George Gibbs (ethnologist)

George Gibbs (1815–1873) was an American ethnologist, naturalist and geologist who contributed to the study of the languages of indigenous peoples in Washington Territory.

[e] On February 23, 1852, he sent the transcript and map to McKee, who was to take them to Washington, D.C. and give them to Henry Schoolcraft, whom Gibbs knew through their mutual association in the New-York Historical Society.

While waiting for the spring rains to ebb, Gibbs wrote Observations on the Indians of the Klamath River and Humboldt Bay, Accompanying Vocabularies of Their Languages[21] archived in the Smithsonian Institution.

In late 1852, Fillmore appointed Gibbs as the Collector of Customs, and he returned from the Klamath River region to Humboldt Bay and took a ship to San Francisco, then back up the coast to Astoria, Oregon where he arrived in mid-December.

In April, 1853, while at Fort Vancouver, he received news that the newly inaugurated Franklin Pierce planned to reappoint the previous Customs Collector.

He earned a reputation as the "most apt student of the Indian languages and customs in the Northwest", because his skills with Governor Stevens helped convince the natives to sign the treaty.

Gibbs brought an argument to the table that because there was much variety in the Indians' customs and languages, and in their needs for fishing rights, amongst others, many small reservations should be built.

In 1857 Gibbs joined The Northwest Boundary Survey of the Canada–United States border, which began on the Pacific coast and included in its ranks Joseph Smith Harris.

The Smithsonian collection of Gibbs' papers from that time period includes the notes of his research on the growth of forests in the Washington Territory, dated to 1860.

He volunteered to defend the home of John C. Fremont during the New York City draft riots on July 15, 1863,[31] after which he returned to Washington D.C., where he spent most of the last decade of his life.

The original manuscript of Tribes of western Washington and northwestern Oregon, dated 1865, and other papers were given to the State Historical Society of Wisconsin by Gibbs' grand-niece in 1949.

Map of the Oregon Trail
—Fort Vancouver and the Village from the Northwest, July, 1851, Drawn by George Gibbs. From collection of photographs entitled Drawings by George Gibbs in the Far Northwest, 1849–1851 , in the American Bureau of Ethnology. Smithsonian Institution.
Map of Jedediah Smith 's explorations that Gibbs annotated on an 1844 version of John C. Fremont 's Map of an Exploring Expedition To The Rocky Mountains in the Years 1842 and to Oregon & North California in the Years 1843–44 . University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee Libraries