James Constantine Pilling (1846-1895)
Powell’s Pals: James C. Pilling
James Constantine Pilling was a stenographer first hired by Congress as a stenographer and transcriptionist. Soon after his hiring and subsequent promotions, he became famous as a pioneering Ethnologist and Philologist. He was chiefly known for compiling a series of extensive bibliographies of the cultures, mythologies and languages of the North and Central American aboriginal peoples. [1] Due to his thoroughness, and exhaustingly long work hours, many of his wavering colleagues and Congressional enemies joked that he should be called by the nick name: Poison Pilling.
Beginning in 1875, Pilling joined the survey of the American West led by Maj. John Wesley Powell. The assignment continued through 1881. During those six years Pilling did extensive fieldwork and proofread Powell’s Report on the lands of the arid region of the United States (1879). Although he died before final publication of the Powell Report, Pilling proved to be the most diligent and thorough chronicler of the Native American languages, and Powell was grateful to have a painstaking man like Pilling in his inner circle.[1][4]
| James C. Pilling | |
|---|---|
| Born | 16 November 1846 Washington, D.C. |
| Died | 26 July 1895 (aged 48) Washington, D.C. |
| Occupation | Philologist |
Education & Early Work
Pilling attended Gonzaga College. At the time this high school was chartered by Congress to offer university degrees, but today it is a Jesuit high school in Washington, D.C. Having taught himself Pitman shorthand while still in grade school, Pilling became highly proficient as a stenographer, later working for several government agencies.[1]
Ethnology Career
In 1875, John Wesley Powell hired him to help administer the United States Geological Survey (USGS) of the Rocky Mountain regions. In 1879, when Powell founded the Bureau of Ethnology (known from 1897 to 1965 as the Bureau of American Ethnology or BAE), Pilling became the bureau’s chief clerk. When Powell took over as director of the USGS and of the BAE from Clarence King (1881), Pilling became the USGS chief clerk as well, while continuing his work with the BAE. In his unpaid hours over the next 15 years Pilling compiled an extensive bibliography of books and manuscripts on North American languages. He was also responsible for the initial development of the BAE library and for maintaining its archives system. By 1891, a debilitating illness he had contracted during his years of ethnological fieldwork forced him to resign from such administrative duties, but he continued his ethnology work until his death in 1895.[1]
In 1885, the BAE published his labor of love as the 1,200-page Proof-sheets of a Bibliography of North American Indian Languages; only 100 copies were printed. Scholars of American Indian languages, however, gave the work an enthusiastic reception, and their cooperation enabled Pilling subsequently to revise this monumental work and publish a series of bibliographies, each dealing with a particular family of what became know as “Amerindian languages.”[1]
Organizing his data sets in card catalogues and using a cross-reference system, between 1887 and 1894, Pilling revised and published a tremendous number of bibliographies. The list of languages impacted by his years of methodical research included many Eskimo–Aleut, Siouan–Catawban, Iroquoian, Muskogean, Algonquian, Athabaskan, Chinookan, Salishan, and Wakashan language families (Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletins 1, 5, 6, 9, 13, 14, 15, 16, and 19).[2]
In addition, Pilling had compiled much of the material for a proposed bibliography of Mexican languages, which was not published during his lifetime. Now known as the Uto-Aztecan languages, their kinship was conclusively established by Edward Sapir in the 1920s, but Powell had opposed such a classification scheme. Pilling’s Shoshonean languages are now known as Northern Uto-Aztecan, while his Sonoran and Aztec groupings are now both considered among the Southern Uto-Aztecan languages.
Pilling died of locomotor ataxia, now called Tabes dorsalis, a disease associated with untreated syphilis, in 1895.[3]
[1] Notes are extensively taken from Wikipedia for the life and history of James Pilling.
[2] “Pilling, James Constantine (1846-1895), Papers” in p. 2 of Guide to the Collections of the National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution. Retrieved February 4, 2010.
[3] Locomotor ataxia is a disease that impacts the nervous system, causing sufferers to lose the ability to precisely control one’s own bodily movements. Syphilis is commonly known as a sexually transmitted infection.
[4] James C. Pilling was one of the men with whom John Wesley Powell found some of his strongest kinship. The exploration of the relationship is outlined and discussed in another Powell’s Pals post on Pilling and eight other scientists and explorers from the Powell era.
Henry E. Hooper 
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