Hale, Horatio

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Hale, Horatio

Horatio Emmons Hale (1817–1896), American ethnologist, was born at Newport, New Hampshire. His mother was Sarah Josepha Hale, for many years editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book. While Hale was still a student at Harvard, which he entered in 1833, he made a study of the language of an Algonquian-speaking band encamped on the college grounds; he himself set into type and published the results of the study. This early attempt at Un guistic research within an ethnological context set the tone for all his later work in the emerging anthropology of the nineteenth century: through out a long life of periodic, although always enthu siastic, involvement in anthropological research, he continued to stress language as the “true basis of ethnology.”

Upon his graduation from Harvard, Hale accepted a position as philologist with a United States expedition to survey and chart areas of the Pacific, under the command of Captain Charles Wilkes. Hale’s senior colleague in the scientific corps of this first research expedition sponsored by the United States government was Charles Pickering, who with du Ponceau and Gallatin was a leader among those early nineteenth-century ethnologists who stressed the collection of comparative linguistic data from the human societies recently discovered and constantly threatened by western expansion. When the expedition stopped at the Oregon Territory, toward the end of its four-year voyage in the Pacific, Hale left it to devote more time to the study of the languages of the Indians of the Northwest Terri tory, after which he returned overland to the East. Hale’s contribution to the Reports of the Expedition was published in 1846 as Volume 6, Ethnog raphy and Philology. Its primary emphasis was upon his collection from the southern Pacific, and although it contained a mass of miscellaneous and often superficial ethnographic observations, Hale’s linguistic data, especially those from the Polynesian islands, were carefully recorded and are still useful. It was upon this linguistic evidence that Hale built his theory of Polynesian migrations, which, except for refinements derived from more recent data, is still essentially sound.

After the Wilkes expedition and Gallatin’s death in 1849, the linguistic emphasis of American eth nology gave way to the rapid rise of archeological interests. About this time, also, Hale married and moved to Clinton, Ontario, where for the next twenty years he devoted himself to business ac tivities. Yet, he was to resume his ethnological in vestigations, stimulated by the proximity of the Six Nations Reserve, on the Grand River at Brantford and probably also by a developing friendship with Lewis H. Morgan. Toward the end of the 1860s he began the collection of traditional literature from older informants on the reserve. These form the basis of his most important substantive contributions to the anthropological literature and particu larly to that of Iroquoian studies.

His interest in language as the foremost indicator of ethnological status led him to concentrate upon that aspect of Iroquois culture. And it was his continuing concern for language that led Hale in all his work to stress the distinction between race, defined biologically, and language and to stress the superiority of language for establishing the historical (i.e., ethnological) relations of existing groups. More particularly, he defined Tutelo as a Siouan language within the Iroquoian geographical range; he rescued Wyandot Huron from disappearance and demonstrated that it had been the most ancient Iroquoian language; using a technique which anticipated more recent glottochronological methods, he attempted an arrangement of existing Iroquoian languages into a historical sequence; and perhaps most important of all for later ethnological methods, he used the traditional tales of the Iroquois as a source for ethnological data.

In his most significant work, The Iroquois Book of Rites (1883a), he summarized much of his work on the Iroquois. Here, using his several approaches, he reconstructed the late prehistory of the Six Nations, with a particular emphasis, drawn from the traditions he had recovered, upon the story of the legendary hero Hiawatha (which he rescued from the romanticism and errors of H. R. Schoolcraft) and the formation of the League of the Iroquois. Hale’s published contributions to the ethnological literature are relatively few, but all of them are graced with his intelligence and originality, with his theoretical bent and his humanism.

Hale’s greatest contribution to American anthropology, however, lies in his influence upon Franz Boas, much of whose early field work on the Northwest Coast was done under Hale’s supervision and direction. Although Boas had spent a productive season among the Northwest Coast Indians in 1886, his subsequent field work in this area during the early 1890s was subsidized by a special com mittee of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, of which Hale was the driving force. It was Hale who recruited Boas for this work; and although differences of approach to field problems developed, Hale was Boas’ constant and en thusiastic supporter. Correspondence between the two men indicates that Hale not only provided Boas with the material support required but was also the source of much in Boas’ emerging point of view toward the anthropological enterprise, a point of view which was to form the foundation of American anthropology for half a century. Hale trans mitted to Boas the intensity of his feeling for the diversity of culture and language and his distaste for the construction of universal historical systems; he provided Boas with the technique for the recapture of lost elements of culture through the collection and analysis of myths and legends; he per suaded Boas of the insufficiency of biological criteria for the establishment of a classification of the varieties of man and for the evaluation of his varying capacities; and by his insistence that Boas collect all the data relating to the differences between human groups, Hale laid the foundation in a field approach for the concept of a “general anthropology,” which came to be the hallmark of the work of Boas and his followers.

Horatio Hale died in 1896. He was mourned by Boas as “a man who contributed more to our knowl edge of the human races than perhaps any other single student.” Sufficient praise indeed.

Jacob W. Gruber

[For discussion of the subsequent development of Hale’s ideas, seeIndians, North Americanand the biography ofBoas.]

WORKS BY HALE

1846 Ethnography and Philology: United States Exploring Expedition. Philadelphia: Lee & Blanchard.

(1883a) 1963 The Iroquois Book of Rites. With an intro duction by William M. Fenton. Univ. of Toronto Press.

1883b The Tutelo Tribe and Language. American Philo sophical Society, Proceedings 21:1–47.

1890 An International Idiom: A Manual of the Oregon Trade Language, or “Chinook Jargon.” London: Whitaker.

1891 Language as a Test of the Mental Capacity: Being an Attempt to Demonstrate the True Basis of An thropology. Ottawa.

1894 The Fall of Hochelaga: A Study of Popular Tradition. Pages 252-266 in International Congress of An thropology, Chicago, 1893, Memoirs. Chicago: Shulte.