40 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. Ill 



later times) or the roll call of the League. This argument, nonetheless, 

 does not deny that one who understood it could employ the mnemonic 

 circle of wampum for enumerating the chiefs of the confederacy. 



List of chiefs by Seth Newhouse. — Toward the end of the nine- 

 teenth century the Iroquois record keepers had ceased to rely entirely 

 upon wampum strings and other devices for remembering the roll call 

 of chiefs. From a list of chiefs in the missionary orthography that 

 was instituted by the Anglicans and the S. P, C. G. (Society for the 

 Propagation of the Christian Gospel) for writing Mohawk and print- 

 ing hymnals and prayer books it is clear how the ancient mnemonics 

 were combined and labeled with the new writing. The manuscript, 

 which was among Mr. Hewitt's papers in the Bureau of American 

 Ethnology, was evidently written by some Iroquois scribe, who was 

 familiar with both systems, on a piece of folded letter stationery 

 bearing in the upper left corner of page i the circular seal of what 

 appears to be "C. R. Chisholm & Co." around a wood-burning loco- 

 motive. Informants on the Six Nations Reserve recognized the name, 

 which is hardly legible, as Chisholm, a firm of Toronto lawyers who 

 had been retained by the Six Nations chiefs ; and Hilton M, Hill knew 

 an A. G. Chisholm, barrister, who was solicitor for the Six Nations 

 in the Grand River Navigation Claim and who had died about 1942. 

 A. G. Chisholm, barrister, had offices in London, Ontario, according 

 to Charles Cooke, retired member of the Indian Department, Ottawa. 

 Mr. Hill declared that the document is not in the hand of Josiah Hill, 

 for many years secretary of the Six Nations council, but suggested 

 two other possibilities. Chief William Loft spoke Mohawk, and he 

 was a great penman and natural artist, as witness the memorial in 

 burnt leather which hangs in the council house at Ohsweken; he was 

 the only man who could speak the Mohawk of the League ritual and 

 who could write well, and he died about 1939 or 1940. But it is more 

 than likely that Seth Newhouse was the scribe. Newhouse manu- 

 scripts in the archive of the Bureau of American Ethnology are in 

 the same hand, which suggests that this Mohawk chronicler and 

 codifier of custom law printed the list on a borrowed sheet of lawyers' 

 stationery. The identification both supports and is confirmed by the 

 analysis of a recently discovered Iroquois Constitution which is the 

 work of Newhouse (Fenton, 1949, p. 144). 



Apart from the list of chiefs, on the margin of the first page appears 

 the mnemonic system for remembering how many titles belong to the 

 five tribes, how the tribal councils are spaced to signify intertribal re- 

 lations, and what are the classes of chiefs in each tribal council — all 

 nicely labeled by tribe, and enumerated into 16 classes (pi. 9, and 



