George T. Emmons

George T. Emmons

George Thornton Emmons (June 6, 1852 – June 11, 1945) was an ethnographic photographer and a U.S. Navy Lieutenant.

He was born in Baltimore, Maryland. His father was George Foster Emmons.

He graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1874. In 1881, he attained the master rank, (1883) lieutenant j.g. and (1887) lieutenant.

Emmons got stationed in 1882 on the Pinta in Alaska and stayed there through the 1880s and 1890s. The navy took largely the responsibility for stability in the region, in those times.

Emmons married Kittie Baker in 1886.

Through his duties, Emmons got in contact with, and interested in, the Alaska Native cultures of the region: particularly the Tlingit and Tahltan. He began to record information and collect artifacts as he visited them on his leaves. He was dedicated to learning native life traditions, like Chilkat weaving, bear hunting, feuds, and the potlatch (a very big ceremonial feast). He was able to understand beliefs and values and recorded, through his ethnographer's devotion, also the Tlingit terms. He was assigned from 1891–1893 to the World's Columbian Exposition to accompany the Alaskan exhibit.

Emmons retired in 1899 and took on special projects for the federal government. He was sent to Alaska in 1901 to locate border stone markers between Canada and the USA. He gave advice in 1902 about Alaskan game and forests and salmon fishery. In 1904, he gathered information about white settlers and Alaska Natives and asked President Theodore Roosevelt to investigate in Alaska Native conditions, because of starvation among the Copper River Indians. He was supported by Roosevelt and presented in 1905 a report to the Congress.

His interests in Alaska Natives got him into close contact with the American Museum of Natural History, which purchased his first two collections of Alaska Native artifacts in the 1890s and with which Emmons had an exchange of items for the next three decades. (In 1902 the Field Museum of Natural History purchased a large and varied collection of more than 1,900 Tlingit objects.) F. W. Putnam, curator of the American museum, asked for his help on a report in 1896 and repeated the request to the navy the following year. So Emmons was officially ordered and detached from active service to write the Ethnological report on the Native tribes of Southeast Alaska, elaborated from the museum collections. He became a regular contributor to The American Museum Journal (forerunner of Natural History journal) and other scholarly periodicals.

At the recommendation of Franz Boas, with whom he corresponded regularly and at the request of the president of the American Museum of Natural History, Morris K. Jesup, he began to organize his notes and prepare a manuscript on the Tlingit. When he died in Victoria, British Columbia in 1945, the encyclopedic book was still unfinished. The work was taken over by Frederica de Laguna in 1955 and finally published 1991 with the title The Tlingit Indians. It includes topics such as census data, names of clans and houses, species of plants and their uses, native calendars, and names of gambling sticks.