Garrick Mallery

Born in Pennsylvania in 1831, he studied at Yale and entered the legal profession before serving in the Union Army during the Civil War. He remained in the military afterward and eventually rose to the rank of brevet colonel.

Alongside his army career, he developed a deep interest in Indigenous languages and symbolic systems. He became especially known for his research on Native American sign language and pictographs, and he later worked with the Bureau of American Ethnology at the Smithsonian, where his studies reached a wider scholarly audience.

His best-known writings include major works on picture-writing and gesture-sign language among Indigenous peoples of North America. Although written in the framework of 19th-century anthropology, his publications remain an important part of the history of ethnology and the study of human communication.