Picture-Writing of the American Indians: Tenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1888-89, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1893, pages 3-822Mallery, Garrick
History
Picture-Writing of the American Indians: Tenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1888-89, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1893, pages 3-822
Mallery, Garrick
Picture-writing, Indian
In 1875 Mr. P. W. Shafer published in a historical map of Pennsylvania
several groups of pictographs. These had before appeared in a rude and
crowded form in the Transactions of the Anthropological Institute of New
York, 1871-’72, page 66, where the localities are mentioned as “Big”
and “Little” Indian rocks, respectively. One of these rocks is in the
Susquehanna river, below the dam at Safe harbor, and the drawing clearly
shows its Algonquian origin. The characters are nearly all either
animals or various forms of the human body. Birds, bird tracks, and
serpents also occur. A part of this pictograph is presented below, Fig.
1089.
Dr. W. J. Hoffman visited this place during the autumn of 1889 and made
sketches of the petroglyphs. The Algonquian type of delineation of
objects is manifest.
The rock known as “Big Indian rock” is in the Susquehanna river,
three-fourths of a mile below the mouth of Conestoga creek and about 400
yards from the eastern bank of the Susquehanna. It is one of many, but
larger than any other in the immediate vicinity, measuring about 60 feet
in length, 30 feet in width, and an average height of about 20 feet. The
upper surface is uneven, though smoothly worn, and upon this are pecked
the characters, shown in Fig. 70.
[Illustration: FIG. 70.--Big Indian rock, Pennsylvania.]
The characters, through exposure to the elements, are becoming rather
indistinct, though a few of them are pecked so deep that they still
present a depression of from one-fourth to one-half an inch in depth.
The most conspicuous objects consist of human figures, thunder birds,
and animals resembling the panther.
“Little Indian rock” is also situated in the Susquehanna river,
one-fourth of a mile from the eastern bank and a like distance below
the mouth of Conestoga creek. This rock, also of hard micaceous schist,
is not so large as the one above mentioned, but bears more interesting
characters, the most conspicuous being representations of the thunder
bird, serpents, deer and bird tracks, etc.
[Illustration: FIG. 71.--Little Indian rock, Pennsylvania.]
Prof. Persifor Frazer, jr., (_b_) remarks upon the gradual obliteration
of these pictographs, and adds:
In addition to these causes of obliteration it is a pity to
have to record another, which is the vandalism of some visitors to
the locality who have thought it an excellent practical joke to
cut spurious figures alongside of and sometimes over those made by
the Indians. It is not unlikely, too, that the “fish pots” here,
as in the case of the Bald Friar’s inscriptions, a few miles below
the Maryland line, may have been constructed in great part out of
fragments of rock containing these hieroglyphics, so that the parts
of the connected story which they relate are separated and the
record thus destroyed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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