The general design of the chart and the meaning of most of its characters were ascertained by Lieutenant Reed, at Fort Sully, Dakota, and afterwards at Fort Rice, Dakota, in November, 1876, by the present writer; while further investigation of records and authorities at Washington elicited additional details used in the publication mentioned and many more since its issue.
After exhibition of the copy to a number of military and civil officers connected with the Departments of War and of 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 delineated in picture writing on hides or bark are very common. Nearly 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 family connections of the first owner. Some of these in the possession of the present writer have special significance and are mentioned under appropriate heads in the present work.
It is believed that, in the pictographs of all of these peoples discovered before the chart mentioned, the obvious intention was either historical or biographical, or more generally was to chronicle occurrences as such, and that there was not an apparent design to portray events selected without exclusive reference to their intrinsic interest or importance, but because they severally occurred within regular successive intervals of time, and to arrange them in an orderly form, specially convenient for use as a calendar and valuable for no other purpose.
The copy made by Lieutenant Reed was traced over a duplicate of the original, which latter was drawn on a buffalo robe by Lone-Dog, an aged Indian, belonging to the Yanktonai tribe of the Dakotas, who in the autumn of 1876 was near Fort Peck, Montana, and was reported to be still in his possession. His Dakota name is given him by correspondents who knew him, as in the ordinary English literation, Shunka-ishnala, the words respectively corresponding very nearly with the vocables in Riggs’s lexicon for dog-lone. Others have, however, identified him as Chi-no-sa, translated as “a lone wanderer,” and asserted that he was at the time mentioned with the hostile Dakotas under Sitting Bull. There appear to have been several Dakotas of the present generation known to the whites as Lone-Dog.
Plate VI is a representation of the chart as it would appear on the buffalo robe, but it is photographed from the copy on linen cloth, not directly from the robe.
The duplicate from which the copy was immediately taken was in the possession of Basil Clément, a half-breed interpreter, living at Little Bend, near Fort Sully, Dakota, who professed to have obtained information concerning the chart from personal inquiries of many Indians, and whose dictated translation of them, reduced to writing in his own words, forms the basis of that given in the present paper. The genuineness of the document was verified by separate examination, through another interpreter, of the most intelligent Indians accessible at Fort Rice, and at a considerable distance from Clément, who could have had no recent communication with those so examined. One of the latter, named Good-Wood, a Blackfoot Dakota and an enlisted scout attached to the garrison at Fort Rice, immediately recognized the copy now in possession of the writer as “the same thing Lone-Dog had,” and also stated that he had seen another copy at Standing Rock Agency in the hands of Blue-Thunder, a Blackfoot Dakota. He said it showed “something put down for every year about their nation.” He knew how to use it as a calendar, beginning from the center and counting from right to left, and was familiar with the meaning of many of the later characters and the events they commemorated, in which he corroborated Clément’s translation, but explained that he had forgotten the interpretation of some of the earlier signs, which were about those things done before his birth.
All the investigations that could be made elicited the following account, which, whether accurate or not, the Indians examined certainly believed: Probably with the counsel of the old men and authorities of his tribe, Lone-Dog ever since his youth has been in the habit of deciding upon some event or circumstance which should distinguish each year as it passed, and when such decision was made he marked what was considered to be its appropriate symbol or device upon a buffalo robe kept for the purpose. The robe was at convenient times exhibited to other Indians of the nation, who were thus taught the meaning and use of the signs as designating the several years, in order that at the death of the recorder the knowledge might not be lost. A similar motive as to the preservation of the record led to its duplication in 1870 or 1871, so that Clément obtained it in a form ending at that time. It was also reported by several Indians that other copies of the chart in its various past stages of formation had been known to exist among the several tribes, being probably kept for reference, Lone-Dog and his robe being so frequently inaccessible.
Although Lone-Dog was described as a very old Indian, it was not supposed that he was of sufficient age in the year 1800 to enter upon the duty as explained. Either there was a predecessor from whom he received the earlier records or obtained copies of them, or, his work being first undertaken when he had reached manhood, he gathered the traditions from his elders and worked back so far as he could do so accurately, the object either then or before being to establish some system of chronology for the use of the tribe, or more probably in the first instance for the use of his particular band.
Present knowledge of the Winter Count systems renders it improbable that Lone-Dog was their inventor or originator. They were evidently started, at the latest, before the present generation, and have been kept up by a number of independent recorders. The idea was one specially appropriate to the Indian genius, yet the peculiar mode of record was an invention, and is not probably a very old invention, as it has not, so far as known, spread beyond a definite district or been extensively adopted. If an invention of that character had been of great antiquity it would probably have spread by inter-tribal channels beyond the bands or tribes of the Dakotas, where alone the copies of such charts have been found and are understood. Yet the known existence of portable pictographs of this ascertained character renders it proper to examine rock etchings and other native records with reference to their possible interpretation as designating events chronologically.
A query is naturally suggested, whether intercourse with missionaries and other whites did not first give the Dakotas some idea of dates and awaken a sense of want in that direction. The fact that Lone-Dog’s winter count, the only one known at the time of its first publication, begins at a date nearly coinciding with the first year of the present century by our computation, awakened a suspicion that it might be due to civilized intercourse, and was not a mere coincidence. If the influence of missionaries or traders started any plan of chronology, it is remarkable that they did not suggest one in some manner resembling the system so long and widely used, and the only one they knew, of counting in numbers from an era, such as the birth of Christ, the Hegira, the Ab Urbe Conditâ, the First Olympiad, and the like. But the chart shows nothing of this nature. The earliest character (the one in the center or beginning of the spiral) merely represents the killing of a small number of Dakotas by their enemies, an event of frequent occurrence, and neither so important nor interesting as many others of the seventy-one shown in the chart, more than one of which, indeed, might well have been selected as a notable fixed point before and after which simple arithmetical notation could have been used to mark the years. Instead of any plan that civilized advisers would naturally have introduced, the one actually adopted—to individualize each year by a specific recorded symbol, or totem, according to the decision of a competent person, or by common consent acted upon by a person charged with or undertaking the duty whereby confusion was prevented—should not suffer denial of its originality merely because it was ingenious, and showed more of scientific method than has often been attributed to the northern tribes of America. The ideographic record, being preserved and understood by many, could be used and referred to with sufficient ease and accuracy for ordinary purposes. Definite signs for the first appearance of the small-pox and for the first capture of wild horses may be dates as satisfactory to the Dakotas as the corresponding expressions A. D. 1802 and 1813 to the Christian world, and far more certain than much of the chronological tables of Regiomontanus and Archbishop Usher in terms of A. M. and B. C. The careful arrangement of distinctly separate characters in an outward spiral starting from a central point is a clever expedient to dispense with the use of numbers for noting the years, yet allowing every date to be determined by counting backward or forward from any other that might be known; and it seems unlikely that any such device, so different from that common among the white visitors, should have been prompted by them. The whole conception seems one strongly characteristic of the Indians, who in other instances have shown such expertness in ideography. The discovery of the other charts presented or referred to in this paper, which differ in their times of commencement and ending from that of Lone-Dog and from each other, removed any inference arising from the above-mentioned coincidence in beginning with the present century.