Pictographs of the North American Indians. A preliminary paper: Fourth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1882-83, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1886, pages 3-256Mallery, Garrick
History
Pictographs of the North American Indians. A preliminary paper: Fourth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1882-83, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1886, pages 3-256
Mallery, Garrick
Haida Indians; Picture-writing, Indian; Tattooing
No. III. Crow Indians stole two hundred horses from the Minneconjou
Dakotas near Black Hills.
Interpreter A. Lavary says: Brulés were at the headwaters of White
River, about 75 miles from Fort Laramie, Wyoming. The Dakotas surprised
the Crows in 1849, killed ten, and took one prisoner, because he was
a man dressed in woman’s clothes, and next winter the Crows stole six
hundred horses from the Brulés. See page 142.
1850-’51.--No. I. Cow with old woman in her belly. Cloven hoof not
shown.
No. II. The character is a distinct drawing of a buffalo containing
a human figure. Clément translated that “a buffalo cow was killed in
that year, and an old woman found in her belly”; also that all the
Indians believed this. Good-Wood, examined through another interpreter,
could or would give no explanation, except that it was “about their
religion.” At first the writer suspected that the medicine men
had manufactured some pretended portent out of a fœtus taken from
a real cow, but the Dakotas have long believed in the appearance
from time to time of a monstrous animal that swallows human beings.
This superstition was perhaps suggested by the bones of mastodons,
often found in the territory of those Indians; and the buffalo being
the largest living animal known to them, its name was given to the
legendary monster, in which nomenclature they were not wholly wrong,
as the horns of the fossil _Bison latifrons_ are 10 feet in length.
The medicine men, perhaps, announced, in 1850, that a squaw who had
disappeared was swallowed by the mammoth, which was then on its
periodical visit, and must be propitiated.
No. III. A Minneconjou Dakota, having killed a buffalo cow, found an
old woman inside of her.
Memorandum from interpreter: A small party of Dakotas, two or three
young men, returning unsuccessful from a buffalo hunt, told this story,
and it is implicitly believed by the Dakotas.
Major Bush suggests that perhaps some old squaw left to die sought the
carcass of a buffalo for shelter and then died. He has known that to
occur.
[Illustration:
BUREAU OF ETHNOLOGY FOURTH ANNUAL REPORT PL. XXVI
1851-’52.
1852-’53.
1853-’54.
THE DAKOTA WINTER COUNTS.]
1851-’52.--No. I. Peace made with the Crows.
No. II. Peace with the Crows. Two Indians, with differing arrangement
of hair, showing two tribes, are exchanging pipes for a peace-smoke.
No. III. Dakotas made peace with the Crow Indians. It was, as usual,
broken immediately.
The treaty of Fort Laramie was in 1851.
1852-’53.--No. I. A Crow chief, Flat-Head, comes into the tipi of a
Dakota chief, where a council was assembled, and forces them to smoke
the pipe of peace. This was a daring act, for he was in danger of
immediate death if he failed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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