Item #238166 Autograph Letter, signed ("F.W. Hodge") to a friend and colleague regarding his forthcoming "sojourn in Arizona and New Mexico this summer" Frederick Webb Hodge.

" ... preparing for a sojourn in Arizona and New Mexico"

Autograph Letter, signed ("F.W. Hodge") to a friend and colleague regarding his forthcoming "sojourn in Arizona and New Mexico this summer"

Washington, D.C: june 8, 1899.

Price: $300.00


About the item

One page, on letterhead of the Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of Ethnology. 1 vols. 8vo. " ... preparing for a sojourn in Arizona and New Mexico" Fine.

Item #238166

A fine letter from this distinguished American anthropologist, who was involved in one the most widely publicized scholarly controversies of his day: whether the summit of the famous and practically unscaleable Enchanted Mesa of New Mexico had ever been, as local tradition would have it, the site of the original village of the Acoma Indians. Professor W.A. Libbey of Princeton had announced his skepticism and his intention to scale the mesa in order to demonstrate the falsity of the myth. In the summer of 1897, he and a reporter climbed to the summit, where they spent three hours looking for pottery and utensils, and found none. "Romantic Indian legend can never stand the acid test of scientific investigation," Libbey proclaimed. When Hodge read of Libbey's expedition, he organized one of his own, and after scaling the Mesa, he and a crew spent 24 hours scouring the area. They found their first pottery shard within 5 minutes, as well as utensils, arrowpoints, etc., all of which had been entirely overlooked by Libbey in his rush to prove his own theory. Hodge was to write later: "The Indian lore of a thousand years cannot be undone by a few hours of careless investigation."

Hodge writes here: "Dear Professor, I am glad to have your card and to learn that you are prospering. I have been very busy during the last couple of years, and am preparing for a sojourn in Arizona and New Mexico this summer"