PREFATORY NOTE

JEREMIAH CURTIN earned his Bachelor of Arts degree at Harvard College in 1863, having been a member of the final class to study their required mathematics under my instruction as Assistant Professor. I found young Curtin's personal appearance and his way of thinking to be unusual and interesting. He was a proficient scholar generally, possessing an extraordinary capacity for learning languages. In his unpublished autobiography, he notes that seven and a half months before he entered Harvard, he did not know a single word of Latin or Greek, yet he passed his entrance examination with more knowledge of each language than was required. By the time of his death in 1906, he knew more than sixty languages and dialects and spoke every European language, as well as several Asian languages, fluently. He served as Secretary of the United States Legation in Russia from 1864 to 1870, during which time he served as acting consul-general for one year (1865–1866). He was affiliated with the Bureau of Ethnology at the Smithsonian Institution from 1883 to 1891 and was later employed by the Bureau periodically for special projects.

In Siberia, during the journey described in this volume, he studied the Buriat language with a Buriat speaker who knew Russian. As difficult as it was to...