190 MYTHS OF THE CHEKOKKE [eth.axn.19 



due to the hostility of their Algonquian neighbors, !iy whom the Hurons and their 

 allies were forced to take refuge about Georgian bay and the liead of Lake Ontario, 

 while the Iroquois proper retreated to central New York. In 15:55 C'artier found the 

 shores of the river from Quebec to Montreal oceuiiied by an IrcHjuoian people, but on 

 the settlement of the country seventy years later the same region was found in pos- 

 session of Algonquian tribes. The confederation of the five Iroquc lis nations, proliably 

 about the year 1540, enabled them to check the Algonquian invasion and to assume 

 the offensive. Linguistic and other evidence shows that the separation of the Chero- 

 kee from the parent stock must have far antedated this period. 



(5) Wal.im Olum (p. 18): The name signifies "red .score," from the Delaware 

 ivalain, "painted," more particularly "painted red," and otum, "a score, tally- 

 mark." The Walam Olum was first published in 1836 in a work entitled "The 

 American Nations," by C(.instantine Samuel Raflnesque, a versatile and voluminous, 

 but very erratic, French scholar, who spent the latter half of his life in this country, 

 dying in Philadelphia in 1840. He asserted that it was a translation of a manuscript 

 in the Delaware language, which was an interpretation of an ancient sacred metrical 

 legend of the Delawares, recorded in pictographs cut upon wood, obtained in 1820 by 

 a medical friend of his among the Delawares then living in central Indiana. He 

 says himself: "These actual olum were first obtained in 1820 as a reward for a 

 medical cure, deemed a curiosity, and were unexplicable. In 1822 were obtained 

 from another individual the songs annexed thereto in the original language, but no 

 one could be found l)y me able to translate them. I had therefore to learn the 

 language since, by the help of Zeisberger, Heckewelder, and a manuscript diction- 

 ary, on jiurpose to translate them, which I only at'complisheil in 1833." On account 

 of the unique character of the alleged Indian record and Ratinesque's own lack of 

 standing among his scientific contemporaries, but little attention was paid to the 

 discovery until Brinton took up the subject a few years ago. After a critical sifting 

 of the evidence from every point of view he arrived at the conclusion that the 

 work is a genuine native production, although the manuscript rendering is faulty, 

 partly from the white scribe's ignorance of the language and partly from the Indian 

 narrator's ignorance of the meaning of the archaic forms. Brinton's edition (q. v.), 

 published from Rafinesque's manuscript, gives the legend in triplicate form — picto- 

 graph, Delaware, and English translation, with notes and glossary, and a valuable 

 ethnologic introduction by Brinton himself. 



It is not known that any of the original woodcut pictographs of the Walam Olum 

 are now in existence, although a statement of Rafinesque implies that he had seen 

 them. As evidence of the truth of his statement, however, we have the fact that 

 precisely similar pictographic series cut upon birch bark, each jiictograph represent- 

 ing a line or couplet of a sacred metrical recitation, are now known to be common 

 among the Ojibwa, Menomini, and other northern tribes. In 1762 a Delaware 

 prophet recorded his visions in hieroglyphics cut upon a wooden .stick, and aliout 

 the year 1827 a Kickapoo reformer adopted the same method to propagate a new 

 religion among the tribes. One of these "prayer sticks" is now in the National 

 Museum, being all that remains of a large basketful delivered to a missionary in 

 Indiana by a party of Kickapoo Indians in 1830 (see plate and description, pp. 665, 

 697 et seq. in the author's Ghost-dance Religion, Fourteenth Annual Report of the 

 Bureau of Ethnology). 



(6) Fish river (p. 18) : Namsesi Sipu (Heckewelder, Indian Nations, 49), or Namas- 

 sipi (Walam Olum, p. 198). Deceived by a slight similarity of sound, Heckewelder 

 makes this river identical with the Mississippi, but as Schoolcraft shows (Notes on 

 Iroquois, p. 316) the true name of the Mississippi is simply :Misi-sipi, "great river," 

 and "fish river" would be a most inappropriate name for such a turbulent current, 

 where only the coarser species can live. The mere fact that there can he a question 

 of identity among experts familiar with ludian nomenclature would indicate that it 



