ge is in the
large number of guttural and interrupted sounds which are not helped
by external motions of the mouth and lips in articulation, and the
light gives little advantage to its comprehension so far as concerns
the vocal apparatus, which, in many languages, can be seen as well
as heard, as is proved by the modern deaf-mute practice of artificial
speech. The corresponding story that no white man ever learned Arapaho
is also false. A member of Fremont's party so long ago as 1842 spoke
the language. Burton in the same connection gives a story "of a
man who, being sent among the Cheyennes to qualify himself for
interpreting, returned in a week and proved his competency; all he
did, however, was to go through the usual pantomime with a running
accompaniment of grunts." And he might as well have omitted the
grunts, for he obviously only used sign language. Lieutenant Abert, in
1846-'47, made much more sensible remarks from his actual observation
than Captain Burton repeated at second-hand from a Mormon met by
him at Salt Lake. He said: "Some persons think that it [the Cheyenne
language] would be incomplete without gesture, because the Indians use
gestures constantly. But I have been assured that the language is in
itself capable of bodying forth any idea to which one may wish to give
utterance."

In fact, individuals of those American tribes specially instanced in
these reports as unable to converse without gesture, often, in their
domestic _abandon_, wrap themselves up in robes or blankets with only
breathing holes before the nose, so that no part of the body is seen,
and chatter away for hours, telling long stories. If in daylight
they thus voluntarily deprive themselves of the possibility of making
signs, it is clear that their preference for talks around the fire at
night is explicable by very natural reasons wholly distinct from the
one attributed. The inference, once carelessly made from the free use
of gesture by some of the Shoshonian stock, that their tongue was too
meager for use without signs, is refuted by the now ascertained fact
that their vocabulary is remarkably copious and their parts of speech
better differentiated than those of many people on whom no such
stigma has been affixed. The proof of this was seen in the writer's
experience, when Ouray, the head chief of the Utes, was at Washington,
in the early part of 1880, and after an interview with the Secretary
of the Interior made report of it to the