Featured on PDR in the collection Indian Sign Talk (1893)

Upon reading Lieutenant Colonel Garrick Mallery’s 1880 appeal for descriptions of “Indian Sign Talk”, Lewis Francis Hadley abandoned his philological research on Quapaw and Ponca languages (he was reputed to know twenty Native tongues) and applied himself to the mastery of the single silent language that he estimated was known by over 100,000 Native people. By 1890, he had moved to a cave near Anadarko, Oklahoma. His tent was crowded with a printing press and stacks of woodblocks, which he carved with a kitchen knife to illustrate the hand language of Plains Indians. From woodblocks, he moved on to electrotype prints of his gestural sketches, which he made into flash cards that could be used to teach the signs. By the time he published Indian…