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Albert Louis Samuel Gatschet ( or ; October 3, 1832 – March 16, 1907) was a Swiss-American linguist, philologist, and ethnologist. He is best known for his contributions to the study of the Indigenous peoples and languages of the Americas. His work included analyses of almost a hundred different languages and preserved many on the brink of Language death.
Born in Switzerland to a Protestant minister, Gatschet studied at universities in Switzerland and Germany before immigrating to the United States in 1868 working as a language teacher. In 1872, the German botanist Oscar Loew asked him to analyze sixteen American Indian vocabularies recorded during the Wheeler Survey. His analysis was presented to the United States Congress and culminated in a German-language book which earned him the attention of Major John Wesley Powell, hiring Gatschet as an ethnologist for the Smithsonian Institute. Gatschet was later a founding member of the Bureau of American Ethnology and spent the majority of his life traveling the United States and completing surveys of the nation's languages en masse.
Gatschet's work remains highly regarded; his ethnological and linguistic publications on Indigenous peoples and their languages are considered to have pioneered the field. His reorganization of the language families of Indigenous languages earned him significant appreciation during his lifetime. His work on the Klamath people earned him particular praise, including from the people themselves several decades after his death. Modern linguists have described his work as part of the driving force behind a period of transition away from missionary-based linguistic study and towards a view based on scientific interest.
In his youth, Gatschet's education was primarily religious and for a time he considered becoming a reverend like his father. He attended the gymnasia in Neuchâtel and Bern. Gatschet attended the University of Bern from 1852 to 1858, studying languages, history, art, and theology; his favorite subjects there were Ancient Greek and theological doctrinal criticism. The same year he left the University of Bern, he began studying at the University of Berlin where he studied ancient languages.
In New York, Gatschet continued to publish linguistics articles, but worked primarily as a language teacher, being fluent in both French and German, though he reportedly had difficulty with English. In 1872, he was given the recorded vocabularies of sixteen American Indian languages to analyze by the German botanist Oscar Loew, who had been attached to the Wheeler Survey tasked with exploring the Southwestern United States. Gatschet's analyses of the vocabularies were reported in the 1875 and 1876 volumes of the Wheeler reports, culminating in another publication entitled Zwölf Sprachen aus dem Südwesten Nordamerikas.
Although Zwölf Sprachen was published in Weimar, the publication earned Gatschet the attention of John Wesley Powell, a major in the United States Army and a veteran of the American Civil War, then serving as Director of the Geographical and Geological Survey of the Rocky Mountain Region. In March 1877, Gatschet accepted an offer from Powell to become an ethnologist under him in order to classify and document the languages of the region, prompting Gatschet to relocate to Washington, D.C., permanently. Upon his arrival, he began working with the Smithsonian Institution to classify its existing documentation of American Indian languages. The same year, he was commissioned by the government to formulate a comprehensive account of the Pacific Northwest beginning with an expedition to the Otaki village in the Sacramento Valley and later visiting the Modoc people and , among others. There, he also began his work on the Klamath people in and around modern-day border of Oregon and California.
In 1879, Gatschet became a founding member of the Bureau of American Ethnology, with Powell as its new director. His work on the Klamath was halted following Powell's order to reexamine the phylogenetic relationships of the nation's language families to create a more certain classification system. Gatschet was among several other linguists who were deployed to different parts of the country to reassess classifications. In December 1881, Gatschet traveled to South Carolina where he discovered the relationship between the local Catawba language and the Siouan languages of the Great Plains.
In January 1885, Gatschet traveled to Lake Charles, Louisiana, to begin work on the Atakapa language. There, he discovered the last village of the tribe – – experiencing a mass exodus as tribesmen who could speak the language began migrating to Texas and Oklahoma. Gatschet worked with "the two most knowledgeable speakers of the language" – cousins and – in the village, but he published a plea to try and get support, which failed. The year after Gatschet's death, John R. Swanton took up Gatschet's plea, publishing a good portion of his notes and finishing his dictionary by 1932. While Swanton attempted to conduct his own research, he found the tribe somewhat reluctant to speak to outsiders and some of it has been lost. Although a handful of vocabularies existed prior, Gatschet's work on Atakapa's grammar is the only extant source. Later that year, Gatschet's work took him to Oklahoma where he undertook the first major survey of the Yuchi language. He traveled back to Louisiana in 1885 and 1886 to study Tunica language, Chitimacha, Biloxi language, and two dialects of Choctaw language.
