of Mexico after his triumphant campaign, inclosing a memorandum which he
urged the general to hand to civilians attached to the army. This was a
request to purchase books, copies of documents, printed grammars, and
vocabularies of the Mexican languages, and he authorized the general to
spend four hundred dollars in this purpose on his account. In the second
volume, published in 1848, he printed the result of his continued
investigations on the subject which first interested him, as an
introduction to a republication of a work by Mr. Hale on the "Indians of
Northwest America." This consisted of geographical notices, an account
of Indian means of subsistence, the ancient semi-civilization of the
Northwest, Indian philology, and analogic comparisons with the Chinese
and Polynesian languages. These papers Mr. Gallatin modestly described
to Chevalier as the 'fruits of his leisure,' and to Sismondi he wrote
that he had not the requisite talent for success in literature or
science. They nevertheless entitle him to the honorable name of the
Father of American Ethnography.
In 1837 Mr. Wheaton, the American minister at Berlin, requested Mr.
Gallatin to put the Baron von Humboldt in possession of authentic data
concerning the production of gold in the United States. Humboldt had
visited the Oural and Siberian regions in 1829, at the request of the
Emperor of Russia, to make investigations as to their production of the
precious metals. Mr. Gallatin was the only authority in the United
States on the subject. Later von Humboldt wrote to Mr. Gallatin of the
interest felt abroad, and by himself, in the gold of the mountains of
Virginia and Tennessee, a country which rivaled on a small scale the
Dorado of Siberia. The treasures of the Pacific coast were not yet
dreamed of.
Mr. Gallatin perfectly understood the range of his own powers. He said
of himself:--
"If I have met with any success, either in public bodies, as an
executive officer, or in foreign negotiations, it has been
exclusively through a patient and most thorough investigation of
all the attainable facts, and a cautious application of these to
the questions under discussion.... Long habit has given me great
facility in collating, digesting, and extracting complex documents,
but I am not hasty in drawing inferences; the arrangement of the
facts and arguments is always to me a considerable labor, and
though aiming at nothing more than perspicuity and brevity, I am a
very slow writer."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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