ART. I.-A CALENDAR OF THE DAKOTA NATION. 



By Brevet Lieut. Col. Gakrick Mallery, 



Captain First United States Infantry, Acting Signal Officer. 



Plate 1. 



The chart presented with this paper is ascertained to be the calendar 

 of the Dakota Nation, extendino; over the seventy-one years commencing 

 with the winter of A. D. 1799-1800. The copy from which the lithograph 

 was taken is traced on a strip of cotton cloth, in size 9ue yard square, 

 which the symbols almost entirely fill, and was made by Lieut. H. T. Eeed, 

 U. S. A., an accomplished officer of the present writer's company and 

 regiment, in the two colors, black and red, used in the original, of which 

 it purports to be a fac simile. The general design of the chart and the 

 meaning of most of its symbols were determined by Lieutenant Eeed, at 

 Fort Sully, Dak., and afterward at Fort Eice, Dak., in iN^ovember, 

 1876, by him and the writer ; while further investigation by the latter of 

 records and authorities at Washington elicited additional details. After 

 exhibition of the copy to a number of military and civil officers con- 

 nected with the Departments of War and the Interior, it appeared that 

 those who, from service on expeditions and surveys or from special 

 study of American ethnology, were most familiar with the Indian tribes 

 west of the Mississippi, had never heard of this or any other similar 

 attempt among them to establish a chronological system. Bragging 

 biographies of chiefs and partisan histories of particular wars, deline- 

 ated in picture-writing on hides or bark, are very common. IsTearly 

 every traveler on the plains has obtained a " painted robe ", on which 

 some aboriginal artist has stained rude signs purporting to represent 

 tribal or personal occurrences, or often the pedigree of the first owner. 

 It may here be apropos to hint a caution that the " fancy " prices paid by 

 amateurs for these decorations of the bison's hide have stimulated their 

 ■wholesale manufacture by agency Indians (locally termed " coffee- 

 coolers"), who make a business of sketching upon ordinary robes the 

 characters in common use, without regard to any real event or person, 

 and selling them as curious records. This pictorial forgery would seem 

 to show a gratifying advance of the Lo family in civilization j but it is 

 'feared that the credit of the invention is chiefly due to some enter- 

 prising traders, who have been known to furnish the unstained robes 

 and paints for the purpose, and simply pay a skillful Indian for his 

 work when the genuine antique or veracious chronicle is delivered. 



