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
The appearance in America of a carving of the hairy mammoth,
presumably the work of our aborigines, if not a surprise to students
of archæology, would certainly be no less interesting than the French
discoveries of some twenty years ago; while the ready connection of the
work with the Indian of comparatively recent times, the appearance of
human figures in the carving, and of many symbols which seem related to
highly important branches of archæological study, would awaken a more
general and enthusiastic interest in the Stone, than has been felt for
any other prehistoric representation of the great elephant.
A disbelief in its authenticity would leave us with an interest, not
inconsiderable, in the unknown person who, after months of careful
study and preparation, could have conceived and executed so remarkable
a fraud.
ERRATA.
Page 81, line 2, for Delaware _read_ Susquehannok.
Page 81, line 4, for Delaware _read_ Susquehannok.
THE LENAPE STONE.
In the spring of 1872, eight years after the discovery of the famous
mammoth carving in the cave of La Madeleine, Perigord, France, Barnard
Hansell, a young farmer, while ploughing on his father's farm, four
miles and a half east of Doylestown, Bucks County, Pennsylvania, saw,
to use his own words, a "queer stone" lying on the surface of the
ground, and close to the edge of the new furrow. The plough had just
missed turning it under. He stopped and picked it up; it was the larger
piece of the fractured "gorget stone," in fig. 1, (frontispiece). By
wetting his thumb and rubbing it he could see strange lines and a
carving representing an animal like an elephant, but without troubling
his boyish head much about it, he carried it several days in his
pocket, and finally locked it up in his chest, where, along with his
other relics, arrow-heads, spear-points, axes, and broken banner
stones, thrown in from time to time as he found them on the farm,
it remained until the spring of 1881, when he sold it to Mr. Henry
Paxon, son of a well-known resident of the neighborhood, then a youth
of nineteen, and with a fancy for collecting Indian antiquities, in
whose possession it still remains.[A] At the moment of the purchase no
particular attention had been paid to the carvings, and the new owner
was not certain that he had noticed the mammoth while at Hansell's
house, or until a few hours later, when he had brought home his
trophies and shown them to his father, who distinctly remembers calling
his son's attention to the rude outline of an elephant upon the stone.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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