at Cornell University, Frank Cushing was appointed curator of the ethnological department of the National Museum in Washington, D.C. by the director of the Smithsonian Institution. There he came to the attention of John Wesley Powell, of the Bureau of American Ethnology and was invited by Powell to join an anthropological expedition to New Mexico. The group traveled by rail to end of the line at Las Vegas, New Mexico, then on to Zuni Pueblo where Cushing, ""went native"", living with the Zuni from 1879 to 1884. The book also includes two articles about Cushing written by Sylvester Baxter in 1882.

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