| OCR Text |
Show 92 PICT0GRAPH8 OF THE NORTH AMERICAN INDIANS. istence of portable pictographs of this ascertained character renders it proper to examine rock etchings and other native records with reference to their possible interpretation as designating events chronologically. A query is naturally suggested, whether intercourse with missionaries and other whites did not first give the Dakotas some idea of dates and awaken a sense of want in that direction. The fact that Lone- Dog's winter count, the only one known at the time of its first publication, begins at a date nearly coinciding with the first year of the present century by onr computation, awakened a suspicion that it might be due to civilized intercourse* and was not a mere coincidence. If the influence of missionaries or traders started any plan of chronology, it is remarkable that they did not suggest one in some manner resembling the system so long and widely used, and the only one they knew, of counting in numbers from an era, such as the birth of Christ, the Hegira, the Ab Urbe Condita, the First Olympiad, and the like. But the chart shows nothing of this nature. The earliest character ( the one in the center or beginning of the spiral) merely represents the killing of a small number of Dakotas by their enemies, an event of frequent occurrence, and neither so important nor interesting as many others of the seventy- one shown in the chart, more than one of which, * indeed, might well have been selected as a notable fixed point before and after which simple arithmetical notation could have been used to mark the years. Instead of any plan that civilized advisers would naturally have introduced, the one actually adopted- to individualize each year by a specific recorded symbol, or totem, according to the decision of a competent person, or by common* consent acted upon by a person charged with or undertaking the duty whereby confusion was prevented- should not suffer denial of its originality merely because it was ingenious, and showed more of scientific method than has often been attributed to the northern tribes of America. The ideographic record, being preserved and understood by many, could be used and referred to with sufficient ease and accuracy for ordinary purposes. Definite signs for the first appearance of the small- pox and for the first capture of wild horses may be dates as satisfactory to the Dakotas as the corresponding expressions A. D. 1802 and 1813 to the Christian world, and far more certain than much of the chronological tables of Begiomontanus and Archbishop Usher in terms of A. M. and B. C. The careful arrangement of distinctly separate characters in an oat-ward spiral starting from a central point is a clever expedient to dispense with the use of numbers for noting the years, yet allowing every date to be determined by counting backward or forward from any other that might be known ; and it seems unlikely that any such device, so different from that common among the white visitors, should have been prompted by them. The whole conception seems one strongly characteristic of the Indians, who in other instances have shown such expert- |
