34 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. Ill 



While not a Chief's cane, it is in character. On the head of a vine- 

 spiraled stick has been carved a miniature False-face. (PI. 6, fig. 2, a.) 

 The specimen (Cat. No. 24,103/6084) is recorded as collected among 

 the Senecas of Cattaraugus Reservation in western New York by 

 Barrett in 1918, but according to his field notes it was carried by the 

 man who is annually elected to lead the march of the False-faces from 

 one council house to the other at the Midwinter Festival. The latter 

 notes about the cane are in a section marked Onondaga and may 

 refer to the Six Nations Reserve.^* 



Parker collected and published (1916, p. 112) a record staff for 

 the Condolence and Installation ceremony of a League chief ; it is 

 a round staff with one flattened surface on which are drawn picto- 

 graphs (illustrated, p. iii), 18 in number, which refer to stations in 

 the Requickening Address, but not to the roll call of chiefs. The 

 specimen is in the New York State Museum (Cat. No. 36907). The 

 pictographs, nevertheless, show affinity to the drawings on the cane 

 of Andrew Spragg, which are in the same style. 



In the winter of 1941 Chief Joe Williams of Seneca Longhouse 

 at Six Nations on Grand River, showed me a Chief's cane of a type 

 that resembles the stick of George Davis, already described, in the 

 National Museum of Canada. None of the above specimens, however, 

 is like the specimen under discussion. 



The brothers Simeon and Hardy Gibson came the closest to de- 

 scribing a cane that they had seen in use among the Lower Cayuga 

 and which had the precise arrangement of pegs for denominating 

 the chiefs, although it was a simple mnemonic and lacked accompany- 

 ing pictographs. In fact, Simeon volunteered to reproduce such a cane 

 and he was more accurate in describing it than his brother. We made 

 a drawing at the time of the interview but no such cane ever material- 

 ized (fig. i,b). Starting at the top, which he gave a swordlike handle, 

 Simeon said that it would have three groups of three pegs for the 

 three committees of Mohawk chiefs, with the same repeated for the 

 Oneida chiefs, followed by groups six, one, two, three, and two in a 

 line for the Onondaga chiefs, an arrangement of two, three, three, and 

 two for the Cayuga chiefs, and four groups of two for the Senecas. 

 Except that they were spaced in groups or committees, the pegs ex- 

 tended in a continuous line from the top to the end of the roster, near 

 the foot of the cane. Groups of chiefs were separated by a line, and 

 two lines segregated tribal councils. 



In another interview Hardy Gibson arranged the tribes in phratries 



18 McKern, W. C, personal communication, October 2, 1947. 



