With the interpretations of the several charts given below some explanations are furnished, but it may be useful to set forth in advance a few facts relating to the nomenclature and divisions of the tribes frequently mentioned. In the literature on the subject the great linguistic stock or family embracing not only the Sioux or Dakotas proper, but the Missouris, Omahas, Ponkas, Osages, Kansas, Otos, Assiniboines, Gros Ventres or Minnitaris, Crows, Iowas, Mandans, and some others, has been frequently styled the Dakota Family. Major Powell, the Director of the Bureau of Ethnology, from considerations of priority, has lately adopted the name Siouan for the family, and for the grand division of it popularly called Sioux has used the term Dakota, which the people claim for themselves. In this general respect it is possible to conform in this paper to Major Powell’s classification, but, specially in the details of the Winter Counts, the form of the titles of the tribes is that which is generally used, but with little consistency, in literature, and is not given with the accurate philologic literation of special scholars, or with reference to the synonomy determined by Major Powell, but not yet published. The reason for this temporary abandonment of scientific accuracy is that another course would require the correction or annotation of the whole material contributed from many sources, and would be cumbrous as well as confusing prior to the publication, by the Bureau of Ethnology, of the synonomy mentioned. The word “Dakota” is translated in Riggs’s Dictionary of that language as “leagued, or allied.” Dr. J. Hammond Trumbull, the distinguished ethnographer and glossologist, gives the meaning to be more precisely “associated as comrades,” the root being found in other dialects of the same group of languages for instance, in the Minitari, where _dáki_ is the name for the clan or band, and _dakóe_ means friend or comrade. In the Sioux (Dakota) dialect, _cota_, or _coda_ means friend, and Dakota may, literally translated, signify “our friends.” The title Sioux, which is indignantly repudiated by the nation, is either the last syllable or the two last syllables, according to pronunciation, of “Nadowesioux,” which is the French plural of the Algonkin name for the Dakotas, “Nadowessi,” “enemy,” though the English word is not so strong as the Indian, “hated foe” being nearer. The Chippeways called an Iroquois “Nadowi,” which is also their name for rattlesnake (or, as others translate, adder); in the plural, Nadowek. A Sioux they called Nadowessi, which is the same word with a contemptuous or diminutive termination; plural, Nadowessiwak or Nadawessyak. The French gave the name their own form of the plural, and the voyageurs and trappers cut it down to “Sioux.”