MALLERY. ] INDIAN CHRONOLOGY. 267 
hood, he gathered the traditions from his elders and worked back, the 
object either then or before being to establish some system of chronol- 
ogy for the use of the tribe or more probably in the first instance for 
the use of his own band. 
Present knowledge of the winter-count systems shows that Lone-Dog 
was not their originator. They were started, at the latest, before the 
present generation, and have been kept up by a number of independ- 
ent recorders. The idea was one specially appropriate to the Indian 
genius, yet the peculiar mode of record was an invention, and it is not 
probably a very old invention, as if has not been used beyond a defi- 
nite district and people. If an invention of that character had been of 
great antiquity ic would probably have spread by intertribal channels 
beyond the bands or tribes of the Dakota, where alone the copies of 
such charts have been found and are understood. 
The fact that Lone-Dog’s Winter Count, the only one known at the 
time of its first publication, begins at a date nearly coinciding with 
the first year of the present century, as it is called in the arbitrary com- 
putation that prevails among most of the civilized peoples, awakened 
a suspicion that it might be due to civilized intercourse and was not a 
mere coincidence. If the influence of missionaries or traders started 
any plan of chronology, it is remarkable that they did not suggest one 
in some manner resembling the system so long and widely used, and 
the only one they knew, of counting the numbers from an era, such as 
the birth of Christ, the Hegira, the Ab Urbe Condita, or the first Olym- 
piad. But the chart shows nothing of this nature. The earliest char- 
acter merely represents the killing of a small number of Dakotas by 
their enemies, an event neither so important nor interesting as many 
others of the seventy-one shown in the chart, more than one of which, 
indeed, might well have been selected as a notable fixed point before 
and after which simple arithmetical notation could have been used to 
mark the years. Instead of any plan that civilized advisers would 
naturally have introduced, the one actually adopted was to individu- 
alize each year by a specific recorded symbol. The ideographie record, 
being preserved and understood by many, could be used and referred 
to with ease and accuracy. Definite signs for the first appearance of 
the smallpox and for the first capture of wild horses were dates as 
satisfactory to the Dakota as the corresponding expressions A. D. 
1802 and 1813 are to the Christian world, and far more certain than the 
chronology expressed in terms of A. M.and B.C. The arrangement of 
separate characters in an outward spiral starting from a central point 
is a clever expedient to dispense with the use of numbers for noting 
the years, yet allowing every date to be determined by counting back- 
ward or forward from any other known. The whole conception seems 
one strongly characteristic of the Indians, who in other instances have 
shown such expertness in ideography. The discovery of several other 
charts, which differ in their times of commencement and ending from 
