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STEPHEN SMITH: To most of us, the old cylinders might not seem like much, just brown wax tubes in some storage room at the Library of Congress. The recordings sound rather like a vintage photograph looks-- faded, distant, two dimensional.

[HUMMING]

But just like an old picture, there are stories to be found in the cylinders. You have to dig past the surface noise, past the blur of forgotten history. Lives are carved in the wax, lives of people with names like Yellow Wing chased by bears and Red Fox.

FRANCES DENSMORE: The songs I bring you are the songs of yesterday. The winds of the prairie and the pines of the forest have heard many of them for the last time.

STEPHEN SMITH: Frances Densmore spoke these words in a speech she gave in 1899.

FRANCES DENSMORE: Yet Indian songs are not petrified specimens. They are alive with the warm red blood of human nature. Indian music is not an art in our sense of the term.

The old Indians received their songs in dreams from the bird or animal that appears in the dream. It has a purpose, such as bringing rain, calling the buffalo, or healing the sick. The Indian believes that music puts him in communication with the mysterious forces of the earth, air, and sea.

LARRY AITKEN: You look at all the accounts and all the other people that have tried to write about our people, they don't even come close to Densmore. She stands alone.

STEPHEN SMITH: Larry Aitken runs a tribal college on the Leech Lake Ojibwe Reservation in Northern Minnesota. He uses Densmore's books to teach Ojibwe culture.

LARRY AITKEN: Her books and her writings are timeless. A lot of things that she has indicated in her book, I still practice as a Native person. She wrote verbatim the issues in the times and the crafts and the charms and the beauty of our life. And she did so without trying to have it be some sort of romantic idea other than what it was.

[VOCALIZING]

STEPHEN SMITH: At the turn of the century, the US government wanted Indian culture to die off. Government schools punished Indian youngsters for speaking their native languages. On many reservations, ceremonies and dances vital to religious life were either discouraged or banned. That's why Densmore sought out the old ones, the last generation of Native people free to live the old ways.

[VOCALIZING]

In 1911, Densmore traveled to the remote Standing Rock Sioux Reservation out on the vast Dakota prairie. She wanted to record songs of the Sundance, a spectacular religious rite in which dancers pierced their flesh. The government banned the Sundance calling it a barbaric superstition. Densmore persuaded Indian elders to sing the old sacred songs into the horn of her phonograph and to show her where the last Sundance took place 30 years earlier.

FRANCES DENSMORE: One afternoon, the entire party drove across the prairie. They scanned the horizon, measuring the distance to the Missouri River and the buttes. At last, they, gave the signal for the wagons to stop and began to search.

In a short time, they found the exact spot where the ceremony was held. The scars were still on their bodies. Some of the Indians put on their war bonnets and their jackets of deerskin with the long fringes.

One old man said with trembling lips, "I was young then. My wife and children were with me. They went away many years ago. I wish I could have gone with them."

STEPHEN SMITH: When Densmore made that Dakota trip, she was already 44 years old. With her wire-rimmed spectacles and close cropped hair, she looked the stereotype of a prim schoolteacher. Her manner was often described as solemn and imperious. Thomas Vennum, an expert on Indian music at the Smithsonian admires the courage it took for a Victorian parlor musician to up and strikeout for Indian country.

THOMAS VENNUM: Here's this woman traveling around with this cumbersome recording equipment, getting in leaky birchbark canoes and crossing the middle of Red Lake to get to a village to record somebody else. It took a lot of gumption.

STEPHEN SMITH: It was especially peculiar given the era in which Frances Densmore grew up, a time when a woman's sphere was usually confined to home and family. Densmore was born in 1867 and spent her childhood in what Mark Twain called the Gilded Age. It was a time when American industry boomed, railroads spread a metal web across the West, and Indians blocked the way. Even though Densmore's father Benjamin had been wounded fighting the Sioux, Frances was raised to daydream about Indians, not despise them.

FRANCES DENSMORE: My childhood home was near the shore of the Mississippi River, and the Sioux Indians were camped on an island opposite the town. We could hear the throb of the drum when they would dance. Sometimes we could see the flickering light of the campfire.

If my mother had told me that Indians were savages, I might have been afraid to go to sleep. Instead, I was told they were people with different customs from our own. And there was no fear in my mind.

I fell asleep night after night to the throb of the Indian drum. Years passed, and I grew up in the white man's music, becoming a piano teacher. And organist. But there remained a wonder about the Indians dancing to the throb of the drum across the water.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

STEPHEN SMITH: As a young woman, Frances got the finest musical training available in Victorian America Oberlin College, Harvard University, special classes with eminent musicians. But she also read all the books she could find about Indians. Minnesota historian Nina Archabal says Densmore gave up a comfortable future as a small town musician for an uncertain career.

NINA ARCHABAL: What is there in the chemistry or the history of this woman that says, I'm not going to teach music for the rest of my life, give piano lessons, I'm going to do something different? I suspect it's like everything else. It probably didn't come from a moment of realization but from a growing interest that just began to propel her and gain momentum throughout her life, enough momentum to keep her going until she was 90 years old.

