`

Nebraska Authors

Melvin R. Gilmore

AKA: Dr. Melvin Randolph Gilmore

Born 1868-03-11 Valley, NE (USA)

Died ≈ 1940-07-25
Lincoln, NE (USA)

Gilmore 's book Uses of Plants by the Indians of the Missouri River Region, originally published in the Thirty-Third Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology in 1919, is considered one of the classics of ethnobotany. Gilmore is one of the first American ethnobotanists, and was among the first white men to respect the environmental knowledge of Native Americans and to understand how intricately Native American Culture was connected to environmental knowledge and practice. Gilmore originally intended to be a Christian missionary and graduated from Cotner University in the town of Bethany, Nebraska (now a Lincoln neighborhood), in 1904-5. He then pursued graduate work at the University of Nebraska under the botanist Charles Bessey. This brought him into a circle that included Frederic Clements and Roscoe Pound, a circle that pioneered the idea of ecology in the biological sciences. Gilmore also studied anthropological field technique with Addison Sheldon of the State Museum. He was to begin his research at a time when there were still elderly Native American informants who knew the old names, uses, and symbolic meanings attached to native plants.

Gilmore had a distinguished career that took him from the Nebraska State Historical Society to the State Historical Society of North Dakota, then to the Heye Foundation's Museum of the American Indian (then in New York, but now considered the founding collection of the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington) and finally to the position of curator of Anthropology at the University of Michigan.

Nebraska folklorist Roger Welsch wrote the introduction to the Minnesota Historical Society's edition (1987) of Gilmore's Prairie Smoke, a 1929 collection of traditional Plains Indians stories that illustrate their ties to the land.

dsc

Places Lived

Lincoln, NE
North Dakota
New York, NY
Ann Arbor, MI

Author Of

  • Nonfiction

Keywords

Anthropology; Ethnology; Botany; Ethnobotany; Great Plains; Folklore; Native Americans

Education

Bachelor of Arts Degree, 1905, Cotner College, Bethany, NE
Ph.D. in Botany, 1914, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, NE

Occupation

Curator of Ethnology

Places Worked

Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan
Nebraska State Historical Society, Lincoln, NE
State Historical Society of North Dakota
Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation

Honors

Nebraska 150 Books honor for Uses of Plants by the Indians of the Missouri River Region, 2017

Associations

Charles Bessey
Frederic E. Clements
Addison Sheldon

Bibliography

Uses of Plants By the Indians of the Missouri River Region. 1914.
Prairie Smoke. 1929.

We appreciate corrections and additions to our information about authors, but please read the following guidelines and caveats carefully.

  • The Nebraska Authors database is based on publicly available sources. Unless you are the author contacting us in person, it helps us if you cite the source or sources of your information. We cannot include unsourced information in the database.
  • We may be appreciative of information we choose not to include in the publicly available database.
  • To include an image on an author profile, please send jpg attachment to nebraskaauthors@lincoln.ne.gov. A photo-release agreement is required before the image will be published on this site.
  • Because of the way we are staffed, expect corrections or additions to take time, sometimes up to three months.
  • While we initially included some actual links to external URLs in the database, we will in the future no longer provide functioning links. We will instead record the presence of specific external materials in language that we hope will help intelligent users find it themselves. Web rot, in which actual materials remain online but undergo changes in their URLs, is too demanding in terms of staff time for us to hope to keep external links current.

Please copy, fill out the form below, and email it to heritage@lincoln.ne.gov to suggest a change.

/
Melvin R. Gilmore
melvin-r-gilmore

Do you have corrections for the above information or other information to add?:

(e.g. Author is buried in Fremont, not in David City / Also wrote for the Daily Nebraskan during her time as a student)