LITMIR.BIZ

      Figure 4. Artifacts on display in Scott’s Fort Sill home. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

      Without question, the most significant collecting Scott did was his work to record legends, history, and linguistic information from the people of the southern plains during his nine years at Fort Sill, detailing several of the scouts in his troop to travel to villages in a large region around the fort tracking down words, signs, and stories. The ledgers he compiled at Fort Sill have survived as a unique source of ethnographic information collected through the medium of sign language about the life and history of the Kiowa, Comanche, and other peoples interviewed in the vicinity of the Fort.⁶¹ He also used the tours of inspection of Indian reservations on which the Board of Indian Commissioners sent him to continue his studies of culture and language in the 1920s.

      In the research he began at the Bureau of Ethnology after leaving Fort Sill in 1897, Scott tracked down a few scanty observations on sign language in the records of European explorers dating back to the expeditions of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and Francisco Vásquez de Coronado in the mid-sixteenth century. He also studied the journals of the Lewis and Clark expedition looking for evidence of the Corps of Discovery’s awareness of the use of this lingua franca among many of the Native nations they encountered on their trek up the Missouri. Scott was struck by how little notice earlier colonizers had taken of sign language. In an early draft for the book he never completed, he wrote: “I have always been amazed at the little attention the Singlangue has received in the past especially soldiers and explorers—for it is certainly a wonderful language and most useful to the above classes—for 200 years—but instead of perfecting themselves in its use they have merely left a reference apparently to show that they knew of its existence—this is the more remarkable in the case of Lewis & Clark 1804–6 whose was directed by President Jefferson to investigate every thing they found that was new and interesting.”⁶² Besides the history of sign language, its spread throughout the central plains region, and its military and diplomatic utility, Scott was also interested in it as a linguistic phenomenon. He faulted others who had written on the subject with failing to recognize it as a natural language “subject to all the general laws of linguistic science, save those of sound … [having] its own place in the hierarchy of all human speech, akin to all through our common humanity.”⁶³

      Even though Scott had an appreciation for the adaptability and expressiveness of sign language, he nonetheless theorized it as representing a simple root stage of language, analogous to the primitive germ out of which more advanced languages, such as Indo-European speech “with all its fullness and inflective suppleness,” had descended over generations. In this he seems to have been influenced by the views of the evolution of complex language put forward in the work of Yale University philologist William Whitney.⁶⁴

      Scott’s research for his book on sign language was cut short by the start of the Spanish-American War. By his own account, he then became “engaged for years in matters more important to [his] career than writing any book.”⁶⁵ There is evidence that he continued to think about the project, however, even when he was in the Philippines. In a letter to his wife written when he was governor of Sulu in 1905, Scott asked Mary to send him some books on linguistics. Specifically, he asked her to buy a book on “deaf & mute language showing its structure etc—not of the artificial alphabetic language but the natural language of the deaf.” He wrote that Dr. Gallaudet of Washington could help identify the kind of thing he was interested in. He also asked her to send him several other books that he had used to prepare a talk General Nelson Miles had asked him to give on sign language at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. These included works on linguistics by Max Müller, F. W. Farrar, and A. H. Sayce. “I seem to want to know something about the real essence of spoken language,” Scott explained to his wife, “but the thing has become dim & I am in the mood for it now if I had the books—as it all bears on sign language more or less.”⁶⁶ Several letters requesting materials from libraries in Texas suggest he had renewed efforts on his research again during the time he was stationed in San Antonio in 1911 and 1912 with the Third Cavalry.⁶⁷

      Scott’s interest in sign language had its origin in his passion for scouting and his ambition to make himself useful to commanding officers and to the frontier army, which he did. As that same army faced the challenges of an expanding overseas empire, Scott would continue to be called on to put his scouting skills to work—on the new frontiers of that empire in Cuba and the Philippines, and eventually back on the border with Mexico.

      Chapter 3

       The Right Kind of White Men

      “It was your handkerchief that saved you,” the leader of the Mexican Rural Guards told him. Second Lieutenant Robert Lee Bullard stood frozen with fear inside the rim of a mountain crater in Sonora as three Rurales kept their rifles trained on him. While the Yaqui Indians attached to the Fourth Cavalry’s expedition south of the border were away from camp searching for signs of Geronimo and his band of Chiricahua Apaches, Lieutenant Bullard had taken the opportunity to go hunting. He was dressed “in Indian style—hatless, coatless, pantless; in shirt, drawers and moccasins only.”¹ Absorbed in the pursuit of a pronghorn antelope among the rocks and crevices of the Sierra Madre mountains, Bullard had been unaware that he was in turn being tracked by the Mexicans, who mistook him for an Apache. When he finally noticed them, Bullard’s first thought was similarly that the crouching figures who had him in their sights were Apaches.

      In August of 1886 all the Mexican borderlands were attuned to the movements of the Apache leader and the followers who had joined him in fleeing intolerable conditions at the San Carlos Reservation in Arizona, where the army sought to confine the Chiracahaus. In arduous campaigning, sometimes involving up to a quarter of its forces, the army had spent the previous four years in fruitless pursuit of three dozen hostiles, only seventeen of whom were fighting men.² Penetration by American troops into Mexican territory also created tensions between the two countries. The urgency of Geronimo’s capture or death was one of the few things on which Mexicans and Americans agreed.

      In words calculated to belittle the American soldier, the leader of the Rural Guard made it clear that Bullard owed his life to his own ineptitude—and to the Mexicans’ superior scouting skills and knowledge

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