About C. Hart Merriam

C. Hart Merriam (1855–1942) was an accomplished biologist and naturalist, being a leader and founding member of the National Geographic Society, the US Bureau of Biological Survey, and the American Ornithologists’ Union. His publications in the biological sciences amount to about 500. Later in his carreer, a personal friendship with a railroad financier caused Merriam to become financially independant—whereupon he shifted his attention from biology to the Native Americans of California.

For more information on Merriam, see Osgood’s biographical memoir of Merriam (1944) and Kroeber’s introduction to Merriam’s Studies of California Indians (1955).

The vocabularies

Though not trained as a linguist or anthropologist, Merriam gathered important linguistic and anthropological information about Indigenous Californians throughout the state. Especially important from a linguistic perspective are Merriam’s natural history wordlists and general vocabularies, as well as his work on classifying the languages he observed. True to his biological training, Merriam was interested in establishing genetic relationships between the languages he studied. The result is a comprehensive language and dialect survey of Indigenous California.

Two hand-copied versions of Merriam’s vocabulary lists were created. One copy is archived at the Library Of Congress in Washington, D.C., and the other at the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley. Under a grant from the U.S. Department of Education, the entire Merriam collection at the Bancroft was microfilmed and then digitized, to improve access to the collection.

Many of the microfilm reels (141 in total) are available online at archive.org. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to find vocabularies for specific languages in the online collection. The researcher must first locate and consult the collection’s finding aid, find which reel the desired information is on, and then search archive.org for the desired reel number.

This website

The purpose of this website is to make the content of the Merriam collection searchable by language, to further increase access to the collection. At the Merriam word-list finder page, users may scroll to find Merriam material by language family and language name name, and find links to individual documents (not just the reels containing the documents) at archive.org.

DISCLAIMER: This site has no affiliation with the Bancroft Library or with archive.org. This project is an independant portal to the Merriam language data.

The Bancroft’s finding aid

This page is not affiliated with the Bancroft Library. The Bancroft’s finding aid for “The C. Hart Merriam Papers, Volume 1: Papers Relating to Work with California Indians, 1850-1974 (bulk 1898-1938)” should be consulted to find out any details about these word lists. It can be found here:
http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/tf8c6006rv/entire_text/

This finding aid is based on the original finding aid for the collection produced by Robert Heizer in 1969. This finding aid shows you what microfilm reel each resource can be found on. The reels were digitized by the Bancroft, and each is viewable online at archive.org.

The Library of Congress copies

The Library of Congress has now digitized its own copies of the Merriam word lists, and made them available online. Interested researchers can look at the digitized files in the Library of Congress’ finding aid to the C. Hart Merriam Papers (MSS32698) here: https://findingaids.loc.gov/repositories/19/archival_objects/4713203. Note that it can be valuable to consult both the Bancroft’s copy and the Library of Congress’ copy of any given word list, because they are sometimes not identical. In some cases, a word list may be entirely absent from one of the institutions’ collections. The collections are not identical.

Works cited