FRANCES DENSMORE: Red Wing, Minnesota, 1903 to William, Holmes Smithsonian Institution Washington DC. I wish to ascertain the qualifications for field work in connection with the Bureau of American Ethnology and if possible, to secure an appropriation for doing such work.

STEPHEN SMITH: The Smithsonian was the apex of American Anthropological research on Indians. Densmore could offer no scientific credentials and hardly any field experience.

WH HOLMES: Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Dear Madam, replying to your favor of March 30, I beg to say that we can offer you no financial assistance. Sincerely, WH Holmes.

STEPHEN SMITH: Undeterred, Densmore made several private trips to remote Sioux and Ojibwe reservations in the Midwest. She hired local guides and interpreters and copied Indian songs on paper. Then in 1907, Densmore experimented with a popular invention that might speed up her work. She wasn't the first to use this new device with Indians, but she became the most prolific.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

SPEAKER 1: This news from the St. Paul dispatch, Detroit Lakes Minnesota on July 4, 1907, the firecrackers were cracking spasmodically along the usually quiet streets here as George Big Bear in town to celebrate his foster country's independence became suddenly aware that a woman of pale face was importuning him to accompany her into a nearby phonograph store. Big Bear allowed himself to be beguiled into the store where the white woman used some more salesmanship and talked the store owner out of the loan of a phonograph. Then George Big Bear obligingly warbled an old Indian refrain or two into the horn.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

STEPHEN SMITH: Densmore wrote to Washington again. This time, the Smithsonian decided to gamble sending $350 to help her continue working with the phonograph. Thus began Densmore's 50-year collaboration with the Smithsonian.

She focused on dance music performed by men and women around a big, hide-covered drum. She made detailed studies of the Ojibwe in Minnesota and the Sioux in the Dakotas, sometimes spending months on remote reservations. Bearing the appropriate gifts of tobacco, she gathered songs, collected cultural objects, and shot photos of village life.

At Fort Yates, North Dakota, Densmore rigged up a recording studio in an old coal shed. She perched her typewriter on a bacon box and her phonograph on a packing crate. She cranked the phonograph spring by hand. Her singer looked down the throat of a specially built, galvanized horn. The soft wax cylinders threatened to melt in the broiling summer heat.

FRANCES DENSMORE: And four.

[TONE]

[NON-ENGLISH SINGING]

FRANCES DENSMORE: I sent for Red Weasel, the only Sioux living who was known to have acted as master of ceremonies at the Sundance. He came very unwillingly traveling 43 miles by stage and wagon against his wishes. He said the truths of the Sundance were very sacred to him, and he intended they should die with him.

I said, I only wanted him to tell me if I'd written down anything that was not true. Before the day was over, he gave me a great deal of most interesting information and also sang four songs. Afterwards, he said he had not sung those songs for more than 30 years and would probably never sing them again.

[NON-ENGLISH SINGING]

STEPHEN SMITH: Gripped by a collector's impulse Densmore wanted above all to get the music on wax.

THOMAS VENNUM: And she was clearly a very determined woman. And when she wanted to get something, she would push.

STEPHEN SMITH: Again, Thomas Vennum of the Smithsonian.

THOMAS VENNUM: She obviously would cajole and flatter singers to induce them to perform for her. She was recording Meckawigabau, a Lac du Flambeau singer. And you can hear right on the cylinder recording that she prefaces his first performance by saying, "This is Joe Kobe. And he has such a beautiful voice that we're going to send it all the way to Washington."

FRANCES DENSMORE: We're now going to record some songs by Mr. Joe Kobe, a very fine singer who lives in Lac du Flambeau. And he's such a fine singer, we're going to send his song to Washington. Mr. Kobe Number one.

STEPHEN SMITH: Older Indians experiencing recorded sound for the first time were often amazed to hear the song played back on the spot. One woman said, "How did it learn the song so quick? That is a hard song."

[MUSIC PLAYING]

SPEAKER 1: This news from the Minneapolis Sunday Tribune. Miss Densmore never subscribed to the belief held by some scientists and artists that one should go and live with the Indians in order to know their ways. She preserved her identity as an educated and cultured white woman. She always ate with her own people.

FRANCES DENSMORE: It is very hard to learn to draw the line to be chummy and cordial and friendly with Indians but not let them ever overstep. I never let them criticize the government nor the White race nor come across with any sob stuff about the way they had been treated.

STEPHEN SMITH: Densmore wrote that in the 1940s to a young scholar named Charles Hoffman.

CHARLES HOFFMAN: She felt superior. She was doing them a favor by recording their past. And she never considered that she was doing anything wrong. She came in, she recorded them, and that was it. $0.25 a song is what she gave them.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

STEPHEN SMITH: During the Depression, government research money grew scarce. For a number of years, Densmore essentially paid for the work herself. Even after the Depression, money was a struggle perhaps because some professional anthropologists in Washington never fully accepted her as a social scientist. Densmore suspected that her gender was an obstacle.

FRANCES DENSMORE: If I drop out, I know it will be said, that a woman cannot make good in scientific work. It is repeatedly said that I am doing a valuable work that no one else can do. If my work is all that people say it is, especially to future generations, why should I have no more compensation than a routine stenographer?

