IN July 1928, Pliny Goddard was at the summer home he and
Gladys Reichard had recently established, when he began vomiting
violently. Before the tests ordered by Boas's physician son could be
carried out, Goddard was dead, of an undiagnosed cancer of the
stomach. Parsons, who was summering in Maine, wrote immedi-
ately to Gladys suggesting a field trip. As she wrote to Boas, "A
new scene is an incredible help in distress of the spirit. . . . Time
was when I wanted to get away from obsessing associations, and I
thought she might feel that way." Two years later, when Mrs. Boas
was killed in an accident, Parsons made the same suggestion, urging
Boas to join her in Mexico. Deciding instead to "suffer in harness,"
Boas wrote affectionately to Parsons, "We each have our own way
of meeting fate. . . . You have met fate bravely your way and so
shall I." ¹

Parsons sought the solace of fieldwork herself in 1928 after the
failure of her attempt at a loose but intimate companionship with
Robert Herrick. By February 1929 she was in Mexico, striking out
boldly in a new setting. But her turn to Mexico was not as quixotic
or as personally motivated as it appears. During her visits to the
Rio Grande pueblos and Taos in 1925 and 1927, she had been
struck by the mixture of mimetic animal dances, Plains ceremonial,
and burlesque of Christian practices that characterized Pueblo danc-
ing during the Christmas season. Part of Parsons's intense excite-
ment in Majorca in the 1928 spring--and no doubt one of the
reasons Herrick felt neglected and de trop--was her discovery that
Mexico was the central link in a chain that led from Majorca, where
the religious dancing reminded her vividly of the Pueblo kachina
cult, to the American Southwest. Examining the records of the San
Francisco monastery at Palma, she found that Majorca supplied
many of the early Franciscan missionaries to Mexico. The pioneer-
ing Antonio Llinás came from the Majorcan town of Artá, and

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