The Lenape Stone; or, The Indian and the Mammoth — John Shaqi
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
It has been supposed that the upper St. Lawrence or Detroit River,
streams noticed by the Indians as abounding in fish, was the "Fish
River" of the Heckewelder tradition. Here, as we have seen according
to information collected from the Lenni Lenape, desperate battles had
taken place with the Allegwi, hundreds of whom were slain and buried
under mounds in that vicinity.[L]
Other considerations, too, induce us to suppose that the Lenape and
Huron-Iroquois invasion came from the northward and not from the west.
If we study the shape and position of the mounds themselves along the
southern shore of the great lakes, we find that they present often the
appearance of fortifications erected against the advance of an enemy
from the north, and suddenly abandoned after a long struggle. Also
the scattered implements and half-removed blocks of ore found in the
prehistoric copper mines on the south shore of Lake Superior, seemed to
indicate their hasty desertion by the miners upon the sudden inroad of
an enemy from that direction.
Again, the works of the mound-builders, though at some points
insignificant and hardly perceptible, extend considerably west of the
Mississippi, and probably would have been encountered by the advancing
Lenape before reaching that river, and had it been the stream meant it
would not have been spoken of as the boundary of the mound-builders'
empire.[M]
The Wallum Olum, however, with its hieroglyphics, does not end with
the brief extract given. Song five, consisting of fifty-eight verses,
recounts the details of the occupation by the conquerors of the Ohio
valley, and long wars with enemies denominated "_Father Snakes_,"
"_Stone Snakes_," and "_North Snakes_," whose pictograph in the
original manuscript is here given (fig. 18). They pass the Alleghenies,
and exploring the Chesapeake Bay and great rivers of "the large and
long east land," finally establish themselves on the Delaware, making
"_Maskekitong_," the rapids at Trenton, the centre of their dominions.
We have now reached the time of the coming of the whites, and the last
verses of the song speak in brief simplicity of a people who came from
somewhere, "and that which was white" (ships) "coming from the East
Sea."
[Illustration: FIG. 18.]
There is still another song--the sixth--continuing the chronicle and
recounting the melancholy story of the Lenape's contact with the
whites, and final westward journey to Ohio, where the records were
obtained. A narrative of sufferings and hard wrongs, whose recital by
the Indian had caused Heckewelder, as he said, "to feel ashamed that he
was a white man."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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