INDIAN WAMPUM RECORDS. 485 



Another inquiry of interest relates to the time when wampum 

 ceased to be made by the Indians. That the records are retained to 

 this day among certain tribes is well known, though their use is 

 slowly dying out. But the beads themselves are no longer made 

 by the Indians. As regards the time when their manufacture 

 ceased, very vague and some very erroneous ideas have prevailed. 

 It is well known that for more than a century in fact, for the 

 greater part of two centuries the wampum beads have been 

 made by the whites for use in commerce with the Indians ; and 

 an opinion has grown up that this has been the case ever since 

 the first arrival of the white colonists, and that most of the wam- 

 pum records held by the Indian tribes have been woven from these 

 modern machine-made beads. Mr. Holmes, however, gives the 

 historical evidence which shows that this opinion has originated 

 in error. He quotes Thomas Morton, of Massachusetts, who in 

 1630, writing of the New England Indians, tells us that " they 

 have a kind of beads instead of money, to buy withal such things 

 as they do want, which they call tvampumpeak ; and it is of two 

 sorts ; the one is white and the other is a violet color. These are 

 made with the shells of fish. The white with them is as silver is 

 with us, the other as our gold ; and for these they buy and sell, not 

 only among themselves, but even with us. These beads are cur- 

 rent in all parts of New England, from one end of the coast to 

 the other ; and although some have endeavored by example to 

 have the like made of the same kind of shells, yet none has ever 

 as yet attained to any perfection in the composure of them, but 

 the salvages have found a great difference to be in the one and the 

 other, and have known the counterfeit beads from those of their 

 own making, and do slight them." Nearly a century later the 

 Carolina surveyor, Lawson, writing in 1714 of the same money, 

 speaks of it as " all made of shells which are found on the coast 

 of Carolina, which are very large and hard, so that they are very 

 difficult to cut. Some English smiths/' he adds, " have tried to 

 drill this sort of shell money, and thereby thought to get an ad- 

 vantage, but it proved so hard that nothing could be gained." 

 The introduction of the machine drill could not, in fact, have 

 made much difference in this respect, as each bead must still be 

 fashioned separately by a white workman, whose time was much 

 more valuable than that of an Indian. That which finally gave 

 the English beads an advantage was not the superiority or the 

 cheapness of their workmanship, but the destruction of the Indian 

 workmen. The quarter of a century which followed the publi- 

 cation of Lawson's book, from 1714 to 1740, saw the extermination 

 of most of the Carolina tribes, and a great decline in the numbers 

 of the Northern Indians from the effects of war and pestilence. It 

 was during this period that the wampum-making industry seems 



