WWAD: Carobeth Tucker Laird

Carobeth Tucker Laird
Encounter With an Angry God:
Recollections of My Life With John Peabody Harrington
(Banning, California: Malki Museum Press, 1975)

Carobeth Tucker Laird

Carobeth Laird was born in Coleman, Texas on July 20, 1895. In 1909, at the age of 14, Carobeth traveled with her parents to Mexico, where she discovered that she had a tremendous facility for languages. It wasn't until 1915, however, that Carobeth was introduced to linguistics. She enrolled in a summer school linguistics course that was taught by John Peabody Harrington. Harrington, who focused on recording the languages of the Native Americans of the western U.S., trained Carobeth. Carobeth first met Harrington, handsome, commanding in presence, sun-tanned from the field. For a young girl, already fascinated by scholarship, he seemed to be romantic and had a dashing personality.

In 1916 she married John Peabody Harrington, field ethnologist for the Bureau of American Ethnology, and for a number of years worked with him in the field gathering ethnologic and linguistic data on the Indians of the Southwest and California. John Peabody Harrington was a man driven by genius and totally obsessed with the idea that time was running out for the American Indian. Eventually he gave up all social life, believing that time wasted was at the cost of his work as field ethnologist for the Bureau of American Ethnology. Harrington was obsessed with preserving a record of the dying Native language of the Americans that he worked at this timelessly, rarely taking any kind of rest. He was so unwilling to take time away from his fieldwork that he left his paychecks uncashed for months at a time for fear that the Smithsonian Institution would learn where he was and recall him to Washington to spend time in the office. For seven years (1916-23), Carobeth was a little more than an indentured servant to her husband. She traveled with him to wherever dispossessed Indian groups had been herded onto reservations, seeking out old men and women who remembered how life had been before the coming of the white men.

During the summer of 1919, Carobeth was sent to Arizona, where she met her future husband, George Laird, a Chemehuevi Indian. At the Colorado River Indian Reservation, Carobeth participated and witnessed old tribal ceremonies. After working with George Laird for four years, Carobeth divorced Harrington and married George. For twenty years, George dictated Chemehuevi texts depicting their myths and tribal history. At the time of George's death in 1940, Carobeth had the most complete collection of Chemehuevi myths ever recorded.

Carobeth's collection of field notes, tapes, and other memorabilia has been established at the University of California, Riverside. A museum dedicated to Chemehuevi studies has been proposed.

Encounter with an Angry God is in one sense is a token of what is meant to be an anthropologist in the early decades of the twentieth century. It is also a sensitive and unsparing account of that strange and legendary figure known as John Peabody Harrington. Even more it is an exciting and compelling love story. A love story that deals with the curious triangle that developed when Chemehuevi informant, George Laird entered the lives of Harrington and his young wife that he drove ruthlessly as he did himself.