Warren K. Moorehead

"Warren King Moorehead" was known in his time as the 'Dean of American archaeology' (see "North American archaeology"); born in Siena, Italy to missionary parents on March 10, 1866, he died on January 5, 1939 at the age of 72.

Early life

His mother died when he was quite young, and while his father remarried and became head of a Presbyterian seminary in Xenia, Ohio, travels for keeping that institution open left young Warren and his sister in the care of two aunts, who are recalled vividly in Helen Hooven Santmyer's non-fictional ""Ohio Town"" and the novel ""And Ladies of the Club.""

Their brother, Moorehead's grandfather, was Joseph Warren King, whose wealth from the King's Powder Mills became both an opportunity and a curse for the fledgeling archaeologist. Digging about in the earth was considered beneath a fine family, and for much of his life Warren King Moorehead was pressured to enter the family business, whose remains are near King's Mills, Ohio, a near ghost town except for the now more famous neighbor called after it, "Kings Island," the Cincinnati area amusement park.

Education

Moorehead went to Denison University, near Moorehead family interests in Muskingum County (from which is descended his collateral relation, actress Agnes Moorehead). By 1887 Moorehead had left without a degree, and his relationship with academic archaeology stayed distant and at odds throughout his life, adding to the speedy dismissal of Moorehead's work after his death by most of professional archaeology.

Excavations and collections begun as a schoolboy continued through self-financed work taking him to a display of his own at the 1888 Cincinnati Centennial Exposition, and contact with Dr. Thomas Wilson of the Smithsonian Institution. Dr. Wilson encouraged and possibly helped Moorehead to enter the University of Pennsylvania for study under the famous Dr. Edward Drinker Cope, but opportunities to lecture and write for publication led Warren away from class work.

The Ghost Dance and Wounded Knee

A contract to write for a national magazine about the "Ghost Dance" phenomenon on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation put Moorehead on the scene for the critical weeks leading up to what is now known as the Wounded Knee Massacre of Dec. 29, 1890. Moorehead was not present, though his camera was apparently used by journalists who were still on the scene to record the horrific aftermath; Gen. John Rutter Brooke ordered Moorehead off the reservation under armed military escort on Dec. 28, according to Moorehead's journal because he was the only reporter present who spoke some of the language and was permitted to stay overnight with the Sioux in their encampments.

1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago

After a frustrating period trying to influence legislators to give justice to the Sioux and publish his account of events leading up to the massacre, Moorehead returned to Ohio and found a position developing the state display for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition (Chicago World's Fair), which led him to work with Frederic Ward Putnam, the Harvard professor who began the academic field of archaeology in the United States.

Some of the field work Moorehead did for Putnam resulted in the Hopewell culture "type site" near Chillicothe, Ohio, setting the parameters for the study of American Indian moundbuilders of the Ohio River valley around 2000 years ago. Work that actually went back to his high school days at Fort Ancient, just up the Little Miami River from his grandfather's King's Mills, also went into the World's Fair display, became a published volume for Moorehead, and caught the attention of the organizers of the Ohio Historical & Archaeological Society (now the Ohio Historical Society) just begun in 1885. Efforts to have Fort Ancient purchased and cared for by the state were spurred by Moorehead's publications on that site and other Ohio cultural marvels.

Curator of Archaeology

When the 1893 WCE ended, and a hoped for faculty position with the new college on the site (soon to be the University of Chicago) did not work out quickly, Moorehead accepted the position as what would be the first curator of archaeology for the OAHS. With the support of President Orton of The Ohio State University, a museum was established in what is now Orton Hall on the OSU Oval, and Moorehead was made a professor of archaeology at OSU, the only part of his work that was paid. OAHS, with little money from the state and sites already to manage (Fort Ancient, and Serpent Mound which had been purchased by Dr. Putnam with money raised at society teas in Newport, RI, but now a local obligation to manage), encouraged Moorehead to pay for his travel and speaking and research by selling duplicate artifacts. This process would today not only be discouraged but is now both unethical and illegal; the 1890's found it unremarkable.

With the aunts refusing to release any money for "that dirty work," Moorehead launched into an ambitious plan to create an atlas of Ohio mounds and earthworks, which he saw eroding and destroyed wherever he went across the Midwest, and even in forays into the American southwest, becoming one of the first surveyors of Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde. His network of collectors literally saved his life after 1898.

