Jacob Piatt Dunn - Author and Ethnographer

Author and Ethnographer

Following the publications of Massacres of the Mountains and Indiana: A Redemption from Slavery, Dunn continued to research and write about other state and local history topics. While he remained a part-time historian, Dunn wrote for and edited several Indiana Historical Society publications and contributed articles to other scholarly journals. In The Word Hoosier, published in 1907, Dunn detailed his extensive research into the origin of the word as a term for citizens of Indiana. He also wrote biographical material for publications such as Men of Progress: Indiana, published in 1899, and Memorial and Genealogical Record of Representative Citizens of Indiana, published in 1912.

Dunn's career as a newspaper journalist, his primary source of income, gave him the opportunity to write about state and local politics. As a political writer for the Democratic State Central Committee, Dunn wrote Seven Percent Off: What the Democratic Party Demands from the Protection Monopolists in 1888. Dunn also contributed articles to the Indianapolis Sentinel, Indianapolis News, Indianapolis Star, and the Indianapolis Times. Dunn used his "considerable writing skills" to support Indiana's Democratic party politics.

Dunn's two-volume book, Greater Indianapolis: The History, the Industries, the Institutions, and the People of a City of Homes, published In 1910, is considered to be his greatest work. It remains a valuable resource for those interested in the city’s development. While the first volume is an "intelligently written, well-researched" local history, the second volume consists of "standard biographies of notable Indianapolis residents. Greater Indianapolis, along with his five-volume Indiana and Indianans: A History of Aboriginal and Territorial Indiana and the Century of Statehood, published in 1919, are still considered "indispensable sources" for studying Indiana history.

In addition to the history of Indiana, Dunn remained interested in Native American history. From his time in Colorado, Dunn continued to collect information on American Indians. His research on tribes in Indiana first appeared in articles for the Indianapolis News and was later published in a book, True Indiana Stories, in 1908. In addition, Dunn was passionate about preservation of Native American languages, especially Potawatomi, Shawnee, and Miami. In his other notable twentieth-century work, the compilation of a Miami-English filecard dictionary of the Miami-Illinois language, commissioned by the Bureau of American Ethnology, Dunn worked with several different speakers of the language in Indiana and Oklahoma. Three sections of the dictionary were completed before the bureau ended its support of the project, but Dunn continued work on the manuscript of the Miami dictionary, which is part of the Indiana State Library's collections and remains a "valuable resource" for researchers.

In 1916 Dunn tried to establish a national Society for the Preservation of Indian Languages, but his efforts were unsuccessful. Even though this effort failed, he continued to write about Indiana's Native American heritage. After the National Research Council, Division of Anthropology and Psychology, encouraged efforts to conduct archaeological surveys in Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, and Missouri, Dunn served on an Indiana committee that urged the Indiana General Assembly to establish a research project under the direction of the Indiana Conservation Commission (known today as the Indiana Department of Natural Resources).