ABSTRACT
The United States in the nineteenth century produced a lively and influential body of such descriptive studies of cultures and institutions, carried out by persons with strikingly varied backgrounds and purposes. One of the central and enduring questions of anthropology was born from this work, indeed largely and unconsciously from the pages of a single rather unprepossessing and fairly dry report on the Omaha Indians of Nebraska. Anthropologists were content for a time to let the names "Crow" and "Omaha," and the associated social systems, stand for types of societies. The Crow and the Omaha both belong to the Siouan family. They differ in that the Crow are matrilineal and the Omaha are patrilineal. Ironically, James Owen Dorsey's rather deadpan reiteration of disagreements among informants allows us a century later to open up the ethnographies and see mid- to late-nineteenth century Omaha life, as it were, three di-mensionally.
