Frances Densmore hoped to stage an encounter with one of the most famous men alive. After a relentlessly cold winter up north in Red Wing, Minnesota, she boarded a slow-moving steam train rumbling south toward St. Louis in April 1904. Resolute and sharply dressed, she had arranged to ship a trunk filled with rare musical instruments to meet her at her destination.
Densmore, like many other Euro-Americans, believed that the traditional lifeways of indigenous people all over the world were doomed to vanish. Her passion was music, and she hoped to preserve something about indigenous people, specifically the American Indians who had fascinated her since childhood. Having heard that hundreds, if not thousands, of American Indians and other Native people were going to be at the world’s fair in St. Louis, she eagerly made her way to Missouri. Hundreds of acres in size and attracting nearly twenty million people, the fair was intended to dramatically celebrate the centennial of the Louisiana Purchase. More than a thousand buildings had been constructed on the fairgrounds. At thirty-six years old, Densmore had little interest in attending the fair to see the colorful sights, the remarkable new technological innovations on display, or the crowded exhibitions contributed by foreign countries from around the globe.
As the train moved south, her thoughts instead drifted to the lecture she was to give at the fair about Native American music. Rarely one to let her mind wander, she sat on the train thinking about meeting Native people who she hoped might shed light for her on their threatened cultural traditions. Her time at the fair would be important, Densmore thought, maybe even the most important opportunity in her life. Her work was part of a much larger, multifaceted effort to record and preserve seemingly fleeting aspects of Native societies.
The fair would be filled with chances to meet people and to record music. More than anything, however, Densmore wanted to meet the famed Apache leader Geronimo. The meeting she envisioned would contribute to a critical effort to record or “salvage” cultural traditions, a phenomenon that writers later described as “salvage anthropology” or “salvage ethnography.” In one 1970 essay, anthropologist Jacob W. Gruber reflected on the ideas behind this troubled history: “The loss of the savage, so real to the anthropologist, pointed up his value. Salvage provided the opportunity for human contact and human contrast. Here savagery met civilization, the presumed past met the present, stability met change.” If change was to be the inevitable price of human progress, some thinkers wondered if this toll might be diminished by preserving elements of the threatened cultures on the road to extinction.
