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
“Several fallen blocks of sandstone have rubbed depressions that may
have been ground out in the sharpening of tools. There have been many
dates of inscriptions, and each new generation has unscrupulously run
its lines over the pictures already made. Upon the best protected
surfaces, as well as the most exposed, there are drawings dimmed beyond
restoration and others distinct. The period during which the work
accumulated was longer by far than the time which has passed since the
last. Some fallen blocks cover etchings on the wall, and are themselves
etched.
“Colors are preserved only where there is almost complete shelter from
rain. In two places the holes worn in the rock by swaying branches
impinge on etchings, but the trees themselves have disappeared. Some
etchings are left high and dry by a diminishing talus (15-20 feet), but
I saw none partly buried by an increasing talus (except in the case of
the fallen block already mentioned).
“The painted circles are exceedingly accurate, and it seems incredible
that they were made without the use of a radius.”
In the collection contributed by Mr. Gilbert there are at least fifteen
series or groups of figures, most of which consist of the human form
(from the simplest to the most complex style of drawing), animals,
either singly or in long files, as if driven, bird tracks, human feet
and hands, etc. There are also circles, parallel lines, and waving or
undulating lines, spots, and other unintelligible characters.
Mr. Gilbert also reports the discovery, in 1883, of a great number of
pictographs, chiefly in color, though some are etched, in a cañon of
the Book Cliff, containing Thompson’s spring, about 4 miles north of
Thompson’s station, on the Denver and Colorado Railroad, Utah.
Collections of drawings of pictographs at Black Rock spring, on Beaver
Creek, north of Milford, Utah, have been furnished by Mr. Gilbert. A
number of fallen blocks of basalt, at a low escarpment, are filled with
etchings upon the vertical faces. The characters are generally of an
“unintelligible” nature, though the human figure is drawn in complex
forms. Foot-prints, circles, etc., also abound.
Mr. I. C. Russell, of the United States Geological Survey, furnished
rude drawings of pictographs at Black Rock spring, Utah (see Figure
153). Mr. Gilbert Thompson, of the United States Geological Survey,
also discovered pictographs at Fool Creek Cañon, Utah (see Figure 154).
Both of those figures are on page 230.
ROCK CARVINGS IN COLORADO.
Captain E. L. Berthoud furnished to the Kansas City Review of Science
and Industry, VII, 1883, No. 8, pp. 489, 490, the following:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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