which became his first commercial success in 1909. This was aided by performances of these songs by noted soprano Lillian Nordica, who was on a concert tour. In the summer of 1909 he went to Nebraska to study the music and traditional instruments of the Omaha and Winnebago tribes. He lived with the people on their reservations, learning to play their instruments. During his trip to the West, he met Francis La Flesche, an Omaha ethnologist who was working with the Smithsonian Institution on studies of the Omaha and Osage peoples. Cadman assisted him in making recordings on wax cylinders of traditional songs. These works are now held by the Library of Congress, and some 60 songs are available online. Cadman drew from La Flesche's recordings, and he was also interested in his stories collected from these peoples. They began work that year on an opera; Cadman had already started to pull melodies from three printed collections of Omaha and Pawnee music published by ethnologist Alice Cunningham Fletcher, who also was with the Smithsonian. The songs were transcribed or harmonized by others. Cadman and Eberhart worked closely with La Flesche by mail, and he continued to provide Cadman with Omaha melodies for the opera. They were not permitted to use melodies which La Flesche had collected for an as yet unpublished report for the Smithsonian. Together with librettist Nelle Richmond Eberhart, Cadman and La Flesche worked together for about three more years to create an opera based on Omaha stories and music. Cadman made occasional Indian Music tours to raise money for the project. He moved to Denver in 1911. Cadman completed the music for Da O Ma (1912) and sought a venue for it, but it was never produced or published. It was rejected by the Boston Opera Company, the White-Smith Music Publishing Company, which had published numerous songs by Cadman; and the Metropolitan Opera. In the course of their work, the team had changed the opera from an Omaha to Sioux (Lakota/Dakota) setting. Cadman did gain some distribution for this music: selections from the opera were published by White-Smith in 1917 as a piano suite, and by Boosey in 1920 as an orchestral suite. In 1915 Cadman was named a national honorary member of Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia music fraternity. Cadman and Eberhart began another project with La Flesche, but he withdrew because of differences. They collaborated with