This record, which the notched and painted sticks have kept for several hundreds of years, is an account of the travels of the Leni Lennape Indians from the Northwest across the Wide River. This must have been the Mississippi. They call it Namesi Sipu, the “river of fish.” When across the Wide River, they found they had come to the country of the Great Serpent. Numerous earth mounds in the form of an immense serpent are found in the valley of the Mississippi. These are believed to have been made by a people, long ago extinct, who may have fought the Delawares. Other Indian tribes and nations have kept long records by means of similar sticks, but the account given by this people is the longest Indian history. The last marks upon these painted sticks are said to mean: “The white men have come from the north and the south. They are peaceful; they have great things. Who are they?” These Leni Lennapes are the Delawares, with whom the Quakers made their treaty near Philadelphia. The Iroquois had conquered these Indians, and had refused to let them go to war as a punishment for their great bravery. The Quakers found them peaceable, honest, and faithful friends, and for forty years no white person was harmed who had never broken his promise to the Leni Lennapes, or Delaware Indians. The Aztecs, or Mexican Indians, had a serpent god, and some have said that these mounds must have been built by them. The Leni Lennape stick records tell only that the country of the Great Serpent was conquered little by little. The mounds are themselves the unsolved records of a great people. No Indian legends or histories have ever explained the meaning of these heaps of earth, which are shaped like animals or birds, and are now sometimes covered by huge trees. The wampum belt tells its story by the pictures upon it, while the record sticks had only painted notches to help the memory of the tribe’s historians. WAMPUM MONEY Wampum has been used among the Indians east of the Rocky Mountains since the whites first had dealings with them. Among the eastern Indians it was first found to be made of the white and purple parts of clam shells. These shells were carefully cut into small pieces by means of sharp-edged stone knives, and a hole was bored through the pieces, making them like little tubes. The white and the dark-colored beads were threaded and carefully arranged into patterns when belts or other woven pieces of ornament were made. The threads were either of vegetable fiber or of deer sinews, and long strings were sometimes made of the bark of the slippery-elm tree. Dark-colored parts of the shells from which the beads were made were called black, but they were really dark shades of purple. White beads meant peace. Dark beads were woven into the belt either in square or diamond patterns or in some more irregular shape.