Garrick Mallery

[3] Mallery received an excellent early education and was prepared by a private tutor for his entrance into his father's alma mater, Yale College, where he matriculated in his fifteenth year.

He devoted some of his leisure time to editorial and literary work, and was steadily advancing in professional standing when the Civil War began in 1861.

[5] During Mallery's tenure with the Signal Corps, he was briefly stationed at Fort Rice in Dakota Territory, where the indigenous system of communication by signs and gestures attracted his attention.

He began to make note of them, which led to a parallel investigation of the pictographs on rocks, skins, and bark, of which he made a large number of transcriptions.

Before Mallery began his researches, European Americans generally supposed that the pictographs, some of which were believed to be of pre-Columbian origin, were simply pictures and devoid of meaning.

He was gradually convinced that gesture-speech and the cognate pictographs formed a complete system, involving mythology and history and having an important relation to the spoken language.

In 1880 Mallery produced a 72-page pamphlet, with 33 figures, entitled "Introduction to the Study of Sign-language among the North American Indians as Illustrating the Gesture-speech of Mankind".

In the same year, he prepared a quarto volume of 329 pages, entitled "A Collection of Gesture Signs and Signals of the North American Indians, with Some Comparisons."

In 1881 Mallery's second important contribution was published in the First Annual Report of the Bureau, namely, "Sign-language among North American Indians Compared with that Among other People and Deaf-mutes."

Mallery's next publication appeared in the Fourth Annual Report of the Bureau, under the title, "Pictographs of the North American Indians; a Preliminary Paper."