90 PICTOGRAPHS OF THE NORTH AMERICAN INDIANS. 



the Indian tribes west of the Mississippi, had never heard of this or 

 any other similar attempt among them to establish a chronological 

 system. Bragging biographies of chiefs and partisan histories of par- 

 ticular wars delineated in picture writing on hides or bark are very 

 common. Nearly every traveler on the plains has obtained a painted 

 robe, on which some aboriginal artist has stained rude signs purport- 

 ing to represent tribal or personal occurrences, or often the family con- 

 nections of the first owner. Some of these in the possession of the 

 present writer have special significance and are mentioned under appro- 

 priate heads in the present work. 



It is believed that, in the pictographs of all of these peoples discov- 

 ered before the chart mentioned, the obvious intention was either his- 

 torical or biographical, or more generally was to chronicle occurrences 

 as such, and that there was not an apparent design to portray events 

 selected without exclusive reference to their intrinsic interest or import- 

 ance, but because they severally occurred within regular successive in- 

 tervals of time, and to arrange them in an orderly form, specially con- 

 venient for uf e as a calendar and valuable for no other purpose. 



The copy made by Lieutenant Reed was traced over a duplicate of 

 the original, which latter was drawn on a buffalo robe by Lone-Dog, an 

 aged Indian, belonging to the Yanktonai tribe of the Dakotas, who 

 in the autumn of 1876 was near Fort Peck, Montana, and was reported 

 to be still in his possession. His Dakota name is given him by cor- 

 respondents who knew him, as in the ordinary English literation, 

 Shuuka-ishnala, the words respectively corresponding very nearly with 

 the vocables in Eiggs's lexicon for dog-lone. Others have, however, 

 identified him as Chi-no-sa, translated as "a lone wanderer," and as- 

 serted that he was at the time mentioned with the hostile Dakotas 

 under Sitting Bull. There appear to have been several Dakotas of the 

 present generation known to the whites as Lone-Dog. 



Plate VI is a representation of the chart as it would appear on the 

 buffalo robe, but it is photographed from the copy on linen cloth, not 

 directly from the robe. 



The duplicate from which the copy was immediately taken was in the 

 possession of Basil Clement, a half-breed interpreter, living at Little 

 Bend, near Fort Sully, Dakota, who professed to have obtained informa- 

 tion concerning the chart from personal inquiries of many Indians, and 

 whose dictated translation of them, reduced to writing in his own 

 words, forms the basis of that given in the present paper. The genu- 

 ineness of the document was verified by separate examination, through 

 another interpreter, of the most intelligent Indians accessible at Fort 

 Kice, and at a considerable distance from Clement, who could have had 

 no recent communication with those so examined. One of the latter, 

 named Good-Wood, a Blackfoot Dakota and an enlisted scout attached 

 to the garrison at Fort Kice, immediately recognized the copy now in 

 possession of the writer as "the same thing Lone-Dog had," and also 



