Manhart editing

[Rankin, Robert L]

Father Manhart attended a couple of the early Siouan Conferences and gave short papers.  There were a few covert comments about "homilies" and the like, and I'm afraid he probably wasn't made to feel particularly welcome.  But both Jan and Wally are right.  Our predecessors were almost all "talented amateurs".  Horatio Hale, James Owen Dorsey, and Francis Laflesche were among them.  Others were primarily ethnographers who documented languages out of a sense of duty, John R. Swanton, and Robert Lowie among them.  Where would we be without them?  We'd know next to nothing about Tutelo, Ofo, Biloxi, Quapaw and several other languages, and those of us studying Kansa, Omaha, Ponca, and Osage would have had to start virtually from scratch.  It's true that they all made their share of mistakes for us to try to sort out, but that's the history of scientific inquiry.  I've spent enormous amounts of time trying to correct the transcription errors in Dorsey and add things like vowel le!
 ngth, but without Dorsey's manuscript materials to work from, my own data collection for Kansa would have been poor indeed.  I guess Newton's famous quotation sums it up:  "If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants."

Bob