NO. 15 ROLL CALL OF IROQUOIS CHIEFS — FENTON 9 



cut in hieroglyphics upon a wooden stick, after the custom of his 

 people, and he was directed to send copies of it to all the Indian 

 villages." None of the Delaware prophet's prayer sticks has been 

 preserved to our knowledge. 



The United States National Museum, however, has an engraved 

 prayer stick that has been ascribed to the Kickapoo prophet, Kanakuk, 

 and Catlin made a portrait of Onsawkie holding a similar stick ; both 

 of these have been published by Mooney (1896, pp. 670, 698), and 

 they are discussed by Voegelin. On the use of these sticks which 

 the Kickapoo prophet carved and sold to his followers, 1827-34, there 

 is an eyewitness account by the Rev. Isaac McCoy, which appeared 

 in his scarce "History of Baptist Indian Missions" (New York, 

 1840), made when the prophet was living on the Illinois River : 



Kenekuk, the Prophet, claimed the honor of being the founder of his own 

 sect . . . His adherents were about four hundred souls, about half of whom were 

 Potawatomies. He professed to receive all that he taught immediately from the 

 Great Spirit . . . Congregational worship was performed among them, and the 

 exercises lasted from one to three hours. They heard speeches from the Prophet, 

 and all united in articulating a kind of prayer, expressed in broken sentences 

 often repeated, in a monotonous sing-song tune, equalling in length about two 

 measures of a common psalm tune. All in unison engaged in this ; and, in order 

 to preserve harmony in words, each held in his or her hand a small board, about 

 an inch and a half broad and about ten inches long, upon which was engraved 

 arbitrary characters, which they followed up with their finger until the last 

 character . . . These characters were 5 in number. The first represented the 

 heart ; the second, the heart, affections, and flesh ; the third, the life ; the fourth, 

 names; the fifth, kindred. 



Considerable detail follows on how the characters were gone over 

 several times (Foreman, 1946, pp. 213-214). Other accounts indi- 

 cate that Kanakuk's prayer sticks were followed with the index finger 

 from top to bottom. 



Another sacred slab attributed to the Shawnee prophet, Tenskwa- 

 tawa, who flourished somewhat earlier, and whom Catlin painted 

 holding his "medicine fire" in 1831, was collected among the Winne- 

 bago about 1922 by Milford G. Chandler and now reposes at the 

 Cranbrook Institute of Science; it has been described (Galloway, 

 1943). Identical sticks of the Shawnee prophet are in the Milwaukee 

 Public Museum and in the Blackhawk Museum (R. T. Hatt, per- 

 sonal communication). 



In general, these engraved and painted sticks that we have been 

 discussing are mnemonic devices to aid in recounting tribal history, 

 or they carry formulae for some sequence of phenomena that must be 

 preserved unaltered: lists of dates, events, names, places, significant 



