The Lenape Stone; or, The Indian and the MammothMercer, Henry C.
History
The Lenape Stone; or, The Indian and the Mammoth
Mercer, Henry C.
Delaware Indians; Mammoths; Picture-writing, Indian
Not one of these outlines is unmistakable, and all lack the
characteristic tusks of the mammoth.
[Illustration: FIG. 2.--Elephant Pipe (Louisa Co., Iowa).]
[Illustration: FIG. 3.--Elephant Pipe (Louisa Co., Iowa).]
Figures 2 and 3, the now famous "elephant pipes," the authenticity
of which is doubted, however, in the last report of the Bureau
of Ethnology, came to light in Louisa County, Iowa. The former,
discovered in 1872 or 1873, was found, it is said, on the surface
by a farmer while planting corn; and the latter, more interesting
from the scratches upon it evidently intended to represent hair, was
taken from a mound near an old bed of the Mississippi by the Rev. Dr.
Blumer and others on March 2, 1880. The material of the two pipes,
which apparently have been much greased and smoked, is the same--a
light-colored sandstone.
The next of the elephant _documents_ is the so-called elephant mound
of Grant County, Wisconsin, (fig. 4). It was described by Mr. Jared
Warner, of Patch Grove, Wisconsin, on page 416 of the "Smithsonian
Report for 1872," when public attention was first generally called to
it. The effigy, 135 feet long, 60 feet broad, and but 5 feet high, is
situated on the east bank of the Mississippi, just below the mouth of
the Wisconsin, and, says Mr. Warner, has been known in the neighborhood
of Patch Grove for twenty-five years as the "elephant mound." Like
the elephant pipes, however, it lacks the characteristic tusks, and
sceptics claim that its original shape has been too much modified by
many years of cultivation to render judgments concerning it admissible.
[Illustration: FIG. 4.--Elephant Mound (Grant County, Wisconsin).]
But to return to the carving, a somewhat novel feature in it, and one
which has been objected to as casting a doubt upon its authenticity,
is the spear between the two upright human figures on the right. Large
flint spear-points, so-called, are found abundantly in the Eastern
States, and within the last hundred years instances of the use of
the spear by the Indians in hunting and fishing are common; no one
doubts, as we learn, for instance, in Tanner's narrative, that the
Indians speared salmon in the Eastern rivers, or, as Catlin shows,
used steel-pointed lances in their Western buffalo hunts. Yet the
early writers, in their descriptions of aboriginal implements, have
been supposed to make no mention of the spear, and there has been some
controversy among archæologists as to whether it can be classed among
Indian prehistoric weapons of warfare or the chase.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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