Harriman Alaskan Expedition

[David Payne]

On Wed, 9 Jan 2008, Jill <grladams at teleport.com> wrote:
> For around two months his invited team of> scientists included John Burroughs, John Muir, George Bird Grinnell,> Clinton Hart Merriam, Edward S. Curtis, William Healey Dall, and William> Emerson Ritter. They shipped tons of supplies and cameras, a grammophone..
>From Wikipedia (): 
 
"Harriman also brought an advanced and outsized phonograph upon which he like to play loud music during his arrival at the small towns and outposts he visited. He also used this modern contraption to record a speech in the dying Eyak language, creating one of the few extant recording of this language as it was spoken. This recording cylinder was lost for many years, but found by Anthony Seeger of the Indiana University Archive of Traditional Music. He brought the cylinder to a meeting in Sapporo, Japan in 1985 and the language was recognized by linguist Michael Krauss, even though it was being played backwards."
Wha?!?! Speaking of magic! Krauss recognized the language "even though it was being played backwards"?!? In 1985? When there was only on person on earth who could still speak the dead language (Eyak)--and she hated interviews? From a 2005 interview: 
 
"The last full-blooded member of the Eyak nation, Chief Marie Smith Jones, lives in Anchorage, Alaska, in a two-story, tan-colored building posted with a notice that warns "No dogs" and "No water beds." On a gray Saturday last spring, I arranged to go visit her. When I arrived at her apartment, no one answered the door. I thought perhaps she had forgotten our appointment and had gone off, but when I called up from the street it turned out that she had decided she did not feel like talking to me that afternoon, or, she implied, ever. I probably never would have got to meet her except that a friend of hers had advised me to bring along, as a gesture of respect, some halibut, a fish prized by the Eyak. Smith Jones asked me if the halibut could fit inside the mailbox. I said I didn't think so." -- http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-4770145/LAST-WORDS-Marie-Smith-Jones.html#abstract
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