MALLERY. ] WINTER COUNTS. Zila 
as would be natural in the progress of a famine or epidemic, or as an 
event gradually became known over a vast territory. 
A test of the mode of selecting events for designating the Winter 
Counts may be found in a suggestion made by the present writer in his 
account of Lone-Dog’s chart, published in 1877, as follows: 
The year 1876 has furnished good store of events for the recorder’s choice, and it 
will be interesting to learn whether he has selected as the distinguishing event the 
victory over Custer, or, as of still greater interest, the general seizure of ponies, 
whereat the tribes, imitating Rachel, weep and will not be comforted, because they 
are not. 
It now appears that two of the Counts made for 1876 and observed 
by the writer several years later have selected the event of the seizure 
of the ponies, and that none of them make any allusion to the defeat of 
Custer. 
After examination of all the charts it is obvious that the design is not 
narrative, that the noting of events is being subordinated to the mark- 
ing of the years by them, and that the pictographie serial arrangements 
of sometimes trivial though generally notorious incidents having been 
selected with special adaptation for use as a calendar. That in a few 
instances small personal events, such as the birth of the recorder or the 
death of members of his family, are set forth, may be regarded as inter- 
polations in or unauthorized additions to the charts. If they had ex- 
hibited a complete national or tribal history for the years embraced in 
them, their discovery would have been in some respects more valuable, 
but they are interesting to anthropologists because they show an at- 
tempt before unsuspected among the northern tribes of American 
Indians to form a system of chronology. 
While, as before mentioned, it is not now necessary to recapitulate 
the large amount of matter before published concerning the Winter 
Counts of the Dakota, it has been decided to present in an abbre- 
viated form the characters and interpretations of the Lone-Dog chart 
as being the system which was first discovered, and the publication of 
which occasioned the discovery of all the other charts mentioned, The 
Winter Count of Battiste Good has not hitherto been published, and it 
possesses special importance and interest apart from its chronology, for 
which reason it is inserted in the present paper, see infra. 
The several charts of The-Flame, The-Swan, American-Horse, and 
Cloud-Shield, published in the Fourth Annual Report of the Bureau of 
Ethnology, are omitted, but selections from all of them are presented 
under the headings of Ideography, Tribal and Personal Designations, 
Religion, Customs, History, Biography, Conventionalizing, Compari- 
son, and in short are interspersed through the present paper where 
they appropriately belong. 
The reader of the Lone-Dog and Battiste Good charts may find it 
convenient to note the following brief account of the tribal names fre- 
quently mentioned: 
