The fact that Lone-Dog’s Winter Count, the only one known at the time of its first publication, begins at a date nearly coinciding with the first year of the present century, as it is called in the arbitrary computation that prevails among most of the civilized peoples, awakened a suspicion that it might be due to civilized intercourse and was not a mere coincidence. If the influence of missionaries or traders started any plan of chronology, it is remarkable that they did not suggest one in some manner resembling the system so long and widely used, and the only one they knew, of counting the numbers from an era, such as the birth of Christ, the Hegira, the Ab Urbe Conditâ, or the first Olympiad. But the chart shows nothing of this nature. The earliest character merely represents the killing of a small number of Dakotas by their enemies, an event neither so important nor interesting as many others of the seventy-one shown in the chart, more than one of which, indeed, might well have been selected as a notable fixed point before and after which simple arithmetical notation could have been used to mark the years. Instead of any plan that civilized advisers would naturally have introduced, the one actually adopted was to individualize each year by a specific recorded symbol. The ideographic record, being preserved and understood by many, could be used and referred to with ease and accuracy. Definite signs for the first appearance of the smallpox and for the first capture of wild horses were dates as satisfactory to the Dakota as the corresponding expressions A. D. 1802 and 1813 are to the Christian world, and far more certain than the chronology expressed in terms of A. M. and B. C. The arrangement of separate characters in an outward spiral starting from a central point is a clever expedient to dispense with the use of numbers for noting the years, yet allowing every date to be determined by counting backward or forward from any other known. The whole conception seems one strongly characteristic of the Indians, who in other instances have shown such expertness in ideography. The discovery of several other charts, which differ in their times of commencement and ending from that of Lone-Dog and from each other, removed any inference arising from the above-mentioned coincidence in beginning with the present century. The following copies of charts, substantially the same as that of Lone-Dog, are now or have been in the possession of the present writer: 1. A chart made and kept by Bo-i'-de, The-Flame, a Dakota, who, in 1877, lived near Fort Sully, Dakota.