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
Plates LII to LVIII represent a pictorial roster of the heads of
families, eighty-four in number, in the band or perhaps clan of Chief
Big-Road, and were obtained by Rev. S. D. Hinman at Standing Rock
Agency, Dakota, in 1883, from the United States Indian agent, Major
McLaughlin, to whom the original was submitted by Chief Big-Road when
brought to that agency and required to give an account of his followers.
[Illustration:
BUREAU OF ETHNOLOGY FOURTH ANNUAL REPORT PL. LII
AN OGALALA ROSTER--“BIG-ROAD” AND BAND]
Chief Big-Road and his people belong to the Northern Ogalala
(accurately Oglala), and were lately hostile, having been associated
with Sitting-Bull in various depredations and hostilities against both
settlers and the United States authorities. Mr. Hinman states that the
translations of the names were made by the agency interpreter, and
although not as complete as might be, are, in the whole, satisfactory.
Chief Big-Road “is a man of fifty years and upwards, and is as ignorant
and uncompromising a savage, in mind and appearance, as one could well
find at this late date.”
The drawings in the original are on a single sheet of foolscap paper,
made with black and colored pencils, and a few characters are in yellow
ocher--water-color paint. On each of the seven plates, into which
the original is here divided from the requirements of the mode of
publication, the first figure in the upper left-hand corner represents,
as stated, the chief of the sub-band, or perhaps, “family” in the
Indian sense.
On five of the plates the chief has before him a decorated pipe and
pouch, the design of each being distinct from the others. On Plates LIV
and LV the upper left hand figure does not have a pipe, which leads to
the suspicion that, contrary to the information so far received, the
whole of the figures from Nos. 11 to 45 inclusive, on Plates LIII, LIV,
and LV, constitute one band under the same chief, viz., No. 11. In that
case Nos. 23 and 36 would appear to be leaders of subordinate divisions
of that band. Each of the five chiefs has at least three transverse
bands on the cheek, with differentiation of the pattern.
[Illustration:
BUREAU OF ETHNOLOGY FOURTH ANNUAL REPORT PL. LIII
AN OGALALA ROSTER--“LOW-DOG” AND BAND]
[Illustration:
BUREAU OF ETHNOLOGY FOURTH ANNUAL REPORT PL. LIV
AN OGALALA ROSTER--“THE-BEAR-SPARES-HIM” AND BAND]
[Illustration:
BUREAU OF ETHNOLOGY FOURTH ANNUAL REPORT PL. LV
AN OGALALA ROSTER--“HAS-A-WAR-CLUB” AND BAND]
It will be noticed that each figure throughout the plates, which
carries before it a war club, is decorated with three red transverse
bands, but that of No. 30, on Plate LIV, and No. 48 on Plate LVI, have
the three bands without a war club.
The other male figures seem in some instances to have each but a single
red band; in others two bands, red and blue, but the drawing is so
indistinct as to render this uncertain.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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