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
The information thus far obtained about petroglyphs in Canada is meager.
This may be partly due to the fact that through the region of the
Dominion now most thoroughly known the tribes have generally resorted
for their pictographic work to the bark of birch trees, which material
is plentiful and well adapted for the purpose. Indeed the same fact
affords an explanation of the paucity of rock-carvings or paintings
in the lands immediately south of the boundary line separating the
United States from the British possessions. It must also be considered
that the country on both sides of that boundary was in general heavily
timbered, and that even if petroglyphs are there they may not even yet
have been noticed. But that the mere plenty of birch bark does not
evince the actual absence of rock-pictures in regions where there was
also an abundance of suitable rocks, and where the native inhabitants
were known to be pictographers, is shown by the account given below of
the multitudes of such pictures lately discovered in a single district
of Nova Scotia. It is confidently believed that many petroglyphs will
yet be found in the Dominion. Others may be locally known and possibly
already described in publications which have escaped the researches of
the present writer. In fact, from correspondence and oral narrations,
there are indications of petroglyphs in several parts of the Dominion
besides those mentioned below, but their descriptions are too vague for
presentation here. For instance, Dr. Boas says that he has seen a large
number of petroglyphs in British Columbia, of which neither he nor any
other traveler has made distinct report.
NOVA SCOTIA.
The only petroglyphs yet found in the peninsula of Nova Scotia are
in large numbers within a small district in Queens county, and they
comprise objects unique in execution and in interest. They were
examined by the present writer in the field seasons of 1887 and 1888,
and some were copied by him, but many more copies were taken in the
last-mentioned year by Mr. George Creed, of South Rawdon, Nova Scotia,
who had guided the writer to the locality. Attention was at first
confined to Fairy lake and its rocks. This lake is really a bay of
a larger lake which is almost exactly on the boundary line between
Annapolis and Queens counties, one of those forming the chain through
which the Liverpool river runs, and called Cegemacaga in More’s History
of Queens County (_a_), but according to Dr. Silas Rand in his Reading
Book in the Micmac Language (_a_), Kejimkoojik, translated by him as
“swelled parts,” doubtless referring to the expansion of the Maitland
river at its confluence with the Liverpool river.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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