After military service during the civil war he resumed, in 1866, the studies which had been interrupted by it, and accompanied Prof. Hayden to the Bad Lands of Dakota. From this expedition and the action of the Congress of the United States in 1866-’67, sprang the Hayden survey, and during its existence Mr. Stevenson was its executive officer. In one of the explorations from 1868 to 1878, which are too many to be here enumerated, he climbed the Great Teton, and was the first white man known to have reached the ancient Indian altar on its summit.
In 1879 the Hayden survey was discontinued, the Bureau of Ethnology was organized, and the U. S. Geological Survey was established. Mr. Stevenson, in addition to his duties as the executive officer of the new survey, was detailed for research in connection with the Bureau of Ethnology. In the subsequent years he devoted the winters--from the incoming of the field parties to their outgoing in the spring--chiefly to business of the survey; his summers to his favorite researches. He explored the cliff and cave dwellings of Arizona and New Mexico; he unearthed in the Canyon de Chelly two perfect skeletons of its prehistoric inhabitants; he investigated the religious mythology of the Zuñi, and secured a complete collection of fetich-gods, never before allowed out of their possession; he studied the history and religions of the Navajo and the Tusayan, and made an invaluable collection of pottery, costumes, and ceremonial objects, which are now prominent in the U. S. National Museum. But in the high mesas which were the field of his explorations in 1885 he was attacked by the “mountain fever” in its worst form. It was his first serious illness, and his regular and temperate life saved him for the time. But a visit to the same region in 1887 brought on a second attack of this peculiar and distressing disease. He came home prostrated, with symptoms of serious heart failure.
He died at the Gilsey House, in New York city, on the 25th of July, 1888, and was buried in the cemetery of Rock Creek church, near Washington.
For the first time in the series of the Annual Reports of this Bureau a single paper is submitted to exhibit the character of the investigations undertaken and the facts collected by its officers, with the results of their studies upon such collections. But while the paper is single in form and in title, it includes, in its illustrations and the text relating to them, nearly all topics into which anthropology can properly be divided, and therefore shows more diversity than would often be contained in a volume composed of separate papers by several authors. Its subject-matter being essentially pictorial, it required a large number of illustrations, twelve hundred and ninety-five figures being furnished in the text, besides fifty-four full-page plates, which, with their explanation and discussion, expanded the volume to such size as to exclude other papers.