In the 1970s, anthropologist Lowell Bean made a startling discovery.
He was digging through the archives of a fellow anthropologist named John Peabody Harrington, a legend in the field, who made a career out of capturing linguistic records in Indigenous communities. Buried deep in Harrington’s files, Bean came across a 20-page report on the traditions and customs of the Chemehuevi Tribe in Arizona.
The report was credited to John Peabody Harrington and Carobeth Harrington — which confused Bean. He’d never heard of Carobeth, who had apparently helped gather ethnographic materials on a tribe that few other anthropologists had researched.
John Peabody Harrington had been dead for a few years, so Bean sent a team in search of Carobeth. They found her in an apartment in Los Angeles with a Chemehuevi woman — who turned out to be Carobeth’s daughter. Carobeth was 71 years old and had been living in obscurity for decades. But she had quite a story to tell.
Writer Denise Hamilton recently told that story in a piece for the journal Alta. The Show spoke with Hamilton about this enigmatic woman who changed the face of anthropology.
Full conversation
DENISE HAMILTON: She was ... from a very progressive kind of liberal family, well traveled in Mexico and throughout the U.S. Her father was a newspaper publisher. She had already had a child out of wedlock at 17, and her parents were like, "We'll take care of the child. You go get an education." And so it was not a very usual, family for a 100 years ago.
So, when she was taking, she was taking either a linguistics class or a history class, and she met this professor, John Peabody Harrington. And they started up, you know, seeing each other. I think she was 19, and he was probably in his 30s. She was very smart, she was very good with languages, she was very sharp. And she really took to this, this kind of research. So, they decided to get married.
And they had embarked on something like 10 years of ethnographic research. And he taught her how to do field work, and they basically went from one Indian village to the next. And some of these were already very impoverished, dying, very few native speakers. And they went around and collected linguistic information about these Indian groups and tribes.
SAM DINGMAN: So this period where she traveling around with Harrington is sort of remarkable, right, because they're living under extremely austere conditions. She is training to do fieldwork in his very particular style. And then at some point she becomes pregnant with his child, and that's where things take a bit of a turn, right?
HAMILTON: Yes, even though he had a stipend from the Smithsonian or the federal government or somewhere to do this research, they didn't have any money. And so here she's 19, and she takes off, and they're living in these huts in these Indian villages. And he would take off for months at a time and leave her behind, and she would run out of food, she'd be sick. If not for the tribal members of these villages where she was staying, she would have died.
And so she was pregnant. And when he found out that she was pregnant, he wanted her to have the baby in the in the village, because he wanted to observe all the, you know, childbirth rituals and religious rituals. And she put her foot down on this. I mean, she was only 19. She was a teenager.
DINGMAN: So just to, just to be clear ... he wanted her to make the birth of their child part of his ongoing research project.
HAMILTON: Absolutely correct, yes. She went home and had the baby. So now she had two children ... she couldn't bring the baby back with her to do the research. So now she leaves a second child at home with the grandparents and goes back to the villages and continues her ethnographic work.
DINGMAN: I would have to imagine, Denise, that as much intellectual stimulation as she was getting out of this, she was also married to this person who is, you know, taking off for weeks at a time and leaving her alone. It it doesn't sound like much of a relationship.
HAMILTON: No, she was a very social person. She wanted love, she wanted affection, she wanted intimacy. And she was getting none of that, and she was slowly realizing that. And then, he also did not want a second pregnancy because that would have gotten in the way of her being able to continue researching for him. So he decided, we're not gonna have regular sex anymore. We're gonna have "unnatural sex." Which she wrote about in her book, "Encounters with an Angry God." And she said that this was not pleasant for her, you know. She wasn't happy with this at all.
So this is the the setting by which — I think we're in the early 1920s by now.
DINGMAN: Yes, I think it's, it's 1923, when in the midst of all this, Harrington sends her here to Arizona on an ethnographic assignment, and that really changes the course of her life.
HAMILTON: Yes, the anthropology community at that time, when they found somebody to interview who would help give them information about the tribe and the customs and the linguistics, they called them "informants." So, Harrington had heard about this informant named George Laird. And so he sent his wife to Arizona to the Chemehuevi community there to do her interviews.
So he was a blacksmith, and he was in his mid-40s, that he was very willing to talk to her in a way that many of the Native Americans of the time were very suspicious ... And rightfully so of these, you know, white academics coming in and just kind of grilling them. So, she developed this kind of warm, friendly relationship with George Laird, and at some point it turned romantic. But she —
DINGMAN: This is a time, right, when there were there were miscegenation laws on the books and racism was was quite rampant.
HAMILTON: That's absolutely correct — and especially an educated young white woman from a "good family." This upended the entire social order, but Carobeth was her own woman. And I think that George Laird offered her the affection and the respect that she wasn't getting at home at all. So, she told her husband, "I am leaving you for your informant."
They, ended up getting married. They had four children. They lived in incredible poverty. You know, he did odd jobs and he helped people in the neighborhood. And, at night, after they put their children to bed, they would sit in the kitchen, and she would be at her rickety little manual typewriter. And they would talk. And she would ask him questions, and she would write down the answers. And because she had been trained by one of the most eminent anthropologists in the country — and she was a smart young lady — she knew exactly what kind of questions to ask and what kind of follow-up questions. And she wrote it all down.
Fast forward to 1941, George is driving some kind of a tractor. And the tractor collapses on top of him ... and he dies.
DINGMAN: This must have left Carobeth in a very difficult circumstance.
HAMILTON: Yes, she had no husband. She had no help. She's got 4 kids. And she thought, ... "We've been doing this research at night. I've got all this data." She reconnected with her ex-husband and said," I'm going to send you this 20 pages, and maybe you can help me get it published."
So, what happens is Harrington receives it and probably reads it and thinks that it's pretty good. So, he slaps his own name on his ex-wife's manuscript. ... So that now the authors are Harrington and Carobeth Harrington — when she's really the one who's, who's written it. And he shoves it deep into his notes. There it languishes for decades until Lowell Bean unearths it.
DINGMAN: So she is published, and then, as you alluded to earlier, she also ends up publishing this memoir, "Encounter with an Angry God."
HAMILTON: Yes, that was her whole life story about, you know, her life with Harrington and then leaving him for George Laird and their poverty, but their research. And they they had so much love and respect for each other. And it's really that chronicle of a very avant-garde woman who made her own way at a time when women found it very hard to do so. She was just irrepressible.
DINGMAN: Well, Denise Hamilton is a crime novelist, an award winning journalist, and wrote this wonderful piece for Alta called "Unearthing a Buried Treasure." The treasure in question, the anthropologist Carobeth Laird. Denise, thank you so much.
HAMILTON: Thank you for having me.
