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
I send herewith a rough sheet of drawings of figures on the
sheltered face of a huge granite cropping in Tulare county,
California. One-half of the cropping had split off, leaving a nearly
plane surface, on which the figures were drawn in red, white, and
black pigments. The locality is known as Rocky point. They are now
quarrying granite at the place. It lies about 12 miles nearly due
east of Visalia, in the first foothills and south of Yokall creek.
The figures appear to have been drawn many years ago, and numbers of
them are now indistinct.
During the summer of 1882 Dr. Hoffman visited the Tule river agency,
California, where he found a large rock painting, of which Fig. 983,
infra, is a copy made by him. His description of it is as follows:
“The agency is upon the western side of the Sierra Nevada, in the
headwater canyons of the branches of the south fork of Tule river.
The country is at present occupied by several tribes of the Mariposan
linguistic stock, and the only answer made to inquiries respecting the
age or origin of the painting was that it was found there when the
ancestors of the present tribes arrived. The local migrations of the
various Indian tribes of this part of California are not yet known with
sufficient certainty to determine to whom the records may be credited,
but all appearances with respect to the weathering and disintegration
of the rock upon which the record is engraved, the appearance of the
coloring matter subsequently applied, and the condition of the small
depressions made at the time for mixing the pigments with a viscous
substance, indicate that the work was performed about a century ago.
“The Indians now at Tule river have occupied that part of the state for
at least one hundred years, and the oldest now living state that the
records were found by their ancestors, though whether more than two
generations ago could not be ascertained.
“The drawings were outlined by pecking with a piece of quartz or other
siliceous rock, the depth varying from a mere visible depression to
a third of an inch. Having thus satisfactorily depicted the several
ideas, colors were applied which appear to have penetrated the slight
interstices between the crystalline particles of the rock, which had
been bruised and slightly fractured by hammering with a piece of stone.
It appears probable, too, that to insure better results the hammering
was repeated after application of the colors.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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