In the 1900 Coleman County census, James H. Tucker, is shown born February 1857 in Texas (father born in Mississippi, birthplace of mother not given), age 43, married 24 years, editor (of local newspaper); wife, Emma C. Tucker, born July 1858 in Texas (father born in New York, mother born in Kentucky); Carobeth Tucker, daughter, born July 1894 in Texas.

In the 1910 Coleman County census, J. H. Tucker is shown as a bank director, living on Live Oak Street, next door to H. R. Starkweather.  Other neighbors on this street were Dr. S. N. Aston, Dr. E. C. Beaumont, F. M. Bowen, W. W. Moss, Frank A. Dibrell.  No other children born to them, other than Carobeth, who is shown as age 14, when the census was taken on April 15, 1910.  This census shows she attended school within the year.  She would have been in high school by this time, probably just finishing the eighth grade.  At this time, the completion of only 10 grades was required to attend college.  It is not known if she graduated from Coleman High School, but she would probably have been in the Class of 1913.

According to her obituary, Carobeth Tucker was born on July 20, 1895 in Coleman, Texas. Carobeth’s father was James Harvey Tucker, a newspaper editor, and her mother was Emma Tucker.  Carobeth had seven children between two marriages.  She had one daughter, Awona, by John P. Harrington, who she was married to from 1916 to 1923.  On August 5, 1983, in San Diego, Carobeth died of heart failure at the age of 88. 

"Carobeth Laird, a writer who didn't publish her first book until she was ''discovered'' by student researchers when she was 80 years old, has died at age 87.  Her best-selling book, ''Encounter With an Angry God: Recollections of My Life With John Peabody Harrington,'' detailed her life among the American Indians with the anthropologist.  In the book, which she wrote in 14 weeks, she told of her youth in Texas and how she moved to San Diego and studied under Mr. Harrington, becoming his lover and later his wife, running his errands and helping him compile notes from 1915 to 1921.  Eventually, she left him for George Laird, an Indian, and they had six children, including one who died.  Mr. Laird died in 1940.  Mrs. Laird died August 5 in a San Diego hospital, according to The Los Angeles Times."  (Obituary from the New York Times, August 12, 1983.)

Carobeth Laird was born in Coleman, Texas on July 20, 1895.  In 1909, at the age of 14, Carobeth traveled with her parents to Mexico, where she discovered that she had a tremendous facility for languages.  It wasn't until 1915, however, that Carobeth was introduced to linguistics.  She enrolled in a summer school linguistics course that was taught by John Peabody Harrington.  Harrington, who focused on recording the languages of the Native Americans of the western U.S., trained Carobeth.  Carobeth first met Harrington, handsome, commanding in presence, sun-tanned from the field.  For a young girl, already fascinated by scholarship, he seemed to be romantic and had a dashing personality.

In 1916 she married John Peabody Harrington, field ethnologist for the Bureau of American Ethnology, and for a number of years worked with him in the field gathering ethnologic and linguistic data on the Indians of the Southwest and California.  John Peabody Harrington was a man driven by genius and totally obsessed with the idea that time was running out for the American Indian.  Eventually he gave up all social life, believing that time wasted was at the cost of his work as field ethnologist for the Bureau of American Ethnology.  Harrington was obsessed with preserving a record of the dying Native language of the Americans that he worked at this timelessly, rarely taking any kind of rest.  He was so unwilling to take time away from his fieldwork that he left his paychecks uncashed for months at a time for fear that the Smithsonian Institution would learn where he was and recall him to Washington to spend time in the office.  For seven years (1916-1923), Carobeth was a little more than an indentured servant to her husband.  She traveled with him to wherever dispossessed Indian groups had been herded onto reservations, seeking out old men and women who remembered how life had been before the coming of the white men.

During the summer of 1919, Carobeth was sent to Arizona, where she met her future husband, George Laird, a Chemehuevi Indian.  At the Colorado River Indian Reservation, Carobeth participated and witnessed old tribal ceremonies.  After working with George Laird for four years, Carobeth divorced Harrington and married George.  For twenty years, George dictated Chemehuevi texts depicting their myths and tribal history.  At the time of George's death in 1940, Carobeth had the most complete collection of Chemehuevi myths ever recorded.

Carobeth's collection of field notes, tapes, and other memorabilia has been established at the University of California, Riverside.  A museum dedicated to Chemehuevi studies has been proposed.

Encounter with an Angry God is in one sense is a token of what is meant to be an anthropologist in the early decades of the twentieth century.  It is also a sensitive and unsparing account of that strange and legendary figure known as John Peabody Harrington.  Even more it is an exciting and compelling love story.  A love story that deals with the curious triangle that developed when Chemehuevi informant, George Laird entered the lives of Harrington and his young wife that he drove ruthlessly as he did himself.

Works by Carobeth Tucker Laird:

Laird, Carobeth - Encounter with an Angry God: Recollections of My Life with John Peabody Harrington - (Banning, Calif.: Malki Museum Press -1975.)

Laird, Carobeth - The Chemehuevis. Banning, Calif. - (Malki Museum Press, 1976.)

Laird, Carobeth - Limbo: A Memoir About life in a Nursing Home by a Survivor - (Novato, California: Chandler & Sharp, 1979)

Laird, Carobeth - Mirror and Pattern: George Laird's World of Chemehuevi Mythology - (Banning, Calif.: Malki Museum Press, 1984)

Further Readings:
J. M. Ethridge and B. Kopala, Carobeth Laird, in Contemporary Authors 1-4, 1983: 557.

