civilization among the Indians of North America in the quarter-century previous, and in 1886 visited the natives of Alaska and the Aleutian Islands on a mission from the commissioner of education. In 1887 she was appointed United States special agent in the allotment of lands among the Winnebago and the Nez Perce under the Dawes Act. She was made assistant in ethnology at the Peabody Museum in 1882, and in 1891 received the Thaw fellowship, which was created for her. Active in professional societies, she was elected president of the Anthropological Society of Washington and in 1905 as the first woman president of the American Folklore Society. She also served as vice-president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and was a longtime member of the Literary Society of Washington. Working through the Women's National Indian Association, Fletcher introduced a system of making small loans to Indians, wherewith they might buy land and houses. She also helped secure a loan for Susan LaFlesche, an Omaha woman, to enable her studies at medical school. Graduating at the top of her class, LaFlesche became the first Native American woman doctor in the United States. Later Fletcher helped write, lobbied for and helped administer the Dawes Act of 1887, which broke up reservations and distributed communal land in allotments for individual household ownership of land parcels. In 1888, Fletcher published Indian Education and Civilization, a special report of the Bureau of Education. She was a pioneer in the study of American Indian music, a field of research inaugurated by a paper she gave in 1893 before the Chicago Anthropological Conference. In 1898 at the Congress of Musicians held in Omaha during the Trans-Mississippi Exposition, she read several essays upon the songs of the North American Indians. A number of Omaha Indians sang their native melodies. Out of this grew her Indian Story and Song from North America (1900), exploring a stage of development antecedent to that in which culture music appeared. Fletcher worked with Frederic Ward Putnam in his research on Serpents Mound in Ohio and assisted in the efforts to raise funds to purchase the site in 1886. The site was donated to the Ohio Archaeological and Historical Society in 1900 and is a National Historic Landmark. In 1930, Margaret Mead started work with the Omaha, and decided to concentrate on the modern aspects of the tribe, because of the