41 6 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM 



On one of them was a row of figures like half diamonds, each ex- 

 tending across the belt. From Buck's explanation I gathered that 

 the figures were conventionalized hearts. This perpetuated the 

 memory of a treaty. " With what tribe? " I asked. " The Eries," 

 answered Buck. ''About what time?" "About 200 years after 

 the white man came to America." This illustrates the starting 

 point which Buck chose for nearly all his estimates of time. So 

 many years or centuries before or after the white man came. 



Belts of pure white beads Buck described as records of treaties 

 of peace. Stripes diagonally across a belt, he said, were symbols 

 of agreement that the tribe giving it would help the Six Nations in 

 war — the diagonal figure being intended as props for . the Long 

 House, the symbol of the confederacy. One belt which showed 

 in its middle an oblong figure with a spot in its center. Buck said 

 was the record of a treaty granting hunting and fishing privileges, 

 that is to say, the tribes exchanging the belts agreed to use certain 

 hunting and fishing territory in common. When asked how this 

 was symboHzed by the design on the belt, Buck explained that the 

 parallelogram was a dish, the spot in its center a piece of meat. A 

 belt of purple containing a white conventionalized design like that 

 commonly called the Greek key pattern (a meander) was said to 

 have been sent by whites as a confirmation of a treaty. 



The collection of belts brought by Buck did not appear so numer- 

 ous as that shown (1871) on Mr Hale's photograph. Its most in- 

 teresting feature was half of the belt which, according to tradition, 

 signalized the formation of the Iroquois confederacy. The cir- 

 cumstance that he had only half the belt Buck explained by saying 

 that, when the Six Nations separated after the American revolution, 

 the majority leaving their ancestral home in what is now New York 

 state to become the wards of the British people, for whom they had 

 fought, in Canada, the wampum belts were divided between the two 

 bodies. In the case of this belt, the league belt, neither body 

 wished to surrender it to the other, so it was cut in two and each 

 body took a half. This belt, however, is not that which is described 

 as the Hiawatha belt, in the possession of the mayor of Albany. 



The latter belt, according to a description recently printed, con- 

 tains four oblong figures, 4 inches by 5, two of which are on either 

 side of a diamond-shaped figure in the middle. All the figures are 

 connected by links and are expounded as follows: The diamond 

 represents the Onondaga nation, which was the wealthiest and most 

 powerful. The other four figures stand for the Senecas, Mohawks, 

 Cayugas and Oneidas. These were the original five nations of the 

 confederacy. Now the half believed by the Canadian Iroquois to 

 be the record of the formation of the league, (the Great Peace, as 

 Mr Hale would have called it) shows only a row of conventional- 

 ized human figures clamping |iands, an exgefrfingl;^ jrud§ mi simple 



