Why was wampum good money in its time? The supply was limited. It took a day to make four or five beads. It was in itself a thing of value to the Indian for ornament. It was easily carried about from place to place. It was practically indestructible. It was always alike. It was divisible. The value attached to it did not vary. It was not easily counterfeited. So it was that it became the money of the colonists; a legal tender in Massachusetts and the tool of the primitive commerce of this continent. The Puritan took it for firewater and gave it back for furs. Long Island was the great mint for this pastoral coinage. It was called the "Mine of the New Netherlands." The Indian walked the beach at Rockaway, dug his toes in the sand, turned up a clam, and after swallowing the contents carried the shells to the mint. Gold and silver at the mouth of a mine obtain their chief value from the labor it takes to get the metals; wampum was the refinement by labor of a money substance free to all. The redemption of wampum was perfect. To the Indians it was a seal to treaties, an amulet in danger, an affidavit, small change, a savings' bank, a wedding ring and a dress suit. To this day the belt of wampum is the storehouse of Indian treasure. In the Six Nations, when a big chief made an assertion in council, he laid down a belt of wampum, as though to say, "Money talks." The Iroquois sent a belt of it to the King of England when they asked his protection. William Penn got a strip when he made his treaty. The Indians braided rude pictures into it, which recorded great events. They talked their ideas into it, as we do into a phonograph. They sent messages in it. White beads between a row of dark ones represented a path of peace, as though to say: "Big chief no longer got Congress on his hands." A string of dark beads was a message of war or of the death of a chief, and a string of white beads rolled in mud was equivalent to saying that there was crape on the door of Tammany Hall. So you see that it was a combined post-office, telegraph, telephone, phonograph and newspaper. The Iroquois had a keeper of wampum--a sort of secretary of the treasury without the task of keeping nine different kinds of money on a parity. This old Indian financier had simple and correct principles. No one could persuade him to issue birch-bark promises to pay and delude himself with the belief that he could thus create money. He certainly would have called them a debt, and would have paid them off as fast as he could. Nor can we imagine him trying to sustain the value of the white wampum after the Puritans started in to make it out of oyster shells by machinery. Nor would he have bought it, not needing it, and have issued against it his promises to pay in good wampum as fast and as often as they were presented.