Smith, Erminnie Adele Platt

▪ American anthropologist

née Platt

born April 26, 1836, Marcellus, N.Y., U.S.

died June 9, 1886, Jersey City, N.J.

      American anthropologist who was the first woman to specialize in ethnographic field work.

      Smith graduated from the Female Seminary of Troy, N.Y., in 1853. She married Simeon Smith, a Chicago lumber dealer and merchant, in 1855. When her sons were students in Germany, she studied at Strasbourg, Heidelberg, and Freiberg. Smith's early work was in geology, particularly crystallography. In 1876 she founded the Aesthetic Society, an organization that attracted as many as 500 people to parlor meetings on science, literature, and art. At those meetings, Smith learned of the new science of anthropology. In 1880, financed by the Smithsonian Institution, she began to study American Indian ethnology.

      Smith devoted her later years to the investigation of the Iroquois Federation. She amassed their legends and also obtained and compiled more than 15,000 words of the Iroquois dialect. She also introduced the technique, widely used by later ethnologists, of training native informants.

      Her publications include numerous scientific papers and Myths of the Iroquois (1883).

* * *