In January Matthew W. Stirling, chief of the Bureau of American Ethnology, requested Mr. Hewitt to undertake the editing of the Manuscript Journal of Rudolph Friederich Kurz, of Berne, Switzerland, in the manner in which he had prepared the Edwin Thompson Denig Report on the Indian Tribes of the Upper Missouri River, published in the Forty-sixth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology. The Kurz manuscript was written in German during the years 1846 to 1852. The typed German text consists of 454 pages of large legal-cap size, while the English translation of it by Myrtis Jarrell occupies 780 pages. The journal is a narrative of Mr. Kurz’s experiences in a trip up the Mississippi River from New Orleans to St. Louis, thence up the Missouri to Fort Union at the mouth of the Yellowstone River, and of his difficulties with the Indians while endeavoring to make drawings or pictures of them. There are 125 pen sketches of Indians and others accompanying the manuscript.
Mr. Hewitt represents the Bureau of American Ethnology, Smithsonian Institution, on the United States Geographic Board, and is a member of its executive committee. In connection with the forthcoming issue of the sixth report of this board much extra work had to be done by members of the executive committee. Mr. Hewitt prepared a memorandum for a portion of the introduction. Mr. Hewitt also devoted much time and study to the collection and preparation of data for official replies to correspondents of the bureau, some demanding long research. Miss Mae W. Tucker has assisted Mr. Hewitt in the care of the manuscript and phonograph and photograph records of the archives.
On May 10, 1931, Mr. Hewitt left Washington, D. C., on field duty and returned to the bureau July 2, 1931. During this trip he visited the Grand River grant of the Six Nations of Iroquois Indians dwelling near Brantford, Canada, and also the Tuscarora Reservation near Niagara Falls, N. Y.
Winslow M. Walker was appointed to the staff of the Bureau of American Ethnology as associate anthropologist in March, 1931. He resumed his research in Hawaiian archeology, begun during a year’s stay in the Hawaiian Islands in 1929, in preparation for a paper on Hawaiian sculpture.