10 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. Ill 



Stations in prayers, songs, order of ceremony, mythology, or treaties. 

 There is a considerable literature on Iroquois wampum belts with 

 attendant explanation of mnemonic pictographs that they preserve. 

 But the bark records and the painted posts on which war leaders 

 delineated their achievements have vanished. Only the colonial docu- 

 ments bear the signatures of Iroquois chiefs, which usually take the 

 form of outline drawings of clan eponyms — wolf, bear, turtle, snipe, 

 beaver, eel; sometimes objects — war club, tree, circles connected by 

 a line to signify ground nut (Apios tuberosa Moench,), the mark of 

 the Potato, or possibly, the Ball clan. The living descendants of the 

 Five Nations can contribute little to our understanding of ancient 

 pictographs (Hewitt and Fenton, 1945), although the following 

 description of the Condolence cane sheds some light on how the 

 ancient law-givers kept a record of their councils. 



THE CANE OF ANDREW SPRAGG 



A document out of the leaves of a primitive council record comes 

 down to us in the form of a cane bearing pegs and corresponding 

 pictographs to denominate the founders of the Iroquois League. This 

 is a primitive roster of the chiefs of the Five Nations — Mohawk, 

 Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca tribes — such as were the 

 village chiefs whom Deganawi'dah and Hiawatha persuaded to accept 

 the Great Peace. The beginnings of the Confederacy are related in 

 the Deganawi'dah legend which states unequivocally that the roll 

 call of the founders, the proportional number of representatives for 

 each tribe, how the chiefships are related to each other as individual 

 offices in tribal councils, and the relation of tribes to each other in the 

 council of the League must be maintained in the original order as 

 it was decreed by the founders. In all likelihood the number of titles 

 has increased and the order of enumeration has changed during the 

 centuries that have elapsed since the village chiefs of the Mohawk, 

 Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca tribes formed the League, 

 which they likened to an extended house, Ganonh'syoni, before the 

 close of the sixteenth century. Whatever new titles were added to 

 the original roster and however succeeding chanters of the roll call 

 have changed the order of reciting the names, the cane of Andrew 

 Spragg, the famed Cayuga ritual singer, is a true tally of the names 

 of the Five Nations chiefs who, following the American Revolution, 

 as Empire Loyalists, reconstituted the League from its shattered rem- 

 nants after coming to Canada and settling on the Grand River. At 

 least the cane, as we shall see, agrees substantially with Morgan's 



