | Tetoki |
| Meat | Mascopi | Nine | Maapeh |
| Ten | Pirokeh |
There is another point worth mentioning. William Clark, writing to Albert Gallatin, said he could discover no affinity at all between the language of the Mandans and those of the Sioux, Osage, Minnetarees, or any other tribe known to him.[16] But Rafinesque, on the basis of Shannon's lexical material, concluded that Mandan had “many similarities with the Yancton and Konzas [i.e., Sioux] dialects of the Missouri tribes.”[17] In this judgment he appears greatly ahead of his time.
The other unpublished Rafinesque document was unknown until 1982, when it was discovered in Paris in the archives of the Institut de France, where it had lain uncataloged since 1835. For the Volney Prize of that year the institute had announced a competition for the best essay on the grammatical character of the Algonkian languages of North America. Only two essays were received: Rafinesque's and one by his Philadelphia friend Peter S. Du Ponceau, who won the contest. Du Ponceau's essay was eventually published as a book (1838), and Rafinesque's manuscript was filed below Du Ponceau's and forgotten. Rafinesque himself never mentioned in any of his published writing that he had even entered the contest.[18]
Having worked so long already on the language of the Delawares (who called themselves the Leni Lenape), Rafinesque chose their language for his prize essay, a language now usually also called Lenape, as central to all the Algonkian languages, and he tried to trace its analogues all the way from the East Coast to the West, even speculating on its relationship with that of the aboriginal Ainu people in Japan. This led him further to conjecture that the language, with its speakers, must have crossed the Bering Strait, because it was related to the Samoyed languages spoken in eastern Siberia.
This French manuscript of 270 pages, the longest-known linguistic essay by Rafinesque, tells us a great deal about the way he approached the comparative study of languages. Interested primarily in language affinities, since his overriding concern was the prehistoric migrations of peoples—not the science of linguistics for its own sake—he worked out to his own satisfaction a statistical formula for judging the degree of affinity between any two languages. Recent recognition of this accomplishment, crude though it was, has caused him to be called the father of lexico statistics.[19]
In the prize essay he took up each of the parts of speech in turn and gave a perfunctory description of their grammatical function in Lenape and related languages, as the contest required. Still, Rafinesque's heart really was not in morphological analysis, with the result that the 1835 Prix Volney quite properly went to Du Ponceau. What interested Rafinesque most were the lexical similarities among Indian languages, similarities he fancied sometimes also were found even with Italian and French. Thus, despite the prodding of the Volney contest, he continued to miss the key that might have led to a measure of success in tracing the migrations of peoples through the permutations of their languages. Of course, it should also be
Shannon's appearance, then, comes only in the appendix to Rafinesque's essay (254), where the author attempts to supply a comparative vocabulary of “Chopunish” and “Chinuk,” among the twenty-one vocabularies given there. In this list, eight Chopunish words are attributed to Shannon, seven of which Rafinesque had published already in his Atlantic Journal essay. The seven are
| Sky | Tetoh | Head | Chop |
| River | Ishkit | Bear | Yahar |
| Sun | Spokan | Father | Papa |
| Nose | Nashne |
| Chief | Tayop |
Even if Shannon could recall in total only a dozen words of Chopunish and today we are able to identify only eight of them, this nevertheless tells us something about him and helps confirm Biddle's opinion that he was one of the brightest of the nine young men from Kentucky. It will be remembered that Chopunish, the language of the Nez Perce Indians, baffled the expedition.[21] When Captain Lewis delivered his formal speech to that nation his words had to be translated into French, from that language into Hidatsa, then into Shoshone, and finally into Chopunish. The wonder is that Shannon could pick up any knowledge of the language at all, much less remember, nearly two decades later, words that had reached him through three linguistic filters. (How many people would remember that “boy” is puer in Latin if the next speaker intoned garçon or perhaps enfant, followed by another who said Junge or possibly Knabe or conceivably Bube—while the equivalents of the word jumped about in the sentence according to the syntactical requirements of each language?)
Since the vocabularies collected by Lewis apparently were lost when Jefferson's possessions were rifled on the James River while being shipped to Monticello, even the few words recalled by Shannon now add another heirloom to the memorabilia of the Corps of Discovery. They add nothing, of course, to present-day understanding of Indian languages, and they added
It is a pity perhaps that Rafinesque could interview only Shannon. If it is true, as is widely believed, that the best way to learn a foreign language is in bed with a native speaker, then Rafinesque ought to have interviewed York, William Clark's black slave, by all accounts the favorite of the Indian women. York must have been a fountain of linguistic lore.
NOTES
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.