The material on which the drawings were made was generally so perishable that few examples have been left to us. One, a stone about seven inches long, found in central New Jersey, has been described and figured by Dr. Abbott.[101] It represents an arrow crossing certain straight lines. Several "gorgets" (smooth stone tablets pierced with holes for suspension, and probably used for ceremonial purposes), stone knives and pebbles, showing inscribed marks and lines, and rude figures, are engraved in Dr. Abbott's book; others similar have been seen in Bucks and Berks counties, Pa.
There was a remarkable series of hieroglyphics, some eighty in number, on a rock at Safe Harbor, on the Susquehanna. They have been photographed and described by Prof. T. C. Porter, of Lancaster, but have yet to be carefully analyzed.[102] From its location, it was probably the work of the Susquehannocks, and did not belong to the general system of Algonkin pictography.
If the rude drawings appended to the early treatises as signatures of native sachems be taken as a guide, little or no uniformity prevailed in the personal signs. The same chieftain would, on various occasions, employ symbols differing so widely that they have no visible relation.[103]
An interesting incident is recorded by Friend John Richardson when on a visit to William Penn, at his manor of Pennsburg, in 1701. Penn asked the Indian interpreter to give him some idea of what the native notion of God was. The interpreter, at a loss for words, had recourse to picture writing, and describing a number of circles, one inside the other, he pointed to the centre of the innermost and smallest one, and there, "placed, as he said, by way of representation, the Great Man."[104] The explanation was striking and suggestive, and hints at the meaning of the not infrequent symbol of the concentric circles.
An alleged piece of Delaware pictography is copied by Schoolcraft[105] from the London Archæologia, Vol. IV. It purports to be an inscription found on the Muskingum river in 1780, and the interpretation is said to have been supplied by the celebrated Delaware chief, Captain White Eyes (Coquethagechton). As interpreted, it relates to massacres of the whites by the Delaware chief, Wingenund, in the border war of 1763.
There is a tissue of errors here. The pictograph, "drawn with charcoal and oil on a tree," must have been quite recent, and is not likely to have referred to events seventeen years antecedent. There is no evidence that Wingenund took part in Pontiac's conspiracy, and he was the consistent friend of the whites.[106] Several of the characters are not like Indian pictographs. And finally, White Eyes, the alleged interpreter in 1780, had died at Tuscarawas, two years before, Nov. 10th, 1778![107]
Record Sticks.
The Algonkin nations very generally preserved their myths, their chronicles, and the memory of events, speeches, etc., by means of marked sticks. As early as 1646, the Jesuit missionaries in Canada made use of these to teach their converts the prayers of the Church and their sermons.[108]
The name applied to these record or tally sticks was, among the Crees and Chipeways, massinahigan, which is the common word now for book, but which originally meant "a piece of wood marked with fire," from the verb masinákisan, I imprint a mark upon it with fire, I burn a mark upon it,[109] thus indicating the rude beginning of a system of mnemonic aids. The Lenape words for book, malackhickan, Camp., mamalekhican Zeis., were probably from the same root.
In later days, instead of burning the marks upon the sticks, they were painted, the colors as well as the figures having certain conventional meanings.[110]