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
For examples of other copies printed from the rocks at Kejimkoojik
lake, see Figs. 549, 550, 654, 655, 656, 657, 658, 717, 718, 739, 740,
741, 1254, 1255, and 1262. These offer intrinsic evidence of the Micmac
origin of the early class of engravings.
[Illustration: FIG. 2.--Palimpsest on Fairy rocks, Nova Scotia.]
The presence of French names and styles of art in the drawings is
explained by a story which was communicated by Louis Labrador, whose
great-grandfather, old Ledore, according to his account, guided a body
of French Acadians who, at the time of the expulsion, were not shipped
off with the majority. They escaped the English in 1756 and traveled
from the valley of Annapolis to Shelbourne, at the extreme southeast
of the peninsula. During that passage they halted for a considerable
time to recruit in the beautiful valley along the Kejimkoojik lake,
on the very ground where these markings appear, which also was on the
ancient Indian trail. Another local tradition, told by a resident of the
neighborhood, gives a still earlier date for the French work. He says
that after the capture of Port Royal, now Annapolis, in 1710, a party of
the defeated Frenchmen, with a number of Indians as guides, went with
their cattle to the wide meadows upon Kejimkoojik lake and remained
there for a long time. It is exceedingly probable that the French would
have been attracted to scratch on this fascinating smooth slate surface
whether they had observed previous markings or not, but it seems evident
that they did scratch over such previous markings. The latter, at least,
antedated the beginning of the eighteenth century.
A general remark may be made regarding the Kejimkoojik drawings, that
the aboriginal art displayed in them did not differ in any important
degree from that shown in other drawings of the Micmacs and the Abnaki
in the possession of the Bureau of Ethnology. Also that the rocks there
reveal pictographic tendencies and practices which suggest explanations
of similar work in other regions where less evidence remains of intent
and significance. The attractive material of the slates and their
convenient situation tempted past generations of Indians to record
upon them the images of their current thoughts and daily actions.
Hence the pictographic practice went into operation at this locality
with unusual vigor and continuity. Although at Kejimkoojik lake there
is an exceptional facility for determining the relative dates of the
several horizons of scratchings, the suggestion there evoked may help to
ascertain similar data elsewhere.
ONTARIO.
Mr. Charles Hallock kindly communicates information concerning
pictographs on Nipigon bay, which is a large lake in the province of
Ontario, 30 miles northwest of Lake Superior, with which it is connected
by Nipigon river. He says:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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