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
It is believed that, in the pictographs of all of these peoples
discovered before the chart mentioned, the obvious intention was
either historical or biographical, or more generally was to chronicle
occurrences as such, and that there was not an apparent design to
portray events selected without exclusive reference to their intrinsic
interest or importance, but because they severally occurred within
regular successive intervals of time, and to arrange them in an orderly
form, specially convenient for use as a calendar and valuable for no
other purpose.
The copy made by Lieutenant Reed was traced over a duplicate of the
original, which latter was drawn on a buffalo robe by Lone-Dog, an
aged Indian, belonging to the Yanktonai tribe of the Dakotas, who in
the autumn of 1876 was near Fort Peck, Montana, and was reported to be
still in his possession. His Dakota name is given him by correspondents
who knew him, as in the ordinary English literation, Shunka-ishnala,
the words respectively corresponding very nearly with the vocables in
Riggs’s lexicon for dog-lone. Others have, however, identified him as
Chi-no-sa, translated as “a lone wanderer,” and asserted that he was at
the time mentioned with the hostile Dakotas under Sitting Bull. There
appear to have been several Dakotas of the present generation known to
the whites as Lone-Dog.
Plate VI is a representation of the chart as it would appear on the
buffalo robe, but it is photographed from the copy on linen cloth, not
directly from the robe.
The duplicate from which the copy was immediately taken was in the
possession of Basil Clément, a half-breed interpreter, living at
Little Bend, near Fort Sully, Dakota, who professed to have obtained
information concerning the chart from personal inquiries of many
Indians, and whose dictated translation of them, reduced to writing
in his own words, forms the basis of that given in the present paper.
The genuineness of the document was verified by separate examination,
through another interpreter, of the most intelligent Indians accessible
at Fort Rice, and at a considerable distance from Clément, who could
have had no recent communication with those so examined. One of the
latter, named Good-Wood, a Blackfoot Dakota and an enlisted scout
attached to the garrison at Fort Rice, immediately recognized the copy
now in possession of the writer as “the same thing Lone-Dog had,” and
also stated that he had seen another copy at Standing Rock Agency
in the hands of Blue-Thunder, a Blackfoot Dakota. He said it showed
“something put down for every year about their nation.” He knew how
to use it as a calendar, beginning from the center and counting from
right to left, and was familiar with the meaning of many of the later
characters and the events they commemorated, in which he corroborated
Clément’s translation, but explained that he had forgotten the
interpretation of some of the earlier signs, which were about those
things done before his birth.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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