298 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



To break from the shell the fragment suitable for a bead, to rasp it 

 on a stone to the proper circular or cylindrical shape, to polish it to an 

 ivory smoothness, and then to pierce it with a drill-point of flint, was 

 a tedious labor. It was this labor which, in great part, gave the wam- 

 pum its value. This alone, however, would not have been suflicient, 

 if the article had not held, in the social system of the Indians, a posi- 

 tion which kept it always in demand. By their custom, handed down 

 from time immemorial, it was essential that all great acts of state policy 

 should be accompanied by the exhibition of wampum in some form. 

 The messenger who summoned the chiefs of a tribe to a public meet- 

 ing bore a string of wamjium to authenticate his errand. The embas- 

 sador, in proposing a treaty, laid down a string or belt of wampum at 

 the close of every clause of his address. When the treaty was con- 

 cluded, several belts were usually exchanged, by way of ratification. 

 A belt of black wampum, formally delivered, was a declaration of war. 

 A string of black wampum, borne by a runner, announced to all the 

 villages of an Indian nation the death of a high chief ; and, at his burial, 

 belts and strings of wampum were deposited in his grave. At the great 

 religious festival of the Iroquois, the " Sacrifice of the White Dog," 

 the dead animal was enveloped in strings of wampum, which were 

 burned with him. The belts and strings which accompanied the mak- 

 ing of treaties and the framing of laws were kept as tribal records, and 

 were brought forth on great occasions to be exhibited and explained 

 to the people. The belts which commemorated the conclusion of the 

 famous League of the Iroquois, framed by Hiawatha, Atotarho, and 

 their associate chiefs, four hundred years ago, are still preserved on 

 the Onondaga Reservation in the State of New York. 



The belts, it should be added, were composed of short strings of 

 wampum, containing from six to twenty-four beads each, laid side by 

 side, and closely knotted together. The length of the string made the 

 width of the belt, which varied from two to nine or ten inches, while 

 its length varied from two to eight feet. The wider and longer the 

 belt, the greater, of course, was its value, and the higher its signifi- 

 cance as a pledge or memorial. Each belt usually had its special de- 

 vice, whose meaning was well understood. This device was wrought 

 sometimes in white beads on a dark ground, sometimes in purple beads 

 on a white ground. These symbols were genuine hieroglyphics, re- 

 sembling the ancient pictorial figures in which the modern Chinese 

 characters had their origin. In the Chinese script a parallelogram sig- 

 nifies an inclosure ; it is the fence of a field. On an Iroquois belt a 

 parallelogram denotes a town ; for with them, in ancient times, the 

 town was inclosed in a rectangular palisade. A lozenge-shaped figure 

 represents a council ; it is the Indian hearth, around which the coun- 

 cilors assembled. Oblique marks across a belt are the stamp and token 

 of the Iroquois confederacy. They represent the rafters of the "long- 

 house," to which the confederacy was likened. Others of these sym- 



