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Show MALLBRT. J TIME- WINTER COUNTS. 89 graph for the year is placed beneath each one. At other times the line is not continuous, but is interrupted at regular intervals by the yearly circle, as in Figure 40. - o- o- o FIG. 40.- Device denoting succession of time. Dakota. The large amount of space takeu up by the Dakota Winter Counts, now following, renders it impracticable to devote more to the graphic devices regarding time. While these Winter Counts are properly under the present head, their value is not limited to it, as they suggest, if they do not explain, points relating to many other divisions of the present paper. THE DAKOTA WINTER COUNTS. The existence among the Dakota Indians of continuous designations of years, in the form of charts corresponding in part with the orderly arrangement of divisions of time termed calendars, was first made public by the present writer in a paper entitled " A Calendar of the Dakota Nation," which was issued in April, 1877, in Bulletin III, No. 1, of the United States Geological and Geographical Survey. Later consideration of the actual use of such charts by the Indians has induced the change of their title to that adopted by themselves, viz., Winter Counts, in the original, waniyetu wdwapi. The lithographed chart published with that paper, substantially the same as Plate VI, now presented, was ascertained to be the Winter Count used by or at least known to a large portion of the Dakota people, extending over the seventy- one years commencing with the winter of A. D. 1800-' 01. The copy from which the lithograph was taken is traced on a strip of cotton cloth, in size one yard square, which the characters almost entirely fill, and was made by Lieut. H. T. Reed, First United States Infantry, an accomplished officer of the present writer's former company and regiment, in two colors, black and red, used in the original, of which it is a/ a<? simile. The general design of the chart and the meaning of most of its characters were ascertained by Lieutenant Reed, at Fort Sully, Dakota, and afterwards at Fort Rice, Dakota, in November, 1876, by the present writer; while further investigation of records and authorities at Washington elicited additional details used in the publication mentioned and many more since its issue. After exhibition of the copy to a number of military and civil officers connected with the Departments of War and of the Interior, it appeared that those who, from service on expeditions and surveys or from special study of American ethnology, were most familiar with |
