1893-94.] PICTURE-WRITING OF THE BLACKFEET. 117 



results from the figure-alphabet being precisely the same in both, while 

 the devices of the nugamoons, or medicine, vvabino, hunting and war 

 songs are known solely to the initiates who have learned them, and who 

 always pay high to the native professors for this knowledge." The 

 mythology of the Indians was sometimes ropresented by pictographs. 

 When Marquette and his companions went down the Mississippi a picto- 

 graph was seen which filled the Indians with awe, and they told him 

 that this rock-inscription represented a story, which was " that a demon 

 haunted the river at this place, whose roar could be heard at a great dis- 

 tance, and who would engulf them in the abyss where he dwelt; that the 

 waters were full of frightful monsters who would devour them in their 

 canoe." Rock inscriptions are abundant in the localities frequented by 

 the Indians scattered over the northern part of the continent. Many of 

 them, however, are in secluded places, and not easily discovered by 

 travellers. 



Birch-bark rolls are used by the Cree Indians, one of which, belonging 

 to Louis Constant, is neatly illustrated in "The Rainbow of the North," 

 with this explanation : — " Some time since he put into Mr. Hunter's 

 hands the last relic of his former superstition. It is a roll of birch-rind, 

 about four feet long and nearly a foot broad, and on the inner surface 

 are scratched with some pointed instrument various hierographic devices, 

 intended to mark out the straight road to long life and happiness. This 

 road is guarded on one side by figures of the sacred goose, and on the other 

 by a corresponding row of the heads and arms of some of their other 

 deities, while the supposed paths of the wicked diverge from the main 

 road and are lost. But the whole is so uncouth that it is only worthy of 

 attention as a proof of the extravagances into which the human nn'nd is 

 suffered to fall when it has departed from the living God. And yet it 

 cannot rest satisfied without a guide, real or self-created. Louis Con- 

 stant told Mr. Hunter that he used to regard this roll with the same 

 reverence he now felt for the Bible, but that, as might be expected, it had 

 since his conversion been to him a source of shame and sorrow." In 

 various places in the Dominion pictographs have been discovered. 

 Schoolcraft describes an elaborate inscription on the rocks on Cunning- 

 ham's Island, ascribed to the Eries, a tribe now extinct. Some have 

 been found in the country of the Micmacs in the eastern part of the 

 Dominion. About twenty miles from Port Arthur and three and a half 

 miles from Rabbit Mountain Mine, lying between it and Lake Superior, 

 is a small lake opening out of Lake Oliver. Upon the rocky walls of 

 one of the shores of this small lake are coloured pictures of men, canoes, 

 paddles, crabs, serpents and other figures. There is the " Jesuits* 

 Cross " on a rock on the northern shore of Lake Superior, between 