In 1890, Gatschet published The Klamath Indians of Southwestern Oregon, a more-than-1,500-page monograph published in two parts. The contents are the result of years of investigation on the Klamath reservation, its first volume comprising a compilation of accounts of the Modoc War by Klamath veterans, biographical sketches, cultural customs and jurisprudence, and tribal legends and stories recounted to him by Winema, Curly Ball, and a few others, written with English interlinear glossing. The second volume comprises both a Klamath–English dictionary and an English–Klamath one. The work captures the language as it was spoken before it experienced significant contamination from the growing dominance of Chinook Jargon; Gatschet was reportedly discerning in distinguishing the speech of those who were already beginning to have their language affected by language contact. The book was extremely well-received among its readership. Decades after his death, The National Cyclopædia of American Biography described the publication as "one of the most exhaustive studies of an American native language ever undertaken and may fairly be said to mark an epoch in the science of linguistics". Many Klamath expressed approval at his work as well, with one writing fifty years after his death that "his work with our Indians ... can never be surpassed or even equaled".
Later in life, Gatschet became overly involved in his work to the point of Self-neglect. Following the publication of The Klamath Tribe and Language of Oregon, the Bureau of American Ethnology commissioned him to begin a comparative grammar survey of the Algonquian languages, which he planned to follow with a survey of the Shawnee language, but he was forced to retire on March 1, 1905, following the exacerbation of the kidney disease he ultimately died from. Before he left, he gave the Bureau a massive manuscript "probably equal in extent" to his Klamath publication, containing about ten thousand words of the Peoria language. Gatschet's health began deteriorating rapidly following his retirement and he was constantly attended to by his wife. His later life was marked with what his doctors referred to as . In July 1906, he collapsed in the street and had to be revived at Freedman's Hospital.
Gatschet died in Washington, D.C., on March 16, 1907, of Bright's disease and overwork at the age of 74. The couple had no children. Although later in life he had become unconcerned with spiritual matters altogether, an Episcopalian funeral service was held at his house on 15th Street three days after his death. He was buried at Mount Peace Cemetery in Philadelphia the following day.
The American linguist Ives Goddard described the efforts of Gatschet and James Owen Dorsey as "two men of unusual linguistic ability and equipment" who ushered in a period of linguistic interest motivated "by scientific interest rather than missionary zeal". Gatschet's work examined over a hundred American Indian languages, many of which were critically endangered at the time of his documentation. He wrote the first major works on Muskogee and Hitchiti and began the only Atakapa language dictionary. By 1902, he had published over a hundred works on Indigenous languages.
Gatschet's influence on the study of the Siouan languages is profound. His work identified the Siouan-speaking peoples' Urheimat as having been closer to the East Coast of the United States than the Great Plains, as was previously assumed. Linguists now believe Proto-Siouan was spoken in and around the Ohio River Valley. His work with the Biloxi people and Biloxi language on the Gulf Coast made him the first to identify the language as Siouan.
Throughout his career, Gatschet was a member of several Learned society, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Philological Society, the American Folklore Society, the National Geographic Society, the Anthropological Society of Washington, the Washington Academy of Sciences, the Anthropological Society of Vienna, the Historical Society of Canton Bern, and the Grütliverein of Bern, among others. He was also a beneficiary member of the Bookbinders Guild of Bern. In 1884, he was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society, followed by election to the American Antiquarian Society in 1902.
Gatschet's friend and colleague James Mooney wrote that "his chief characteristics were thoroughness and absolute honesty", but admitted that "it was practically impossible for him to collaborate" with others in his work. The National Cyclopædia of American Biography similarly described him as "a brilliant and painstaking scholar ... of an unusually retiring nature and, by preference, most of his important work was accomplished alone". Alfred Kroeber described meeting him thus:
Still, he was known as morally upright, loyal, and unwilling to tolerate pseudoscience. In response to one such claim, he remarked: "To guess is not science".
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