STEPHEN SMITH: Whatever problems came up, Frances persevered. She traveled from British Columbia to the deep South recording among dozens of tribes. She filled more than 3,000 cylinders with music.

Although Densmore never married, she wasn't alone. Frances and her younger sister Margaret were lifelong companions. Margaret managed the family home, drove the car on field trips, and handled much of the typing. Catherine Ullrich lived down the street from the Densmore sisters. She remembers that when Margaret died, Frances was 80 years old.

CATHERINE ULLRICH: We all thought when Margaret died that Frances would fall apart because she had never had to do anything for herself not at all. As I recall, at that point, she sold the big house, moved up into that Spartan apartment where she lived until she died, nothing in there practically excepting her work. And that was her main thing, her work.

STEPHEN SMITH: At age 87 and in frail health, Densmore got one last commission to make a field recording trip among Seminole Indians in the Florida Everglades. Shortly after her 90th birthday, Frances Densmore caught pneumonia and died. It was 1957. She was buried on a hill above her hometown of Redwing next to Margaret.

[NON-ENGLISH SINGING]

EARL BULLHEAD: [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] I'm beckoning the warriors.

SPEAKER 2: [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]

STEPHEN SMITH: Summer 1994, 80 years after Densmore worked among the Sioux at Standing Rock Reservation, singer Earl Bullhead is searching through cassette tapes of the Densmore cylinders for Lakota songs his traditional drum group might revive.

EARL BULLHEAD: Like, for instance, this comes from the Densmore collection. Those songs are on the first cassette 10,555A.

STEPHEN SMITH: Are the Densmore songs the kinds of songs one hears in the Densmore collection, do they have a place in contemporary life?

EARL BULLHEAD: Definitely, more so than we ever realize because our people cling to those things whole heartedly. What she left was kind of like a seed. And that seed now is starting to flourish amongst a lot of people my age and older and the young ones coming up because you got to remember that a lot of this was almost lost.

[NON-ENGLISH SINGING]

STEPHEN SMITH: One of the tunes Earl Bullhead found in the Library of Congress tapes was a song composed to honor Densmore herself when a Lakota elder named Red Fox adopted her as his daughter in a 1912 ceremony.

[NON-ENGLISH SINGING]

STEPHEN SMITH: Indian singers across the country are slowly finding out about Densmore's recordings. A young Ojibwe singer named Wayne Valliere looked up songs his great grandfather sang for Densmore in 1910. Valliere's ancestor was a powerful Ojibwe religious leader on the Lac Flambeau reservation in Northern Wisconsin.

WAYNE VALLIERE: And it will be in those old people when they allowed Frances Densmore to record those songs the way they figured it was that this is going to go to the great father's house in Washington. So in that way, those songs won't be lost. And those people are very, very wise because here we are 100 years later looking and finding.

STEPHEN SMITH: Valliere used Densmore's tapes to recover songs he could sing at Ojibwe religious ceremonies. He is convinced his great grandfather recorded those songs expressly for the current generation of singers in the Valliere family. The songs are sacred, the kind of thing Ojibwe people usually keep secret from outsiders, but anyone can order tape copies of the Densmore cylinders from the Library of Congress. So Valliere wants the original cylinders repatriated, given back to the tribe.

WAYNE VALLIERE: They've served their purpose. Why do we have to have them on some white man's recording? I think that it ought to be given to the appropriate people. And there's a lot of it that should have been buried with that deceased person.

There's a lot of it that should have been just taken out in the woods and let the spirits and the elements take it. That's the way we do it. And I'd like to see it come back. That would make the spirits, make our ancestors up in the sky very, very happy.

STEPHEN SMITH: Some Ojibwe elders worry that sacred medicine songs recorded by Densmore may be exploited by people with bad or misguided intentions. Ojibwe scholar Larry Aitken warns that anyone who listens to the medicine songs must be careful because powerful spirits may be angered.

LARRY AITKEN: That's meant for Indigenous ears, Indigenous hearts, Indigenous spirits alone. If non-Indians or laypeople try to interpret them, they'll come out wrong. And they ought not to try it because they put in danger their own families when they try to interpret them and misinterpret them, you see.

STEPHEN SMITH: Larry Aitken and many other Indian people I spoke with are sure that Frances Densmore herself must have been guided by the spirits. How else, they say, could she earn so much trust from Indians? How else could she collect such powerful medicine songs from so many tribes and lived to be 90 years old?

FRANCES DENSMORE: Mr. Kobe number 6.

[NON-ENGLISH SINGING]

STEPHEN SMITH: In 1905, when Frances Densmore first canoed to an Ojibwe village, many Native people still lived in wigwams. By the end of her life, Densmore sped to Indian reservations on paved highways. Her prediction that American Indian music would vanish never came true. But Indian scholars say much of Native culture did erode in the heavy pressure to join mainstream America.

Much more might be gone without Densmore's 60-year crusade. Single-minded, untiring, Frances Densmore left a legacy of rare and endangered sounds. From her childhood home on the edge of the Mississippi River, Densmore heard an Indian drum and spent a lifetime following.

[PIANO PLAYING]