266 PICTURE-WRITING OF THE AMERICAN INDIANS, = 
SECTION 2. 
WINTER COUNTS. 
In the preliminary paper on ‘Pictographs of the North American 
Indians,” published in the Fourth Annual Report of the Bureau of Eth- 
nology, 58 pages of text and 46 full-page plates were devoted to the 
winter counts of the Dakota Indians. The minute detail of explana- 
tion, the systematic comparison, and the synoptic presentation which 
seemed to be necessary need not now be repeated to establish the genu- 
ine character of the invention. This consisted in the use of events, 
which were in some degree historical, to form a system of chronology. 
The record of the events was only the device by which was accom- 
plished the continuous designation of years, in the form of charts 
corresponding in part with the orderly arrangement of divisions of 
time termed calendars. It was first made public by the present writer 
in a paper entitled “A Calendar of the Dakota Nation,” which was 
issued in April, 1877, in Bulletin ILI, No. I, of the United States Geo- 
logical and Geographical Survey. The title is now changed to that 
adopted by the Dakotas themselves, viz, Winter Counts—in the origi- 
nal, wan‘iyetu wo/wapi. 
The lithographed chart published with that paper, substantially the 
same as Pl. xx, Lone-Dog’s Winter Count, now much better presented 
than ever before, is the winter count used by, or at least known to, a 
large portion of the Dakota people, extending over the seventy-one 
years commencing with the winter of A. D, 1800-01. 
The copy from which the lithograph was taken is traced on a strip 
of cotton cloth, in size 1 yard square, which the characters almost 
entirely fill, and is painted in two colors, black and red, used in the 
original, of which it is a facsimile. The plate is a representation of 
the chart as it would appear on the buffalo robe. It was photographed 
from the copy on linen eloth, and not directly from the buffalo robe. 
It was painted on the robe by Lone-Dog, an Indian belonging to the 
Yanktonais tribe of the Dakotas, who in the autumn of 1876 was near 
Fort Peck, Montana. His Dakota name is given in the ordinary Eng- 
lish literation as Shunka-ishnala, which words correspond nearly with 
the vocables in Riggs’s lexicon for dog-lone. Lone-Dog claimed that, 
with the counsel of the old men of his tribe, he decided upon some event 
or circumstance which should distinguish each year as it passed, and 
marked what was considered to be its appropriate symbol or device 
upon a buffalo robe kept for the purpose. The robe was at convenient 
times exhibited to other Indians of the tribe, who were thus taught the 
meaning and use of the signs as designating the several years. 
Itis not, however, supposed that Lone-Dog was of sufficient age in the 
year 1800 to enter upon the work. Hither there was a predecessor from 
whom he received the earlier records or, when he had reached man- 
