The copy from which the lithograph was taken is traced on a strip of cotton cloth, in size 1 yard square, which the characters almost entirely fill, and is painted in two colors, black and red, used in the original, of which it is a facsimile. The plate is a representation of the chart as it would appear on the buffalo robe. It was photographed from the copy on linen cloth, and not directly from the buffalo robe. It was painted on the robe by Lone-Dog, an Indian belonging to the Yanktonais tribe of the Dakotas, who in the autumn of 1876 was near Fort Peck, Montana. His Dakota name is given in the ordinary English literation as Shunka-ishnala, which words correspond nearly with the vocables in Riggs’s lexicon for dog-lone. Lone-Dog claimed that, with the counsel of the old men of his tribe, he decided upon some event or circumstance which should distinguish each year as it passed, and marked what was considered to be its appropriate symbol or device upon a buffalo robe kept for the purpose. The robe was at convenient times exhibited to other Indians of the tribe, who were thus taught the meaning and use of the signs as designating the several years. It is not, however, supposed that Lone-Dog was of sufficient age in the year 1800 to enter upon the work. Either there was a predecessor from whom he received the earlier records or, when he had reached manhood, he gathered the traditions from his elders and worked back, the object either then or before being to establish some system of chronology for the use of the tribe or more probably in the first instance for the use of his own band. Present knowledge of the winter-count systems shows that Lone-Dog was not their originator. They were started, at the latest, before the present generation, and have been kept up by a number of independent recorders. The idea was one specially appropriate to the Indian genius, yet the peculiar mode of record was an invention, and it is not probably a very old invention, as it has not been used beyond a definite district and people. If an invention of that character had been of great antiquity it would probably have spread by intertribal channels beyond the bands or tribes of the Dakota, where alone the copies of such charts have been found and are understood.