Excerpt from Anthropological Papers American the of Natural History, Social Organization and Ritualistic of the Blackfoot Indians, Blackfoot, Vol. 7

David C. Duvall died at his home in Browning, Montana, July 10, 1911. He was thirty-three years old. His mother was a Piegan, his father a Canadian-French fur trade employe at Ft. Benton. He was educated at Fort Hall Indian School and returned to the Reservation at Browning, where he maintained a blacksmith shop.

The writer first met him in 1903 while collecting among his people. Later, he engaged him as interpreter. Almost from the start he took an unusual interest in the work. He was of an investigating turn of mind and possessed of considerable linguistic ability. On his own initiative he set out to master the more obscure and less used parts of his mother tongue, having, as he often said, formed an ambition to become its most accurate translator into English. As time went on, he began to assist in collecting narratives and statements from the older people. Here his interest and skill grew so that during the last year of his life he contributed several hundred pages of manuscript. These papers have furnished a considerable part of the data on the Blackfoot so far published by this Museum and offer material for several additional studies. As they by no means exhaust the field his untimely death is a distinct loss.

To this work Mr. Duvall brought no ethnological theories, his whole concern being to render faithfully into English as complete information on the subjects assigned as could be found among the best informed Indians. Not being in any sense an adherent of Blackfoot religion, he looked upon all beliefs and ceremonies as curious and interesting phenomena worthy of sympathetic investigation.

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