Scope and Content Note
The papers of Clinton Hart Merriam (1855-1942) span the years 1872-1938 and consist of correspondence, writings, journals, bibliographies, maps, and other papers. Especially prominent are more than a hundred journals of scientific expeditions and an extensive set of North American Indigenous vocabularies, with accompanying large-scale maps showing the distribution of Native American tribes in California and Nevada, as well as notes relating to the Adirondack Mountains and files relating to the Bering Sea Tribunal of Arbitration and the Harriman Alaska Expedition. Other topics include subject material relating to expeditions and regions and sites in the American West as well as others parts of the country and abroad.
Merriam's indexed journals form a continuous record of his accomplishments in science as well as of his personal relations and cooperation with scholars in the United States and internationally. In addition to twenty-five years of service as organizer and head of the United States Department of Agriculture's Division of Economic Ornithology and Mammology (later the United States Division of Biological Survey and then the United States Bureau of Biological Survey), and a somewhat longer period of ethnological and biological research in California and Nevada begun in 1910 under the Harriman Fund of the Smithsonian Institution, Merriam's many activities included a twenty-year membership on the Board on Geographic Names, which he chaired 1917-1925. Also documented are his activities with the American Ornithologists' Union and the Washington Academy of Sciences, Washington, D.C. In 1891 he was appointed fur seal commissioner to represent the United States on a joint American and British commission to study the problems of pelagic sealing on the Pribilof Islands. In 1899 he visited Alaska as part of the Harriman Alaska Expedition and later served as editor of the publications of its scientific staff.
Merriam's research and fieldwork into Native American languages are documented in boxes 24-47, under his original heading "Indian Vocabularies." This material consists primarily of comparative vocabulary lists phonetically documenting Indigenous Californian languages, with occasional examples from Nevada, Arizona, Oregon, and other regions. Merriam's hierarchical arrangement of this material, as retained, consolidates folders documenting individual regions or dialects under headings representing larger language families. Merriam's original phonetic spellings of languages, dialects, and tribal names has been retained; applicable modern language and tribal names (if known) are included in parentheses, including variant spellings and terms. Researchers should note that Merriam's groupings and classifications of various languages do not always correspond to modern understandings of linguistic or tribal relationships, or to modern nomenclature.