Burt Folkart, "Writer, Discovered at 80, Dies at 87," Los Angeles Times, Aug. 10, 1983: 22

Johnny P. Flynn, "Mirror and Pattern: George Laird's World of Chemehuevi Mythology" (book review) in The American Indian Quarterly Summer 1989 vol. 13 no. 3 p. 298

Victor Golla, A Harrington Chronology 1907-1976, (December 2000).

Guide to the Collections of the National Anthropological Archives, Portrait of George Laird, ca.1923, (catalog information only) (December 2000).

Nikki Akins, John Peabody Harrington, 1884-1961, (December 2000).

Carobeth Tucker Laird, 1895, (December 2000).

Gacs, Ute 1989 Carobeth Tucker Laird. In Women Anthropologists: A Biographical Dictionary. Ute Gacs, et al., eds. Pp. 202-7. New York: Greenwood Press.

Perhaps the greatest charm of this absorbing book is its author's honesty. In spirited prose Carobeth Laird writes candidly of the contrast between her two marriages and of the two husbands who heard the music of such different drummers, while holding her own shortcomings up to the same penetrating light.  Lagniappe for these fascinating characterizations are the deft and entertaining sketches of cameo characters, and a rare insight for the reader into the life of an ethnologist in the early twentieth century.  Encounter With an Angry God is the story of the author's life with John Peabody Harrington, controversial linguist-ethnographer (whose lifetime data on American Indian tribes filled whole warehouses) from the time when, as an eager 19-year-old student, she met him unhappily teaching a summer linguistics class and looking, she thought romantically, "like an angry god."

Bedazzled by "a scholar, a scientist, who was also young and beautiful," she was willingly drawn into his orbit.  As his bride, for some time the romantic haze obscured the fact that, in his obsession for collecting Indian language data, he regarded any activity that took him away from his fieldwork as a waste of time, and that as well as being brilliant, he was also penurious, insensitive, and endlessly demanding.  With the perspective of many years, she writes that he had "no deliberate cruelty; neither ever a trace of empathy or compassion."  He could leave a young, fearful, eight-months pregnant wife alone in a strange Indian rancheria without money or sufficient food while a supposedly four-day trip stretched into two weeks (because on his way home he had found a man who would make metal files for his notes and he wanted to supervise the job), then wonder, when he finally returned, why his wife was upset and seemed to blame him for something.

The role of wifely helpmeet would become an increasingly thankless and monumental task.  "She would type, act as chauffeur, make contacts he wished to avoid -- do anything and everything he found boring, frightening, embarrassing, or time consuming."  Then, when she had proven her ability, he sent her unwillingly to do fieldwork on her own, and in doing so, lost her.  For on one of these expeditions, her affection for Harrington now worn threadbare, she met George Laird, a Chemehuevi Indian informant, and an extraordinary love story begins.

The author dips her pen in different ink when writing of the two men.  Of Harrington she writes with a sort of studied objectivity, a wry humor, and a determination to show fairness and no malice or resentment.  She admits that she was the wrong bride for him; that he needed "a wise, firm, and sympathetic guide -- not a youthful slave and disciple."  But when she writes of George Laird, the words glow on the page, from the description of their meeting and of his native courtesy, innate kindness and consideration to the eulogy wherein she calls him "my father, brother, lover, husband, and above all, my friend."

Those who have read Winter in Taos may notice a parallel between the marriage of Carobeth and Chemehuevi George Laird and that of Mabel Dodge and Taos Tony Luhan.  Both Indians were men of kindness, sensitivity, intelligence, and strength who made their wives feel cherished; both marriages were happy and enduring.

Because she makes the reader care about everyone in her story, there is occasionally a vagueness that is disappointing.  It would have been pleasant to know more about the Laird children, none of whom is ever named except the eldest daughter.  How many were there?  What were their names?  And just who was "Mrs. C." -- so obviously a mixed blessing in the Laird family lives?

The printing, paper, and binding of this book are most attractive; the design and layout by Don Perceval and Melanie Fisch, respectively, exotic and artistic.  Encounter With an Angry God has been a real "sleeper" in the publishing world and a deserved hit, its wide appeal bringing richly-deserved kudos to its talented and courageous autumn-flowering author.  It is a book not to be missed.

"We were by then fully into the Depression.  Hoover closed the banks, including a very insignificant one in Coleman, Texas.  My father had helped to found this bank, and in a sense it had been a more satisfactory child to him than his flesh and blood daughter.  He survived its closure by just one week, dying quite literally of a broken heart.  The night he died we were all together in the home in San Diego.  He lay on a hospital bed set up in the alcove off the living room that we called the "music room."  My mother sat beside him, holding his limp hand and sighing heavily at intervals, doing her duty to the very end of their life together.  The children were upstairs, except the three-months-old baby, who was in her basket in the dining room, where George and I lay sleepless on a quilt.  The folding doors into the living room were partially open.  Soon after midnight we heard the death rattle, then the final expiration, and then, no more....

"We purchased a lot for ten dollars in the unkempt old cemetery at Poway.  There on a day of driving November rain we buried my father under the catalpa trees.  Mother said this was appropriate, for his mother, the mother he had scarcely known, lay under the catalpa trees somewhere near Uvalde, Texas.  The gloom of the brief graveside ceremony was broken for an instant when one of the Laird children piped up, "Did we forget the bananas?"  To him, the trip to San Diego meant an opportunity to purchase bananas, not the loss of a grandfather."  (Encounter with an Angry God, by Carobeth Laird (University of New Mexico Press, 1993), page 178.)