MALLERY.] PRAYER STICKS. 509 
ported him until he learned from him his creed and his system of teaching it to 
others, when he discharged him and commenced preaching amongst his people him- 
self, pretending to have had an interview with some superhuman mission or inspired 
personage, ingeniously resolving that if there was any honor or emolument or influ- 
ence to be gained by the promulgation of it, he might as well have it as another 
person; and with this view he commenced preaching and instituted a prayer, which 
he ingeniously carved on a maple stick of an inch and a half in breadth, in charac- 
ters somewhat resembling Chinese letters. These sticks, with the prayers on them, 
he has introduced into every family of the tribe and into the hands of every indi- 
vidual; and as he has necessarily the manufacturing of them all, he sells them at his 
own price and has thus added lucre to fame, and in two essential and effective 
ways augmented his influence in his tribe. Every man, woman, and child in the 
tribe, so far as I saw them, were in the habit of saying their prayer from this stick 
when going to bed at night and also when rising in the morning, which was invari- 
Fig. 715.—Ah-ton-we-tuck. 
ably done by placing the forefinger of the right hand under the upper character 
until they repeat a sentence or two, which it suggests to them, and then slipping it 
under the next and the next, and so on to the bottom of the stick, which altogether 
required about ten minutes, as if was sung over in a sort of a chant to the end. 
Fig. 716, from the same volume, opposite page 100, is a portrait of 
On-saw-kie, The-Sac, a Pottawatomie, using one of these prayer sticks, 
which had been procured from the Shawnee Prophet. 
Figs. 715 and 716 with their descriptions exhibit an intermediate 
condition between the aboriginal mnemonic method and the Christian 
formula of prayer by the use of printed books. They should be con- 
sidered in comparison with the remarks on the ‘Miemae Hieroglyphs,” 
Chap. xIx, See. 2. j 
Fig. 717, incised on the Kejimkoojik rocks in Nova Scotia, suggests 
the midé’ lodge, sometimes called the medicine lodge, of the Ojibwa, 
