5. The settlement on opposite shore of lake.
6. Boat crossing for the signalist.
Under this head of messages and communications may be included the material objects sent as messages, many accounts of which are published. It is to be expected that graphic representations of the same or similar objects, with corresponding arrangement, should have similar significance. Among the Indians painted arrows, bearing messages when discharged, are familiar. The Turkish Selam, or flower letters, are in the same category.
The following account of a “diplomatic packet” is extracted from Schoolcraft, Vol. III, p. 306, et seq.:
In the month of August, 1852, a message reached the President of the United States, by a delegation of the Pueblos of Tesuque in New Mexico, offering him friendship and intercommunication; and opening, symbolically, a road from the Moqui country to Washington. * * *
This unique diplomatic packet consists of several articles of symbolic import. The first is the official and ceremonial offer of the peace-pipe. This is symbolized by a joint of the maize, five and a half inches long, and half an inch in diameter. The hollow of the tube is filled by leaves of a plant which represents tobacco. It is stopped to secure the weed from falling out, by the downy yellow under plumage of some small bird. Externally, around the center of the stalk, is a tie of white cotton twisted string of four strands, (not twisted by the distaff,) holding, at its end, a small tuft of the before-mentioned downy yellow feathers, and a small wiry feather of the same species. The interpreter has written on this, “The pipe to be smoked by the President.” * * The object is represented in the cut, A, [represented in Figure 63.]
Fig. 63.—Part of diplomatic packet.
The second symbol consists of two small columnar round pieces of wood, four and a half inches long, and four-tenths in diameter, terminating in a cone. The cone is one and a half inches long, and is colored black; the rest of the pieces are blue; a peace color among the Indians south, it seems, as well as north. This color has the appearance of being produced by the carbonate of copper mixed with aluminous earth; and reminds one strongly of the blue clays of the Dacotahs. The wood, when cut, is white, compact, and of a peculiar species. A notch is cut at one end of one of the pieces, and colored yellow. A shuck of the maize, one end of which, rolled in the shape of a cone, is bound up by cotton strings, with a small bird’s feather, in the manner of the symbolic pipe. There is also tied up with the symbolic sticks, one of the secondary feathers and bits of down of a bird of dingy color. The feather is naturally tipped with white. Together with this, the tie holds a couple of sticks of a native plant or small seed of the prairie grass, perhaps. It may, together with the husk of the maize, be emblematic of their cultivation. The whole of the tie represents the Moquis. The following cut, B, [reproduced in Figure 64,] represents this symbol: