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Show 9 0 PICTOGRAPHS OP THE NORTH AMERICAN INDIANS. the Indian tribes west of the Mississippi, had never heard of this or any other similar attempt among them to establish a chronological system. Bragging biographies of chiefs and partisan histories of particular wars delineated in picture writing on hides or bark are very common. Nearly every traveler on the plains has obtained a painted robe, on which some aboriginal artist has stained rude signs purporting to represent tribal or personal occurrences, or often the family connections of the first owner. Some of these in the possession of the present writer have special significance and are mentioned under appropriate heads in the present work. It is believed that, in the pictographs of all of these peoples discovered before the chart mentioned, the obvious intention was either historical or biographical, or more generally was to chronicle occurrences as such, and that there was not an apparent design to portray events selected without exclusive reference to their intrinsic interest or importance, but because they severally occurred within regular successive intervals of time, and to arrange them in an orderly form, specially convenient for ure as a calendar and valuable for no other purpose. The copy made by Lieutenant Reed was traced over a duplicate of the original, which latter was drawn on a buffalo robe by Lone- Dog, an aged Indian, belonging to the Yanktonai tribe of the Dakotas, who in the autumn of 1876 was near Fort Peck, Montana, and was reported to be still in his possession. His Dakota name is given him by correspondents who knew him, as in the ordinary English literation, Shunka- ishnala, the words respectively corresponding very nearly with the vocables in Riggs's lexicon for dog- lone. Others have, however, identified him as Chi- no- sa, translated as " a lone wanderer," and asserted that he was at the time mentioned with the hostile Dakotas under Sitting Bull. There appear to have been several Dakotas of the present generation known to the whites as Lone- Dog. Plate VI is a representation of the chart as it would appear on the buffalo robe, but it is photographed from the copy on linen cloth, not directly from the robe. The duplicate from which the copy waa immediately taken was in the possession of Basil Clement, a half breed interpreter, living at Little Bend, near Fort Sully, Dakota, who professed to have obtained information concerning the chart from personal inquiries of many Indians, and whose dictated translation of them, reduced to writing in his own words, forms the basis of that given in the present paper. The genuineness of the document was verified by separate examination, through another interpreter, of the most intelligent Indians accessible at Fort Bice, and at a considerable distance from Clement, who could have had no recent communication with those so examined. One of the latter, named Good- Wood, a Blackfoot Dakota and an enlisted scout attached to the garrison at Fort Rice, immediately recognized the copy now in possession of the writer as " the same thing Lone- Dog had,' 1 and also |