The Indians have most retentive memories; they will preserve to their deaths a recollection of any place they have once passed through; they never forget a face that they have attentively observed but for a few seconds; at the end of many years they will repeat every sentence of the speeches that have been delivered by different individuals in a public assembly; and has any speech been made in the council house of the nation, particularly deserving of remembrance, it will be handed down with the utmost accuracy from one generation to another, though perfectly ignorant of the use of hieroglyphicks and letters; the only memorials of which they avail themselves are small pieces of wood, such as I told you were brought by them to Captain E——, preparatory to the delivery of the presents, and belts of wampum; the former are only used on trifling occasions, the latter never but on very grand and solemn ones. Whenever a conference, or a talk as they term it, is about to be held with any neighbouring tribe, or whenever any treaty or national compact is about to be made, one of these belts, differing in some respect from every other that has been made before, is immediately constructed; each person in the assembly holds this belt in his band whilst he delivers his speech, and when he has ended, he presents it to the next person that rises, by which ceremony each individual is reminded, that it behoves him to be cautious in his discourse, as all he says will be faithfully recorded by the belt. The talk being over, the belt is deposited in the hands of the principal chief. On the ratification of a treaty, very broad splendid belts are reciprocally given by the contracting parties, which are deposited amongst the other belts belonging to the nation. At stated intervals they are all produced to the nation, and the occasions upon which they were made are mentioned; if they relate to a talk, one of the chiefs repeats the substance of what was said over them; if to a treaty, the terms of it are recapitulated. Certain of the squaws, also, are entrusted with the belts, whose business it is to relate the history of each one of them to the younger branches of the tribe; this they do with great accuracy, and thus it is that the remembrance of every important transaction is kept up. [Sidenote: WAMPUM.]