482 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



monic purposes until a comparatively recent date. My late dis- 

 tinguished friend Sir Daniel Wilson had indeed inferred this use 

 of them in former times. In his Prehistoric Man (page 77 of the 

 third edition) he tells us that " in the Grave Creek Mound, shell 

 beads, such as constitute the wampum of forest tribes, amounted 

 to between three and four thousand ; and it seems singularly con- 

 sistent with the partial civilization of the ancient mound builders 

 to assume that in such deposits we have the relics of sepulchral 

 records which constituted the scroll of fame of the illustrious 

 dead, or copies of the national archives deposited with the great 

 sachem to whose wisdom or prowess the safety of his people had 

 been due." This inference seemed to me natural and reasonable ; 

 but more recent studies have induced me to question it. Many 

 fragments of ancient cloth have been found in the mounds. The 

 wampum belt was a woven structure of peculiar firmness, having 

 a strong warp, with a duplicate woof, on which the beads were 

 strongly attached. That no fragment of such a record has been 

 found in our ancient mounds is surprising, if such numbers of 

 them were buried as this presumption would lead us to suppose. 

 Moreover, it is doubtful if the true wampum bead of the modern 

 belt was in general use in prehistoric times. The shell beads of 

 those times, if small, are of oval or ovoid shape, and, if large, are 

 thick circular disks, resembling modern button molds, or still 

 larger. The beads in modern belts are, as is well known, oblong 

 tubes, about the fourth of an inch in length, shaped like pieces of 

 a tobacco pipe cut off square at the ends. They are well suited to 

 be woven together in a belt, but are otherwise not adapted either 

 for ornament or for use as money. Mr. Holmes, in his valuable 

 paper on Art in Shell of the Ancient Americans, published in the 

 Second Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, remarks that 

 "it is not known positively that beads of this particular shape 

 were employed in pre-Columbian times; but it is certainly one 

 of the earliest historical forms, and one which has been manufac- 

 tured extensively by the Indians as well as by the whites. They 

 may be found both in very old and in very recent graves, and 

 have always formed an important part of the stock of the Indian 

 trader." 



The conclusion to which. I have been led by these and other 

 evidences is that the use of wampum for conveying messages and 

 preserving records was one of the improvements which accompa- 

 nied the formation of the Iroquois confederation, and was most 

 probably due to the genius of Hiawatha. Like all his other 

 reforms, it merely brought into clear and useful shape a tendency 

 toward which his people had been advancing. We can not doubt 

 that in dealings between different native tribes there would have 

 been frequent interchange of presents ; and no presents would be 



