Books and Manuscripts

Gallatin, Albert
A Table of Indian Tribes of the United States, East of the Stony Mountains, arranged according to languages and dialects; furnished by Albert Gallatin. 1826
(Washington, D.C.), 1826. Printed broadside. 22 x 18 1/4 in. (559 x 463 mm). Repairs in top corners; scattered very small chips and wears along edges; very small spotting along left recto edge. In mat, 29 1/4 x 25 1/4 in. (743 x 641 mm). Not in Shaw and Shoemaker

A fine and rare chart mapping the languages of Native American tribes in the United States. Conceived by Swiss-American politician, diplomat, and Secretary of the Treasury under Jefferson, Albert Gallatin (1761-1849), this chart lists 102 Native tribes, grouped by languages and geographic locations. The chart's creation was prompted by a combination of Gallatin's long engagement with linguistic research and as a result of the United States’s policies of forced Native removal from ancestral homes. Gallatin’s work was encouraged by scientists like Alexander von Humboldt and Peter Stephen Du Ponceau, and working through the War Department, Gallatin secured $2,000 in funding from the U.S. government to research Native American languages.

At the beginning of the project Gallatin had Secretary of War James Barbour issue a circular letter to Indian Agents across the United States, stating that “it is the intention of the government to collect and preserve such information as may be obtained concerning the Indian languages.” The letter included three accompanying documents, the first, in an effort to establish a uniform comparative vocabulary, was a list of 600 English words that each agent was to send back to the War Department with their native language equivalent. The second enclosure consisted of a list of sentences to be translated into each native language in order to compare grammatical forms and structure. Finally, the third enclosure consisted of this broadside, described by Barbour as “an attempt…to arrange the Indian Tribes of the United States east of the Stony Mountain, according to languages and dialects.” 

In composing the current list, Gallatin tapped works by Du Ponceau and John Heckwelder, and also information received from interviews he had with visiting Native delegations to Washington, D.C. between 1824-26. Gallatin hoped his study would be published by the government, but a lackluster response to Barbour's circular letter stalled the project. Eventually, in 1836, Gallatin would publish the results he was able to compile, within the second volume of Archaeologia Americana: Transactions of the American Antiquarian Society.

Very rare, we can locate only seven extant examples: Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, Yale University, the American Philosophical Society, the New York Historical Society, the Morgan Library, the American Antiquarian Society, and Northeastern State University. According to RBH, this is only the third copy of this chart ever offered at auction.