Illness and Recovery

Tuberculosis was nearly always fatal in Moorehead's day, and when he was clearly diagnosed with the disease, a second trip to the desert southwest became part of what turned into a permanent leave from OAHS. (His assistant, William Mills, completed what is now known as the Mills Atlas of 1904, but Moorehead laid out the majority of the material that is in the volume.) Finding no relief in the southwest, he returned to meet with Robert Singleton Peabody in Philadelphia, a wealthy descendant of George Peabody, trader and philanthrophist, who collected pottery and baskets from Indian cultures throughout the New World.

Peabody, seeing how ill Moorehead had become, generously offered a season of treatment at Saranac Lake, New York, the famous tuberculosis sanitarium where just a few years earlier Robert Louis Stevenson had sought relief. The season turned into two years, and from blood loss and anemia Moorehead's wife Evelyn Ludwig (of Circleville, Ohio) and their son Ludwig King Moorehead were told repeatedly to prepare for Warren's death.

Rebirth

With the dawn of a new century, Warren King Moorehead began almost literally a new life in 1901. Moorehead was based at the Phillips Academy, Andover, MA, from 1901-1938. He and Evelyn had a second son, Singleton Peabody Moorehead, who would become a key architect with the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and is buried on the grounds of Bruton Parish Church there. With Peabody's influence and money, a museum and program was established at Phillips Andover Academy, with the dedication program including a fellowship from the Peabody-established Victoria Institute and the award of an honorary doctorate from Dartmouth College (also a recipient of significant Peabody largesse). He was also Curator of the Museum of Ohio State University (1894-1897), worked at archaeological sites along the Ohio River, and at Chaco Canyon. As head of the Peabody Institute of Andover in Andover, Massachusetts, Moorehead launched into a program of research and publication that went on to include the Red Ocher Culture of the Atlantic coast, Etowah Indian Mounds in Georgia, and Cahokia Mounds in Illinois.

=Cahokia & Illinois=Moorehead worked at the Cahokia site between 1921-1927. Cahokia is now a UNESCO World Heritage site. He was instrumental in getting the State of Illinois to buy a portion of the Cahokia site in order to create a state park. From 1927 to 1939 he worked on sites in the Illinois River Valley. Major collections from Cahokia are at the Illinois State Museum and the University of Illinois ( [http://www.itarp.uiuc.edu] ).

The Spirit of Wounded Knee

He was named by President Theodore Roosevelt a member of the board of commissioners for the Bureau of Indian Affairs with the Department of Interior in 1909, and his work on behalf of Indian Land Claims, exposing fraudulent Indian agents, and seeking better health care on reservations probably made many Washington bureaucrats feel the same way Gen. Brooke did in 1890. After many attempts to remove him and silence the commission, especially after his leadership of the "White Earth Indian Reservation" hearings on injustices following the Dawes Act, the Depression was used as pretext to dissolve the commission in 1933, after almost 25 years of service by Moorehead.

Death and Legacy

With many honors and published volumes to his credit, and a thriving and vital field of research and informed speculation well established, Moorehead died in 1939 and was buried near his parents, his grandfather, and his aunts in Xenia; the family home is now the heart of the Greene County Historical Society, where portraits of father William and grandfather Joseph are on prominent display. Little is known there, however, about Warren; their papers include a reminiscence from a contemporary on Moorehead's death calling him, from their childhood together, "a born archaeologist."

High compliment indeed, when at his birth in 1866 the title archaeologist didn't even exist!

Sources

*Exploration of the Etowah Site, republished by University Press of Florida 2000 ISBN 978-0-8130-1793-8
*unpublished: 96 boxes of archival material at the Ohio Historical Society
* Moorehead, Warren K. The Cahokia Mounds, edited by John E. Kelly and republished by the University of Alabama Press, 2000 ISBN 0-8173-1010-X

External links

http://www.usm.maine.edu/gany/webaa/moorhd2.jpg-- Moorehead portrait at R.S. Peabody Foundation, Andover, MA

[http://www.texasbeyondhistory.net/villagers/buriedcity/images/moorehead3.html Villagers ] at www.texasbeyondhistory.net -- Warren K. Moorehead